Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Raphael Cartoon Pin 📌 TMNT Pinback Button, Red Bandana Twin Sai Collectible

Remember Raphael's TMNT Cartoon Pin? ❤️ Raph, Coming Right at You

Size: 1 1/2"

Raphael never did learn to sit still, and on these buttons he is springing straight off a royal blue ground at you: knees up, red mask tails whipping behind his head, a sai in each fist and the scowl he wore through ten seasons of cartoons. This is the cartoon Raph, drawn the way kids knew him around 1990, and I think it is about as much action as anybody ever fit on an inch and a half.

Every detail says Raph. Red wraps at both wrists, red pads on his elbows and knees, a yellow-orange plastron, and a gray belt with its knotted tails hanging down, fastened by a round buckle with a white R on it. That R is the only lettering on the front. Each one has a bright steel back with a wire bar pin and a bent-wire catch, and a short line of fine print sits on the blue curl where the paper wraps over the edge.

📺 Why There Is an R on His Belt

In Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's first comics, all four Turtles wore red bandanas. When the cartoon came along, Laird gave each brother his own color and a belt with the first letter of his name on it. Leo went blue, Donnie purple and Mikey orange, and Raph got to keep the red.

That cartoon started out the week of December 28, 1987 as a five-part syndicated miniseries. Playmates Toys was still unsure about four mutant turtles and wanted a TV deal in place first, so its first Turtles figures only hit stores the next summer. Fred Wolf Films produced it, the full series got rolling on October 1, 1988, and by 1990 it was running every day on more than 125 TV stations. CBS picked it up for Saturday mornings in September 1990, and it kept going until November 2, 1996: ten seasons and 193 episodes. Rob Paulsen gave Raph his voice for the first nine seasons, and the show kept his temper on a shorter leash than the comics did and made him the sardonic wise guy of the bunch.

🔴 The Red Mask, the Way Fans Tell It

There is a favorite bit of Turtles lore about those original all-red bandanas: the story goes that the brothers were raised as assassins with one bloody job to do, and red was the color of it. On that telling, Raph kept the red because he kept the most of that first edge. He is the hothead of the four, the strongest, and the one most likely to butt heads with Leonardo. He is also the only brother whose name does not end in an o, even though the Renaissance painter he is named for was Raffaello in Italian. I have always thought that suits him.

⚔️ The Sai in His Hands

The sai is an old Okinawan weapon, a long center prong with two short curved side prongs that can catch and trap a blade. In Okinawa the police carried it to make arrests and handle crowds, and it is usually worked in pairs, one in each hand. A pair of sai is Raph's signature, and on this button he has both of them out and pointed down, ready for business.

🐢 Two Guys in Dover, New Hampshire

It all started as a joke. In November 1983 Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were young comic artists sharing a house in Dover, New Hampshire, and one night Eastman drew a masked turtle standing on its hind legs with nunchucks, just to make Laird laugh. Laird wrote "teenage mutant" over it, and they were off. The idea poked fun at the big comics of the day: the teenagers of the New Teen Titans, the mutants of the X-Men and the ninjas of Daredevil, with a little Howard the Duck thrown in. They thought about Japanese names and went with Renaissance artists instead, which Laird said "felt just quirky enough to fit the concept," and their rat sensei Splinter was a wink at Daredevil's teacher, Stick.

In March 1984 they started Mirage Studios at home, named that because there was no actual company yet. A tax refund and a loan from Eastman's uncle paid for the first printing, they ran an ad in the Comics Buyer's Guide, and issue #1 came out that May at a comic convention in Portsmouth, New Hampshire: black and white, on cheap newsprint, in an oversized magazine format. All 3,000 copies sold in a few weeks. Raph got a one-shot comic of his own in 1985, and that is the one that brought in Casey Jones, the hockey-masked vigilante who hauls his sports gear around in a golf bag. Raph stopped him from killing some muggers, the two of them had it out, and they were fast friends ever after.

Dover has not forgotten. In November 2023, for the Turtles' 40th birthday and the city's 400th, Dover unveiled a New Hampshire state historical marker at Union Street and Central Avenue and a Turtles manhole cover outside the house where Eastman and Laird made that first comic. The cover was crowd-funded, $13,000 from more than 200 donors, and Eastman came home for the day: "This is home to us. This is where they were created." A manhole cover for four heroes who live in the sewer. You cannot write it better than that.

🍕 Turtlemania

Getting the Turtles into stores took some doing. Their licensing agent, Mark Freedman, put it plainly: "I was turned down everywhere. Everyone said no except for this one toy company called Playmates." Mirage signed with Playmates Toys in 1987, and then the dam broke. About $1.1 billion worth of Turtles toys sold between 1988 and 1992, the third-bestselling toy figures ever at the time behind G.I. Joe and Star Wars, and 1990 alone moved 100 million units. There were Turtles lunchboxes, piñatas, pinball games, roller skates, skateboards, even snow skis. Over in Britain they were the Hero Turtles, and London's V&A, which keeps a 1988 Playmates Raphael figure, calls Raph "the anti-social bad boy of the team, aggressive but fiercely loyal." Nobody has summed him up better.

And there were Turtles buttons by the slew, cheap enough for pocket money and easy to pin on anything. The Button-Up Company, a Michigan button maker with a Warren address in 1984 and a Troy one by 1988, turned out Mirage-licensed Turtles buttons an inch and a half across, with a Mirage Studios copyright line printed on the curl. They were already out by 1989: a stand-up counter display from that year held 39 of them. Button-Up even made a button of the Turtles logo itself, the red TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA banner over big green TURTLES lettered like a shell. This one skips the logo and lets Raph do the talking.

This same leaping Raph, knees up and both sai pointed down, also turns up on a four-brother Turtles button, springing over Leo, Donnie and Mikey under the logo. One long-time Turtles collector kept that group button from when he was a kid, its front faded from years of use and its back spotted with rust, and of all four poses on it he gives the prize to Raph's knees-up attack stance. I can't argue with him.

Mirage later moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, and in October 2009 Viacom bought most of the Turtles rights. A joke drawn one night in Dover has been in comics, cartoons and movies ever since.

🎬 1990, the Year They Hit the Big Screen

The live-action movie opened on March 30, 1990, from New Line Cinema, after the major studios had passed on it. It was shot the summer before in Wilmington, North Carolina and New York City, and Jim Henson's Creature Shop built the Turtle suits, one of Henson's last projects before his death shortly after the premiere. It cost $13.5 million, took $202 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing independent film up to that time. Josh Pais played Raph in the suit and voiced him too, and the story gives Raph the rough road: he argues with Leo over who is in charge, gets ambushed by the Foot on the rooftops, Casey Jones wades in, and Raph heals up at April's family farm upstate.

📌 Pin It, Frame It, Give It

Pin one on a jean jacket, a backpack or a ball cap the way kids did in 1990, or put it in a shadow box with the rest of your Turtles. It makes a great little gift for anybody who always picked the red one.