Vintage 1990 TMNT Movie Pinback Button 🐀 Splinter Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Button-Up Troy MI

Remember Master Splinter in the 1990 TMNT Movie? 🐀 Master Splinter, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie, 1990

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie pin with Master Splinter, the old rat himself, in a close-up from the film, whiskers, sharp eyes and a dark robe, with TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES® in green and THE MOVIE in red across the bottom.

The back is a shiny steel shell with a pin, and the fine print runs around the rim: BUTTON-UP 2011 AUSTIN TROY, MI 48083, the button maker in Troy, Michigan, a Detroit suburb in Oakland County about 15 miles north of the city, and ©1990 NORTHSHORE INVESTMENTS LIMITED/ MIRAGE STUDIOS. The pin-back button itself is an old American idea: the first design was patented here in 1896, and a 1990 movie pin is built almost exactly the same way.

🐢 Splinter

In the comics and the movie, Splinter started out as the pet rat of a ninja named Hamato Yoshi in Japan, an unusually clever rat. After Yoshi was killed, Splinter ended up living in the sewers of New York, where a canister of mutagenic ooze changed him and four baby turtles, and he named them and raised them as his sons. In the 1990 movie Splinter was performed and voiced by puppeteer Kevin Clash, with help from Rickey Boyd and Robert Tygner.

🎬 The 1990 Movie

Back in the mid-1980s, Roger Corman pitched Eastman and Laird a live-action movie that would have starred Sam Kinison, Gallagher, Bobcat Goldthwait and Billy Crystal as the Turtles, in green makeup. Thankfully, that is not the one that got made. The real movie was produced by Golden Harvest and shot from July to September 1989 in North Carolina and New York City. Most of the big studios passed on it, and New Line Cinema, a small independent company back then, picked it up halfway through production. Steve Barron directed it from a script by Todd W. Langen and Bobby Herbeck, with Judith Hoag as the reporter April O'Neil and Elias Koteas as the vigilante Casey Jones.

The Turtle suits came out of Jim Henson's Creature Shop in London, built in 18 weeks, and Henson said they were the most advanced creatures he had ever worked with. It was one of his last projects before he died, shortly after the premiere. The movie opened on March 30, 1990, made $202 million on a $14 million budget, and was the highest-grossing independent film up to that time. Two sequels followed, The Secret of the Ooze on March 22, 1991 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III on March 19, 1993, but neither caught lightning the way the first one did, and that first movie is the one these pins belong to. The copyright on the first two films belonged to a UK company, Northshore Investments, and that is the name you will find on the back of this button. Look closely at the movie and you can spot a young Sam Rockwell as one of the Foot Clan thugs, and Kevin Eastman himself in a cameo as a garbage man.

🐢 How Four Turtles Started as a Joke

Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were two young comic artists sharing a place in Dover, New Hampshire, in 1983. One night that November, Eastman drew a masked turtle standing on its hind legs with nunchucks, just to make Laird laugh, and Laird wrote "teenage mutant" over it. 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 giving the turtles Japanese names and went with Italian Renaissance artists instead, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo, which Laird said "felt just quirky enough to fit the concept." Even Splinter was a joke on Daredevil's teacher, Stick.

In March 1984 they started Mirage Studios in their home, paid for the first printing with a tax refund and a loan from Eastman's uncle, and ran an ad in the Comics Buyer's Guide. All 3,000 copies sold in a few weeks. In 1987 they licensed the Turtles to Playmates Toys, an animated series came along that same year to sell the figures, and it ran for almost a decade. About $1.1 billion worth of Turtles toys sold between 1988 and 1992, and by 1990 there was a Turtle on just about everything a kid could own, buttons included.

🍕 Cowabunga

Pin it on a jean jacket, a backpack or a hat the way we did in 1990, or frame it in a shadow box with the rest of your Turtles stuff. It's a perfect gift for a teacher, a dad, or anybody who ever got called Sensei.