Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Splinter Cartoon Pin 🐢 — TMNT Button-Up Pinback Button

Remember Master Splinter? 🐀 Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cartoon Pin

Size: 1 1/2"

🐀 Master Splinter, Cartoon Pin

Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon pin with Master Splinter on bright red: a brown rat in a purple robe with white trim and a white belt, a round crest on his chest, his walking stick in one hand and his feet wrapped in bandages, ready for anything.

The back is a shiny steel shell with a pin. The button maker's line, BUTTON-UP of Troy, Michigan, runs around the rim, and the Mirage Studios name is printed on the rim too. The 2011 in Button-Up's line is the shop's street number on Austin in Troy, not the year it was made.

Button-Up Company was a Detroit-area button shop that had been at it a while before the Turtles came along. A licensed Jimi Hendrix button of theirs from 1983 carries a Warren, Michigan address, and in 1984 they were filing trademarks for button lines of their own with names like Comic Release, Rerun Review and Jammin. By the time this one was made they had moved up the road to Troy. They kept busy, too: the Busy Beaver Button Museum in Chicago has Button-Up buttons for Culture Club, Billy Idol, Howard Jones, the California Raisins, New Kids on the Block and Bart Simpson, plus a Turtles logo button and a Turtles movie button of theirs.

🐢 Splinter

The cartoon told Splinter's story differently from the comics. In the 1987 series, Splinter and Hamato Yoshi were the same person, a martial arts teacher in Japan's Foot Clan with a passion for Renaissance art. His rival Oroku Saki framed him for trying to murder their master, and Yoshi was thrown out and moved to New York City, where he lived in the sewers. That is where the mutagen turned him into a rat and four pet turtles into his sons, and he named them after the Renaissance painters he loved. He raised the four of them down there and taught them ninjutsu so they could look after themselves. On the cartoon he was voiced by Peter Renaday for most of the show's run.

📺 The Cartoon Turtles

This button is from the cartoon side of Turtlemania, drawn the way kids knew the Turtles from the 1987 animated series that Playmates launched to sell its action figures: bright green, colored masks, and a big letter on every belt buckle so you could tell the brothers apart. The red TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA banner over big green TURTLES was the logo on the cartoon, the toys and the lunchboxes, and any kid in 1990 could draw it from memory.

🎬 Splinter at the Movies

The live-action movie opened on March 30, 1990, and its Splinter was a different animal. In the film, as in the original comics, he was Hamato Yoshi's pet rat rather than Yoshi himself. On screen he was an animatronic puppet from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, a little rat that could kick, punch and show what he was feeling, worked and voiced by Kevin Clash, who also performed Elmo on Sesame Street. The Creature Shop's London crew built the Turtles' costumes too, and Brian Henson was chief puppeteer. It was one of Jim Henson's last projects before he died that spring. The movie opened to a $25.4 million weekend and went on to take in $202 million worldwide, more than any independent film had made up to then. This button keeps Splinter the way the cartoon drew him, robe, walking stick and all.

🐢 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

Buttons were made to be worn, pinned to jackets and bags, taken to school, dropped and lost. These never were. And most of the buttons in this line show the four Turtles, so Splinter is the one collectors go hunting for when they're finishing a character set. 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.