Out of my Mount Rushmore of favorite entertainment franchises – the others being “Star Wars,” “Buffy” and “The X-Files” – “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” is undeniably the least “adult,” and the one that most brings back memories of being a kid. Since this year is the 30th anniversary of Mirage Comics’ “Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” No. 1, it gives me a perfect excuse – um, I mean, reason – to reminisce.
‘TMNT’ never goes away
TMNT is now in what I consider its third phase of popularity, with IDW cranking out new comics in a new continuity, Nickelodeon airing a third animated series, and a fifth film – not related to the first four — planned for later this year. The first phase – MY phase, and your phase, if you’re also in your 30s – was in the ’80s and ’90s, when there were four basic TMNT “realities”: the Mirage comics, the cartoon, the Archie comics and the movies.
The second phase was the 2000s, when there was a second cartoon series and Peter Laird got his second wind of interest in comic storytelling and caught up with the Turtles in real time, now in their 30s; plus, a fourth film (the first animated one) hit theaters. (Now Kevin Eastman is on his second wind of storytelling, as he’s contributing to the IDW run.)
I mostly ignored the 2000s stuff and am ignoring the current stuff, although my level of intrigue hasn’t gone away. On one hand, I don’t like that IDW and Nick are redoing the origin story (in the new comic, the Turtles are human teens reincarnated as mutant turtles, whereas Mirage had them as plain-ol’ mutated turtles; on the cartoon, April and Casey are teens and Splinter is frickin’ gigantic).
On the other hand, Eastman’s IDW involvement makes me curious. And let’s face it: TMNT had two different origin stories in the 1980s-90s, particularly pertaining to Splinter; in Mirage/movies, he was the pet rat of his master Yoshi, whereas in the cartoon/Archie, he was Yoshi himself (and turned into a rat because it was the species he had most recently been in contact with; likewise, the Turtles took on human traits because they had most recently been in contact with Yoshi).
Hooked by the movie
I didn’t care one lick about the sloppiness of there being four different TMNT timelines when I was a kid. I was obsessed with all of it. My dad is to blame, as he took me, 11, and my sister, Jenny, 8, to the movie upon its March 1990 release. That immediately led to me planning my daily schedule around the airing of the cartoon (which had started in 1987), and watching, taping and cataloguing them. In this pre-Internet age, I didn’t understand the nature of national syndication.
I taped episodes at our Minnesota lake cabin that summer while my dad taped them for me in Nebraska, where he was attending graduate school. Eventually, I figured out that the airing order was identical regardless of where you lived. For my 12th birthday that summer, I got all the action figures released up to that point and then kept an eye out for the elusive April O’Neil and Fugitoid (which I eventually found at Osco, where I had to spend a significant couple of bucks more, but it was of course worth it).
As my collection expanded from those two dozen figures to a couple hundred, I didn’t play with them in the traditional sense. The most risk of damage came when my younger cousins visited on the holidays (R.I.P. broken-in-half Ray Fillet).
Rather, I displayed them on shelves that wrapped around a room in our basement in Fargo, N.D., varying the order from chronological to alphabetical to affiliation (Turtles, Foot Clan and otherwise), with informational cards (from the back of the package) and homemade name tags laid out before them. The vehicles resided on the lower shelves, also with identifying labels, and two Turtle Blimps hung from hooks in the ceiling (watch your head).
This approach to “playing” with toys is not the norm, I understand. When I visited my friend Eric’s house in Fargo, or the house of my Lincoln, Neb., friends before that, their TMNT action figures were chewed on by dogs, scattered across the carpet, matched up with the wrong accessories … deep down, it was painful to see.
And my friend Seth (who I met in my adult years) recently dug out his boxes of TMNT toys and told me he had, for example, at least nine Donatellos, most with detached arms. Whereas my sister respected my TMNT toys, I get the sense that many other sets of siblings in the 1990s were apt to use TMNT action figures as projectiles to throw at each other.
Gotta see the sequel
My interest in comics was secondary to toys and cartoons, but it was creeping to the fore. In December 1990 at Cosmic Comics in Lincoln, while picking up the latest Archie “TMNT,” I also picked up the “Michaelangelo Christmas Special” (which I didn’t realize had been originally published in December 1985). To this day, it might be my favorite Mirage comic. Still, I was 12, and not quite ready to go all “adult” in my TMNT collecting.
In March 1991, my mom dropped off me and my sister at the theater so we could see “TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze.” It was the first time we had attended a movie without Mom and Dad; quite the milestone. Earlier that month, I had received the novelization of the movie through school; remember those book order forms that teachers handed out? You’d check off the books you wanted and your parents would write a check, which you’d bring back the next day. A couple weeks later, the teachers would hand out the books.
I got a fair number of books about sports superstars, and (for no discernable reason) ordered three “TMNT II” novelizations. I read it in one day and excitedly told my mom about the plot and Tokka and Rahzar and SuperShredder, which for reasons I couldn’t fathom, didn’t hold as much excitement for her.
While 1990’s “TMNT” was a classic that still holds up today, “TMNT II” was exciting and new. Only a year had passed, but when you’re 12, that’s a longer year than when you’re 35. Seeing Vanilla Ice in the final act was an undeniably cool coup for the franchise that was now at the peak of its powers. (For the record, Vanilla Ice is still cool, as he has a Turtles logo tattoo.)
I devoured the “making of” special on HBO and me and Jenny regularly riffed on Ernie Reyes Jr.’s quote about how, despite it featuring martial arts, “in the movie, you hardly ever … you never … see any blood, or any stabbings, or anything of the sort.”
Discovering the comics
In the fall of 1991, in Lincoln, my dad traded in his Superman comics at Cosmic Comics and allowed me and my sister to use the trade-in value on some of it. I mostly did some significant padding out of my “Star Wars” vehicle collection. My sister wisely selected the four-volume First Publishing color reprints of the first 11 (plus the “Leonardo” one shot) Mirage “TMNT” issues. (I have them in my collection today, and I never technically bought them from her. Bwa-ha-ha!)
In the fall of 1992, even as I continued to watch and catalogue the cartoon – always thrilled when an action figure such as Slash or Muckman or Mondo Gecko made his debut — I ordered all of the (affordable) back issues from Mirage. I had transitioned from “Hardy Boys” to Timothy Zahn’s adult “Star Wars” novels, so I supposed it was time to dive fully into the “adult,” “dark” and “serious” world of Mirage’s “TMNT.”
My initial impression once I held the bulk of the series in my hands: I thought Eastman and Laird were somewhat lazy for handing off the stories to other writers and artists between the end of “Return to New York” (Issue 21, May 1989) and the start of “City at War” (Issue 50, August 1992).
I realize now that these two starving artists from Northampton, Mass., were using that time to oversee their unexpectedly vast “TMNT” empire. While they did very well by themselves (I think it’s safe to say both are multi-millionaires today), their novice status as businessmen during that period still resonates.
The reason why IDW’s reprints are missing some issues is because of the somewhat casual deals E&L made with the guest writers/artists back in the day. In a nutshell, while Mirage Studios owned the comic and their own characters, the guests owned all of their original creations.
So reprint permissions have to go through the guest creators as well as Eastman and Laird (or now Nickelodeon, since E&L sold TMNT a couple years back). Rick Veitch’s “The River” (Issues 24-26) will always be a gorgeous piece of TMNT lore to me, but technically (sadly, stupidly, pettily), it’s not part of the official Mirage canon, according to Laird, who hashed out a lot of this stuff in the letters pages of Volume 4 in the 2000s.
Petering out
In March 1993, my mom dropped off me and my friend Eric to see “TMNT III: The Turtles are Back … in Time.” We were freshmen in high school, and TMNT had already become something from our distant childhoods of two years prior. If anything, TMNT was something to be whispered about in the halls, lest we be found out as uncool, but mainly it just wasn’t talked about.
The third movie sucked (I knew it on some level at the time, but couldn’t voice it out loud, although Eric could acknowledge it. He wasn’t all that phased by the drop in quality, while deep down it definitely bothered me that there now existed a bad Turtles movie.)
The first volume of Mirage ended with Issue 62 in August 1993, and it immediately went into the full-color Volume 2 (E&L again handed the reins to other folks), which I collected with gradually decreasing fervor. Fall of 1993 also marked the last time I watched and taped the cartoon for posterity, although it would continue until 1996, and I stopped collecting the Archie comics, which would continue until 1995.
In the following years, I occasionally picked up an Image comic (now known as Volume 3 of the Mirage run, and now known as non-canonical because Laird had his own ideas when he started Volume 4 in 2001). But my Turtles phase really had an expiration date of 1994.
A year after that, I was back to full-on “Star Wars” collecting when the new toy line started, whereas my younger cousins with much worse taste were into the crass TMNT ripoff “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.” And three years after that, I learned to appreciate truly good TV in the form of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The X-Files,” completing my Mount Rushmore.
Good memories
And yet, the very fact that I can recall from memory all these TMNT-loving details goes to show that my love never really died. I remember specifics about reading/watching/collecting TMNT and I don’t remember a damn thing about going to school. I know I did go to class, and I know I disliked it, and I know I must’ve soaked up some knowledge just based in the sheer amount of time I sat there, but details about school are completely absent from my brain.
Twenty years after the end of the TMNT pop-culture phenomenon and 30 years after the first Mirage issue, it’s still a very viable commercial franchise, and nostalgia for those early years from children of the ’80s and ’90s is evident on great websites such as TMNT Entity. I’ve sold all my toys and Archie comics on eBay and I have no desire to watch the old cartoon (which by all accounts is terrible once you age past 13). Anyway, I don’t have the tapes anymore.
But I never let go of the Eastman and Laird story that started it all, the story that was always intended for adults anyway. Maybe the 30th anniversary is a good reason – I mean, excuse – to crack open that box of Mirage comics again …