Reflections on Certain Bipedal Reptiles

They say that $500 billion of purchases are influenced by children, and I would contend that this figure has actually dropped off from 15 years ago, when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles waned in popularity.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -- four distinct, beautiful words made forever divine by their matrimony. To this day, I still argue with friends and strangers over who had more TMNT action figures, video games, bedsheets, etc. Sometimes in these debates, I'm forced to lay down my trump, not just revealing that I was Michaelangelo for three Halloweens, but that I owned the VHS of their live "Coming Out of Our Shells" concert tour.

I mean, these guys were the reason I took karate as a kid, and I know I'm not the only member of my generation who can say that.

It's been hard to explain what made TMNT so sensational, this ridiculous hodgepodge of a superhero group -- but it wasn't all that random a concept when you think about it. These comic book spoofs embodied such a perfect storm of irresistable counter-culture elements, it's hard to tell whether creators Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman acutely realized the shift of 80's pop culture, or that they established it all on their own with the comics.

And they weren't the only thing out there at the time. Transformers and G.I. Joe had their shot, but they just didn't excite me, quite possibly because for all their inherent silliness, they still took themselves so damn seriously. There was something safe, identifiable, so much more fun about the Ninja Turtles than anything else a four- to nine-year-old boy could worship.

They eat pizza -- how unglamorous, like me! They live in the sewer -- how underappreciated, like me! The Turtles crack jokes and whoop ass and each have very distinct personalities and identities, all while still being part of a tight-knit brotherhood. I couldn't count all ideals that were embodied by these anti-heroes whom were originally doodled in jest.

You can't re-evaluate a juvenile obsession like TMNT without recounting the toys. The toys. I like to think I had all the ones that mattered, and browsing through them in online archives, I still believe that to be true. A few favorites of mine back in the day:

Breakfightin' Raphael - Breakdance fighting is a confirmed fantasy of every eight-year-old boy since the former's invention. Couple things missing here, though: a striped Adidas track suit and a boombox that played a garbled snippet of Run DMC's "It's Like That", and the experience would have been complete.

The Technodrome - Oh, hell yes. You got you a Death Star on tank treads. With a giant eyeball on top -- which, by the way, came tumbling down to bowl over whatever plastic recipient you placed in its path.

The Pizza Thrower - The Ninja Turtles vehicle that could have been a legitimate weapon. Could have been, but it took four or five square hits with its low-velocity plastic discs to bring down an action figure, so its "don't aim at people or animals" warning seemed... tongue-in-cheek.

Notably, the tie that binds some of the best toys is that they had some independent means of knocking shit over, an attribute I highly valued at that age.

I've learned some things in deconstructing that obsessive period (one of those things being that they should've been written -- grammatically speaking-- as the Teenage, Mutant, Ninja Turtles). The marketing, I'll say, was an Orwellian ministry, and that's just if you consider the cartoon series alone. If you want to put it bleakly, my demographic was commercially enslaved by TMNT, but I'll tell you, that was a joy while it lasted. Power Rangers, Pokemon, whatever subsequent manias you younger types grew up on, you can keep them. The Turtles were fucking perfect.