{"product_id":"vintage-1990-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-cartoon-pin-🐢-raphael-pinback-button-tmnt-collectible","title":"Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cartoon Pin 🐢 — Raphael Pinback Button, TMNT Collectible","description":"\u003ch2\u003eCool but Rude? ❤️ Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Raphael Pinback Button\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSize:\u003c\/strong\u003e 1 1\/2\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv style=\"max-width:315px;margin:0 auto 20px;\"\u003e\u003cdiv style=\"position:relative;padding-bottom:177.78%;height:0;overflow:hidden;\"\u003e\u003ciframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vWudexH5PL0\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen\u003e\u003c\/iframe\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e❤️ Raphael, Cool but Rude\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis button is for everybody who always picked the red one. Raphael fills the face of it, grinning under his red mask with the two tails flying, one sai jabbed blade-up in his right fist and the other held point-down in his left hand. His belt buckle carries a white R so nobody could mix him up with his brothers. Over his head is the logo we all drew on our notebook covers: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA in white capitals on a slanted red banner, TURTLES in big rough-edged green letters, and a tiny ® tucked in after the S. The ground is a clear sky blue, and the face has that fine woven texture under a glossy cover that the good old buttons had.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEach one is 1.5 inches across, a good bit bigger than a quarter. Turn one over and the back is cream molded plastic with a raised ring, a metal safety-pin clasp held on by two little stamped metal tabs, and a small mark molded in below the pin: a stretched hexagon split by a diagonal line, sitting inside a rectangle, with no letters at all. Apart from the art and the logo, nothing is printed on them anywhere, the curl of the rim included. These are new old stock, unused, and every one is this same design.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e📺 Why He Looks Like the Cartoon\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the Saturday-morning Raphael, not the rubber-suited turtle from the movie. In the original comics all four brothers wore red masks. For the animated series Peter Laird gave each turtle his own color, blue for Leonardo, purple for Donatello, orange for Michelangelo, and Raphael was the one who kept the red, the only brother still wearing his first color. The show also gave them belts with the first letters of their names, and there it is on this button, a big white R.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe cartoon began as a five-part syndicated miniseries the week of December 28, 1987, came back as a full series on October 1, 1988, and ran until November 2, 1996: ten seasons and 193 episodes. Fred Wolf Films produced it, and Toei Animation animated the first three seasons. It is the show that gave the Turtles their color-coded masks, their love of pizza, their catchphrases and their separate personalities, and it became the version most of us still picture when somebody says \"Ninja Turtles.\" In the comic books and in most later versions Raph is the hothead of the four, the most aggressive and physically the strongest, but the cartoon's Raphael was the sarcastic wise guy, the team comedian who kept turning to crack jokes straight at the audience. In the opening titles he spears a slice of pizza on his sai and shoves the rest at the camera, and the theme song sums him up in one line: \"Raphael is cool but rude.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRob Paulsen voiced him for nine seasons. Paulsen was born in Detroit and grew up in Grand Blanc, Michigan, and went on to win a Daytime Emmy as Pinky in Pinky and the Brain. He later beat stage III throat cancer and titled his memoir Voice Lessons: How a Couple of Ninja Turtles, Pinky, and an Animaniac Saved My Life. The theme song itself was a rush job: Chuck Lorre and Dennis C. Brown had a $2,000 budget and 48 hours to record and produce it, with James Mandell singing lead and Lorre doing the spoken parts. The story goes, as Lorre tells it, that the two of them only got the job after members of the band The Turtles backed out.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🐢 Two Friends, One Joke, and a Company Called Mirage\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKevin Eastman and Peter Laird met in Massachusetts, and in 1983 Laird invited Eastman to move in with him in Dover, New Hampshire, the county seat of Strafford County. 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 joke poked at the big comics of the day: the teenagers of the New Teen Titans, the mutants of the X-Men and the ninja skills of Daredevil, with a pinch of Howard the Duck. They thought about Japanese names, then went with four Italian Renaissance artists, which Laird said \"felt just quirky enough to fit the concept.\" Even their rat sensei, Splinter, was a wink at Daredevil's teacher, Stick.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn March 1984 they started Mirage Studios in their home, and it was called Mirage because there was no actual company. A tax refund and a loan from Eastman's uncle paid for the first issue, dated May 1984, they ran an ad in the Comics Buyer's Guide, and all 3,000 copies sold in a few weeks. Raphael was there from that very first issue. The studio moved from Dover to Sharon, Connecticut for two years and then to Northampton, Massachusetts, the Hampshire County seat, with the Mirage artists working out of a renovated factory in the village of Florence, where the Playmates toy designs were drawn. In 1988 Mirage also helped draft the Creator's Bill of Rights for comic artists.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🤝 How the Turtles Got onto Everything\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy 1986 a New York licensing agent, Mark Freedman, who had handled the Hanna-Barbera library, was shown the property. He was in disbelief at the title at first, and later said, \"I thought the name was impossibly clever.\" He also said he was turned down everywhere except by one toy company in California, Playmates Toys. Playmates signed on in 1987 but wanted a TV deal behind the figures first, the five-part cartoon pilot came next, and the first Playmates figures reached stores in the summer of 1988. About $1.1 billion worth of Turtles toys sold between 1988 and 1992, which made them the third-best-selling toy figures ever at the time, behind only G.I. Joe and Star Wars. Most of the licensed Turtle artwork of those years, for everyone from Burger King and Pez to Konami and Colorforms, came from two Mirage artists: Steve Lavigne, who had gone to Westbrook High School in Westbrook, Maine with Kevin Eastman, and Ryan Brown, who inked over Lavigne's pencils.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e📜 That Little ® Has a Story\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe banner-over-TURTLES logo is a registered trademark in its own right. It was filed in the United States on July 21, 1988 and registered in April 1989, and those registrations give its first use as December 28, 1987 for the television series, February 10, 1988 for comic books and toy catalogs, and April 5, 1988 for toy figures, board games and puzzles. The plain words came first, on the comic book in May 1984. In Canada the same logo was filed in November 1988 by Eastman and Laird, carrying on business in partnership as Mirage Studios, and the goods it covered ran from comic books and toys to lunchboxes, jewelry and, of all things, buttons and badges. The registration passed to Mirage Studios, Inc. in 2000, the year Eastman sold his share to Laird, and to Viacom in October 2009, when Laird sold the franchise.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat ® was worth having, because the bootleggers wanted in too. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London keeps a British Turtles T-shirt from about 1990 that it calls probably pirated, because it shows no copyright or licensing acknowledgements. And in 1991 Mirage won an interlocutory injunction in England against Counter-Feat Clothing, which had been refused a license and had an artist draw its own humanoid turtles for its clothes. The court found that a substantial number of the buying public believe a cartoon character on a product is there under license.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🎬 1990, the Year of the Turtle\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Turtles reached their commercial peak in the early 1990s, and 1990 was the big one. The live-action movie opened on March 30, 1990 from New Line Cinema, took in more than $25 million its first weekend, the biggest opening an independent film had ever had, and grossed $202 million on a budget of about $13.5 million. The suits came from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, one of Henson's last projects before his death shortly after the premiere. \"Turtle Power!\" by Partners in Kryme spent four weeks at number one in Britain that summer, the first hip hop single ever to top the UK chart. A touring stage musical, \"Coming Out of Their Shells,\" played 40 shows across the country, sponsored by Pizza Hut, and Turtles toys sold 100 million units in 1990 alone.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOver in Britain they weren't even ninjas. The word was thought to have violent connotations, so there the show and the toys were the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. This button says NINJA, the American name.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🔴 The Painter and the Sai\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRaph is named for Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1483-1520), the High Renaissance painter and architect, son of Giovanni Santi, court painter at Urbino, and one of the traditional trinity of great masters alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo. He is the only brother whose name doesn't end in an O, even though the painter's own name was Raffaello. His weapon is the sai, a pointed weapon from Okinawa whose Japanese name means \"hairpin\": a long main prong, two shorter side prongs and a blunt pommel. Okinawa's own police once used them for arrests and crowd control. In the first video games, which were based on this cartoon, Raphael was unpopular because his sai had such short reach, and I never forgave the games for that. In 2011 IGN ranked him 23rd on its Top 100 Comic Book Heroes, a list that didn't include a single one of his brothers.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003e🍕 Cowabunga\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMichelangelo got \"Cowabunga\" in December 1987, when writer David Wise reached for it, but the word is older than any turtle. It began on The Howdy Doody Show in the early 1950s as Chief Thunderthud's \"kowabonga,\" dreamed up by head writer Eddie Kean, and surfers had picked it up by the early 1960s; Snoopy even surfs to it in a 1965 Peanuts strip. Buttons are older still. Whitehead and Hoag of Newark, New Jersey patented the pin-back button on July 21, 1896, and cartoon characters were on them almost at once: the Yellow Kid, the comic-strip boy of the late 1890s, turned up on 154 different buttons. A cartoon hero on a button pinned to a kid is a tradition going on 130 years, and this Raph is right in that line.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePin one on a jean jacket, a backpack or a ball cap the way we did, or set it in a shadow box with the rest of your Turtles things. It makes a great little gift for the friend who always called dibs on Raphael.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"relatedBlock\"\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003e🔎 More From The Vintage \u0026amp; Antique Gifts Archive\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-movie-pin-group-shot-1990-tmnt-treasures\"\u003eVintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Group Shot Movie Pin 🐢 — TMNT The Movie Pinback Button\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-movie-pin-solo-raphael-1990-tmnt-treasures\"\u003eVintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Raphael Cartoon Pin 📌 TMNT Pinback Button, Red Bandana Twin Sai Collectible\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/vintageantiquesgifts.com\/products\/vintage-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-movie-pin-raphael-leonardo-1990-tmnt\"\u003eVintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie Pins 🐢 Raphael Leonardo 1990\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Vintage and Antique Gifts","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67890526781652,"sku":"VAG-8161108361448","price":6.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0685\/2309\/8324\/files\/il_fullxfull.4711952854_kt7i.jpg?v=1792549071","url":"https:\/\/role-players.shop\/products\/vintage-1990-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-cartoon-pin-%f0%9f%90%a2-raphael-pinback-button-tmnt-collectible","provider":"Role-Players","version":"1.0","type":"link"}