My favourite series of action figures when I was a kid… was Real Ghostbusters. But not far behind were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! The first set was released in 1987 and was a huge part of my childhood, as each birthday and Christmas would reveal a few new members of the line-up, straight from the demented mind of Laird and Eastman, or from whatever brainstorming session the marketing people at Playmates had that year. Usually, there would be a few variations of the Ninja Turtles themselves, occupying a new profession or with new weapons. Those were usually all right, if a little lacking in imagination.
You would also have the secondary characters, pulled straight from the TV show, as well as brand new creations that never appeared anywhere else in the franchise. That’s when things would sometimes get weird. Those brand new mutants would often follow a simple formula: take an animal that would look funny or cool if it was standing up like a human, and then give them an occupation that fits the first stereotype that comes to mind. So for example, the only mutant Kangaroo to appear was also outfitted with your typical Crocodile Dundee uniform. That may sound like an extremely lazy idea, and you would be right, but somehow it did not make this list!
We went through the entire Playmates toys series, which somehow lasted until 1997, to pick the best action figures ever released, as well as the very worst ideas to ever make it to toy stores’ shelves. Despite their popularity, not every TMNT action figure was a winner, and it’s worth taking a trip down memory lane just to take see the real stinkers.
25 LAME: Pizzaface
Pizzaface was, simply put, a dirty, disgusting pizza chef. The toy was created to be as gross as possible, with stains all over, and a removable peg leg that was actually an oversized pizza cutter stuck into a pizza box.
His hand was shaped so that he could hold an axe, but he could also hold his own leg.
If he did, he would then fall over because of the lack of balance. Not the best of concepts! Pizzaface was supposed to be Shredder’s private chef, which makes me think that the quality of the food in the Technodrome cafeteria wasn’t that great.
24 LAME: Midshipman Mike
Straight out of a Village People video was Midshipman Mike, a useless variation of the Ninja Turtle’s party animal. This was a rotten idea for two main reasons. The first one was that Mike is already a turtle, which is pretty low on the list of animals that need a boat to get on the water. The second is that no one ever looked menacing dressed like that unless your name is Popeye. Even then, the real sailor man needed some performance-enhancing substances to get the job done.
23 AWESOME: Usagi Yojimbo
The coolness factor of this action figure was twofold. First of all, it’s a bunny that’s also a samurai, and that’s like the greatest combination of words you can come up with for a kid. Second, Usagi’s appearance and storyline in the cartoon was so awesome that you couldn’t wait to get the action figure of such a rad character. The character was actually a crossover, since Usagi Yojimbo had his own comic series at the time, and had been a pretty cool character on his own for a while.
22 LAME: Tattoo
Tattoo’s name at least fitted the gimmick, since this sumo was packaged with a sheet of stickers which you could stick wherever you wanted on the action figure to make it live up to its name.
The problem? Those stickers didn’t not really hold up for all that long.
Within a few weeks, you were left with a very plain, untattooed sumo wrestler. At that point, the figure lost the one cool thing it had going for it, and forever stayed at the bottom of the toy box.
21 AWESOME: Metalhead
I take it back! “Samurai Bunny” might be cool, but “Robot Ninja Turtle” is even better. That guy was unbeatable when I would organize my action figures into a wrestling promotion. Not only that, but he was also a tough boss characters in the arcade games, so that was a truly spectacular character. It was like a cross between The Terminator and TMNT, so it was like the ultimate fantasy for a child growing up in the early 90s. Had it been equipped with a Super Soaker, it would have been the perfect toy of the era.
20 LAME: Halfcourt
Halfcourt is the perfect illustration of what I was talking about in the introduction: Take a funny-looking animal, put it on two legs, and think of the laziest trope you associate with it. In this case, we had a giraffe, and as we all know, giraffes are tall! That’s how we ended up with Halfcourt, the basketball playing mutant. That’s cool in theory, I guess, but TMNT was supposed to be about mutants fighting it out for the safety of our world. Whose side is that giraffe on? This feels like an idea that was never truly finished.
19 LAME: Raph The Magnificent
Here we have a variant of Raphael which happens to be dressed like a magician. Not like a D&D-style wizard, which would at least have been a little intimidating, just a regular, birthday party magician.
When Raphael really wants to take it to the Foot Clan, he puts on a top hat, draws on a moustache and practices juggling.
I’m glad Raphael has hobbies, but so do I, and you won’t see me go challenge an evil inter-dimensional criminal mastermind dressed like a bowling player.
18 AWESOME: Triceraton
That guy was so goddamn cool. He was a dinosaur before Jurassic Park came around and made them the hottest thing around. Triceraton was a trailblazer. He was a bright orange triceratops built like a superhero and armed to the teeth like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando. The shiny armor was just icing on the cake. It didn’t cover anything except for his chest, but Triceraton was so tough that he did not mind bullets. The torn pants made him look grungy, which was very trendy at the time. Great design all around, superb action figure.
17 LAME: Toon Burne
When I was a kid, looking to escape into a strange new world using nothing but action figures and my own imagination, all I really wanted to be was an overweight journalist eating a sandwich. When you have your toys and you imagine bringing down an intergalactic syndicate, you bring along your Ninja Turtles, an intimidating Rhinoceros Man, some dude made out of solid rock, and the newscaster stuffing his face in a too-tight shirt. Toon Burne was a disappointment to any kid who ever received it.
16 AWESOME: Movie Star Sub Series
After a few years of the Turtles dominating the airwaves with their cartoon series, it was time to conquer movie theaters. Not one to miss such an occasion, Playmates Toys created a new line-up which looked closer to the animatronic costumes featured in the film.
The result was picture perfect.
They appeared exactly as they did on the silver screen, and that was enough to make them my favourites from the moment I got one. All that was missing was the official TMNT garbage truck so I could re-enact the movie’s surprisingly dark ending.
15 LAME: Hot Spot
The idea behind Hot Spot isn’t too bad – a dalmatian that is also a fireman. That is sound and logical reasoning. The problem is the execution. Poor Hot Spot is wearing nothing but a yellow leotard, which makes him look either like a wrestler who loses in 2 minutes to Macho Man on WWF Superstars, or like a Disney version of Magic Mike, or like a member of Stryper. If you don’t know Stryper, good job on being born after hair metal was a thing. You didn’t miss much.
14 LAME: Deep Sea Diving Leonardo
I hate to reiterate the points I have made during my description of Midshipman Mike, but LEONARDO IS A TURTLE. HE CAN GO IN THE SEA AND HOLD HIS BREATH FOR A RIDICULOUSLY LONG TIME. WHY DOES HE NEED A DEEP SEA DIVING SUIT. I get that the people who created it had no access to Wikipedia and couldn’t have seen Finding Nemo yet, but surely there was a good old paper encyclopedia somewhere that could have told them a thing or two about turtles.
13 AWESOME: Punker Don
Despite my hate of Turtles variants with useless jobs, there’s something about Punker Don that just screamed “That guy is cool” to me.
Maybe it was the mohawk, maybe it was the leather jacket, but he just looked tough, in a weird 80s way.
Like he could have been in the movie The Warriors. My only nitpick is the choice of accessories. I’m not sure I would have given a keytar to a punk musician, but I wasn’t the creator of the toy line.
12 LAME: Toon Irma
If Toon Burne and his donut was too exciting for you, wait until you see Toon Irma, who’s basically a nerdy lady in a turtleneck. Sometimes she gets really cold! Sometimes she puts on her reading glasses! Look at her! The Turtles are supposed to be cool and full of attitude, and yet Irma looks like she can’t wait to be retired. If the price of old action figures is bases on rarity, this one is probably a gold mine, because there wasn’t that many kids who begged their parents for one.
11 AWESOME: Mondo Gecko
Mondo Gecko is a lizard that also skateboards. It’s everything that a 90s kid would want in an action figure. More importantly, he looked like he could actually get into a fight and believably win. Look at that guy! He’s got spikes on his knee pads! He doesn’t intend to use them to break his fall. He wants to break faces. On top of everything, his tail could be used as a tripod which made it easier to pose it in cool positions on your shelf. It’s such a perfect design.
10 LAME: Rock N Roll Mondo Gecko
The original Mondo Gecko action figure was cool, for the time. The guys had an attitude, and he at least looked somewhat contemporary to his era. The Rock N Roll variant rolled back the clock by twenty years (in the early 90s, so 40 years by today’s standards) to really catch the eyes of those baby boomers who were buying toys for their kids. “I used to love the Grateful Dead”, thought those people. “I’m sure my kid will also love this lizard that never came down from the original Woodstock”.
9 AWESOME: Wyrm
This action figure was supposed to be a garbage man who was exposed to the mutagen in the presence of a bug during a bad day on the job.
It’s a terrible back story, but I did not care.
All I saw was an explosion of neon colors, and if you grew up in the early 90s, then you know that neon colors are the best. Wyrm pushed all the right buttons to make him the perfect toy. He had an attitude, he was just enough to upset your parents, and he was so colorful that he would burn into your TV screen.
8 LAME: Karate Choppin’ Mike
If the sailors and diving variants of the Turtles were redundant because, well, they are turtles, the martial arts variants are just as redundant because they’re already ninjas. It’s right there in the title of the show. Unless you were British and you only knew them as “Hero Turtles”, in which case maybe you needed the reminder then. In this case, the “Karate Choppin’” figure could also be used like a “Rock ‘em Sock ‘em” Robot, which makes it even lamer because those toys stopped being cool in the 70s, and because it only serves to hinder the toy’s movements.
7 LAME: Slap Shot Leo
I have always been a hockey fan, and even as a kid, I knew that this action figure made no sense. A ninja on ice skates is completely useless because of balance issues, and you can’t really play a fake game of hockey with your action figure, because it’s the only player you have. At least, the other sports turtles, playing things like baseball or basketball, could just be wearing jerseys to be cool. No such excuse for Leo, who has the padding, helmet and skates, apparently looking for a rink somewhere in the sewers of New York City.
6 AWESOME: Cave Turtles
The Cave Turtles came out right in the middle of the dinosaurs craze, sandwiched somewhere between Jurassic Park and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. These were like extra-large versions of the usual Turtles, meaning they looked stronger, badder, and meaner.
Did I mention that they rode dinosaurs, which also wore matching bandanas?
It was both the coolest and the cutest thing ever. What else could a kid ask for? These four were definitely a stable in my action figures wrestling promotion, like a cooler, prehistorical version of the Four Horsemen.
