Original subtitles

PETER LAIRD: We got into talking about these bus-kicking turtles.

You know, the bus would be going along Route 108, I think it was,

between Durham and Dover.

Suddenly this turtle would jump out from the side of the road,

kick the bus really hard

and spin it around on its axis,

and you'd be heading back the other way.

We just got a real kick out of talking about these bus-kicking turtles.

We would laugh uproariously.

And I think that is where the Turtles came from.

We had no idea how big big could be.

I felt obligated to resist making it a total commercial.

Every morning, 7:00 on the dot,

I watched every single episode.

They're kind of like the cartoon Beatles.

It's a story that really tells you that anybody can be successful.

Should it have happened?

The odds are infinitesimally low, but it did.

LAIRD: Nothing about it was planned beyond how do we do a 40-page comic

and make it at least halfway decent?

KEVIN EASTMAN: (ECHOING) There's too many happy accidents.

MARK ASKWITH: In 1977, you have this really vital energy

happening in popular culture.

If you want, you can call it punk,

you can call it new wave.

A lot of stuff was happening.

I mean, we were almost at the very end of the Cold War,

there's a lot of multiculturalism coming out,

and a lot of kids who felt out of place.

They didn't know how to describe themselves

and they didn't have the kind of community

that previous generations have had.

Stores like the Silver Snail,

a lot of comic book stores in Berkeley and throughout North America

really picked up on that energy.

Two years before I met Kevin,

I had started this free comic book newspaper sort of thing.

It was actually more like a booklet, called Scat.

I got together with a bunch of local cartoonists

and we decided to do this thing.

ASKWITH: It felt like Mad Magazine in the '60s.

It had this really interesting satirical,

black and white, kind of edgy feel.

LAIRD: I used to love comic books as a kid, and loved reading them.

Sometime around my first or second year of high school, I think it was,

I became aware of Jack Kirby.

EASTMAN: One day, riding the bus to the job I had at the local pizza parlor,

I found this magazine called Scat

put out by a bunch of these artists in Northampton.

With the address in hand, I grabbed my portfolio

and went over to their offices

to sell some of my short stories,

some of my ideas,

because it was kind of like-minded,

underground artist inspired.

One of the guys at Scat gave him my address

and he wrote me a letter, a very nice letter,

and I wrote him back

and said, "Yeah, come on over and we'll get together and talk

"and show each other our artwork and whatnot."

EASTMAN: I walked into his house in Northampton,

and the first thing I saw was a Jack Kirby drawing.

LAIRD: I had a framed Jack Kirby pencil page

from The Losers, the DC comic,

hanging on the wall and he just flipped out.

Oh, my God! I had never seen an actual Jack Kirby original,

having been such a big inspiration to me.

And that was pretty much it.

We hit it off from the word go.

LAIRD: We sat in the pizza parlor in Wells, Maine

trying to think up good names for our business.

I remember we wrote on the back of a napkin or a placemat

a list of about a dozen names,

and Mirage seemed

the coolest sounding and also the most appropriate

because it wasn't really a studio,

it was the two of us sitting in our tiny living room

with our lap boards and our old stuffed chairs

watching TV, goofing around and drawing together.

LAIRD: Genius at work.

(LAIRD LAUGHS)

EASTMAN: Late one night in the studio,

I liked to bug Pete as much as I could,

especially when he's watching his favorite TV shows.

LAIRD: One night, we're sitting around watching bad TV

and that's when it happened.

Kevin drew a turtle standing on its hind legs

with nunchaku strapped to its forearms

and with a bandana-style mask.

And he showed it to me and he says,

"Hey, this is a ninja turtle."

And I was like, "Yeah, great."

So I had to do my own version

and I changed just a couple things.

And of course I had to top him,

so I did a sketch of four in pencil,

and each one had different weapons and this dramatic pose,

and I had to put the comic title above, "Ninja Turtle."

LAIRD: He handed that to me and I inked that.

Sometime around that point I suggested,

"Why not add 'Teenage Mutant' to the name?"

It had a kind of rhythm to it.

"Dude, we have to come up with a story

"that tells how these characters became

"the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles."

We were both huge fans of the underground publishing movement.

You go back to Zap Comix, Robert Crumb, Kitchen Sink,

Rip Off Press, Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

A lot of that stuff we had both seen and enjoyed in the head shops

and that kind of stuff you could find.

We realized pretty early on in our friendship

that we each had strengths that complement the other.

EASTMAN: I brought the layout and the dynamic Jack Kirby-isms

that paced out the story this way.

He brought a lot of great subtle nuances to the story,

certainly in the script, I think more than anything else.

And his artwork style was much more refined, much more detailed.

LAIRD: Kevin was really good at color,

and he had a really powerful color sense

and I was terrible at it.

EASTMAN: Peter didn't do much painting.

He did mostly

the most amazing line work

and detail work you could imagine.

So, I did up a couple of roughs

and this is probably the one I finally selected

before we did this piece here.

This was the first color painting of the Turtles done

back in 1984.

We decided early on that we'd have some of us on each page,

whether we're penciling or inking or whatever,

there was a bit of each of us on each page,

and it got to be where we couldn't see where I left off

and where he started and vice versa.

It took us about two and a half months

to actually complete the entire thing.

Borrowed some money from Kevin's uncle

and took whatever money we had ourselves,

which wasn't a whole lot,

and managed to scrape that all together and print 3,000 copies.

ROSENBAUM: 1984, this comic comes out

created by these two guys

who love all the same stuff

but have very different perspectives.

One of them is more outgoing,

interested in the violent side,

the more emotional side of things.

The other one is a lot more introverted, calmer,

more intellectual in terms of storytelling, in terms of art style,

but they're both fans of the same kinds of comics.

One of the strange things about that first issue of the Turtles

is it sent a very strong and different message.

It didn't feel like a mainstream comic,

there was something about it.

And the fact that it was a slightly wrong size

also gave a slight sense of edginess.

It didn't feel like it was coming from a factory.

ROSENBAUM: What that first issue does is comment on

everything that's going on

in superhero comics at the time.

What's interesting, when the first issue came out,

it was dubbed as a parody and it was, in a big way.

It was like Dave Sim when he started with Cerebus.

He drew this funny little barbarian aardvark

that was this barbarian drawn in the style

of Barry Windsor-Smith when he did Conan.

What worked with Cerebus, and we tried to capture, too,

is that Cerebus just had a lot of depth and character.

Dave progressed the story along and made it interesting,

and that's why he kept so many readers for 300 issues.

And with us, we really aped a lot of

Frank Miller-isms and Daredevil-isms.

I mean, you look at the origin.

The Hand in Daredevil, we have the Foot.

Splinter is based on Stick.

We really pulled some of our favorite bits

from some of our favorite comics

in, what do you call it, homage or whatever.

ASKWITH: So, yes, they were making fun of the ninja trend,

they were making fun of the overblown Frank Miller dialogue.

They were making fun of the dynamic poses of Jack Kirby.

But it was all with great love, great heart, great affection,

and that's one of the reasons why the comic worked.

It was real, it was passionate

and that, you know, come on.

That just shoots out of the pages.

I am often asked,

"Why did you kill your main villain off in the first issue?

"That doesn't make a whole lot of sense."

And the reason is that we never really thought we'd be doing a second one.

This was done completely for fun

and for the passion of wanting to do comics.

And nothing about it was planned beyond

how do we do a 40-page comic

and make it at least halfway decent?

After the first 3,000 were gone,

there were more orders

and so we printed more.

Then we sort of figured out, well...

Again, because we don't have a lot of other distracting paying work,

it's like, "Let's do an issue two.

"Let's continue to tell stories of these characters we created

"and try to make a living at something

"we've both dreamed about our entire life

"which is to write, draw and tell our own comic stories."

ASKWITH: The second issue came out,

it felt like it was aimed at people like me.

However, in ordering the comic

and putting the comic on the stands,

you began noticing that all kinds of people

you wouldn't quite expect to pick up the comic were picking it up.

By the time we started work on issue two,

I was living in Portland, Maine

and Pete was living in Sharon, Connecticut,

and we'd done the pre-orders through the distribution system

for how many copies that they'd want to buy for issue two,

and the orders came in at 15,000.

ASKWITH: And very quickly, by the third or fourth issue of the Turtles,

it was selling more than The Avengers in the store.

So, there was something going on.

In many ways, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

started what became then known as the black-and-white boom.

And by '85, '86, it was mind-boggling how many we were selling.

LAIRD: Doing the numbers on the second issue, the first printing of that,

back in, I think it was, late '84

and realizing that Kevin and I would each make $2,000 profit.

Pete faxed me this note

and at 15,000 copies, total cost involved,

we'd end up with roughly $4,000 profit.

And it was a great feeling to get to that point in life when

what you really want to do

turns out to be what you need to do.

"2,000 for you, 2,000 for me, we do this every two months,

"we could make a living drawing comics."

I literally packed up my bags

and moved out of Portland and moved down to Connecticut.

We then went ahead and finished issue two.

You know what was cool, when we did the first issue of the Turtles

and we kind of knew who the characters were,

we knew their personalities.

Raphael was loosely based on me

and Donatello was loosely based on Pete.

But it was 40 pages,

you really didn't get to know the characters well enough.

They were sort of introduced.

When we started working on the second, third and fourth issue,

the cool part was that we really had to develop these characters.

We had to know them better than anybody, so we could write them.

So, like any writer,

you kind of pull from all these influences around you.

Your crazy Uncle Burt, your sisters, an ex-girlfriend.

For example, April was designed and written

after a girl that I had dated in high school,

then we got married later and stuff.

She was a big inspiration for that character, at least in name,

she didn't look exactly like her.

She did in later issues.

Raphael, who was kind of the crazy, the hothead.

The rest of the group think he's crazy.

To have Raphael meet somebody crazier...

So I started coming up with some ideas

for a vigilante character that was not like...

Most vigilante characters were their whole family was killed,

there was some huge, tragic event in their life

that got them to either put on a suit or whatever

and strike out on their own

to take justice on the bad guys.

So, I came up with this guy.

I like this name, Casey Jones.

He didn't have this huge tragedy

that affected his will to fight bad guys,

it was because he watched too much bad TV.

Pete said, "You know what would be really funny

"is if he had a golf bag,

"and in the golf bag he not only had bats,

"he had a golf club, a hockey stick."

So, he was like an all-sports nut

and that really made the whole character perfect.

One of my favorite movies around this time

was a movie called Big Trouble in Little China,

and I thought Kurt Russell as Jack Burton,

that's Casey.

That was really a huge inspiration.

ROSENBAUM: It was only those first few issues that Kevin and Peter

wrote and drew together, the two of them.

As Ninja Turtles, the comic book,

started getting more popular,

they started building a studio.

LAIRD: We actually needed to be a real business,

so we, in fact, rented an office space.

The comic was doing well enough that we could afford that.

Funny story, Michelangelo was actually,

a lot of him, was based on Steve Lavigne,

who still works with the studio.

I went to high school with Steve, and he was

the Robin Williams of our high school.

He always had the wrong joke at the right time.

Pretty soon after school,

he got the first book out and came back to...

He was living out in Western Mass here with Pete

and came back and asked if I was

interested in maybe coming on board

and doing the lettering, because he really hated

the lettering aspect of the book.

I was like, "Eh, I'll give it a shot," and he taught me to letter

and pretty soon took that over

and just kind of moved my way through.

(INDISTINCT CONVERSATION)

Totally...

(LAUGHING)

(IN FUNNY VOICE) Who is that boy?

It was so weird, I went in there

and there were these three guys

kind of just acting wacky

and having great success at this comic book they were publishing.

So, I showed them my stuff,

and I think maybe right on the spot at that time,

they offered me an inking job.

EASTMAN: You drew that on there?

LAIRD: Ryan became a real important part of the studio,

he was inking Tales of the Turtles,

the first volume of that.

He got heavily into the licensing art world

along with Steve Lavigne.

It was one of those fortuitous things,

Ryan just came up to us at a show and introduced himself.

The early days of Mirage,

we really had full rein on the Turtles.

We could think of ideas and take it to Pete and Kevin.

We all worked together on it and it was really

the best time of my life creatively.

This is my first lesson in using high technology.

LAIRD: And what do you think of it, Mike?

I think that I'm basically a cave dweller.

We all clicked immediately, it was amazing.

Every one of us,

we were just absorbed into the clique right away.

BROWN: It was just insane. It was a circus every day.

Work a little bit, play airsoft rifles,

shoot each other, play basketball.

Then we'd go to lunch at noon, come back at 2:00.

We'd usually go shop in the model shops.

One of the guys used to refer to it as,

"We have to take an occasional work break."

Meaning that in between whatever we used to do,

throw things at each other, airsoft gun battles in the studio,

we'd have to remember that,

"Oh, yeah, we have to get that T-shirt design done."

Or whatever it is that people were working on at the time.

LAWSON: When you think about the guys that have assembled here

for this purpose of drawing the Turtles,

it's amazing to me.

They're Dooney and Berger, Steve and me, Eric.

LAVIGNE: Ryan.

LAWSON: Yeah, we've been like a family, really.

We've worked together, we've played together, it's stunning to me.

It really, I think, is a rare

and kind of cool thing that Mirage did there.

The Turtles have always been very malleable.

Different artists have different takes on them,

some more cartoony than others,

some more realistic than others.

BROWN: Mike Dooney, he's a great all-around artist,

especially his paintings.

And Jim's dynamic with his layouts

and his poses that his characters strike.

Eric's a fan favorite, everyone loves his stuff, because his is real gritty,

kind of, in a way of, like, Kevin gritty.

And I've always really admired Pete's work,

because I think it's so polished.

Kevin and I were incredibly happy

with what was going on with the comic

because it was selling really well,

I think issue eight was our high point,

135,000 copies of a black-and-white comic.

It was really a dream come true,

we were doing exactly what we wanted to do,

drawing what we wanted to draw

and making good money at it.

Pete!

LAIRD: What's that, Kev?

See, we had a design idea here.

See up here where it's all white,

and this is a solid black building wall.

I kind of got the idea that I thought it should go all the way to the top.

The fact that it was selling more than The Avengers was kind of wacky,

but to me it still wasn't mainstream,

and it wasn't mainstream until Surge Licensing hit

and the Turtles really changed

and became more of a mainstream product.

That was what really surprised me.

When the boys decided, "You know what,

"we're gonna not control this so much,

"we're gonna open it up

"and we're gonna let it be something for kids."

That was a really interesting decision.

Then the Turtles went mainstream

in a way that nobody could have expected.

The fact that Mark Freedman showed up as a fan

and convinced Kevin and Peter

to let him take this chance with the toys

was another one of these moments

where without this one thing,

the whole franchise would never have existed.

We started getting a couple calls from licensing agents, people that said...

We'd get this call and be like,

"I'm so-and-so, I'm from New York,

"I represent blah, blah, blah...

"I think that your characters would make

"great cartoon characters or toy characters."

When I first heard the words

"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,"

I jumped out of my skin.

There was something about that name.

We had a meeting with a couple of these guys

that we really weren't that impressed with

and until I think

agent number five or six that called was a guy named Mark Freedman,

and he wanted to come up and meet with us.

He showed up at our office door,

both Peter and I were in shorts

and short-sleeved shirts, and we had been re-painting the office.

So, it was one of these worlds in collision kind of things.

My suit was rented, my tie was rented, my car was rented.

I am absolutely camera shy. I absolutely hate it.

LAIRD: Too late, Mark.

He starts on a spiel where, "I want five years

"and I want this and I want to do blah, blah, blah..."

And we said, "Mark, we've been down this road before,

"we understand trademark and copyright,

"and we've protected our characters

"and we're very happy with the business we have now."

I know I've gotta represent the Turtles, this is gonna be it,

and I would have done any deal with them.

"We'll give you 30 days, 45 days, and you go out

"and if you can bring back something interesting offer-wise,

"then we'll continue talking with you,

"and you'll progress from there."

FREEDMAN: They gave me two things as a going away present.

One was an original first printing of the comic

where they wrote, "Go out and make me $1 million or else."

And they also gave me a 4-foot foam rubber replica of a Turtle,

which I knew would really help me

in presenting this to various toy companies

and broadcasters and so on and so forth.

I'm leaving Northampton in my rented car

and I've got this 4-foot turtle next to me.

I had in my hands what I hoped would be,

of course, no one knew, what I hoped would be a terrific hit.

Now the real work begins.

I was laughed at by a lot of people.

I even heard secondhand that even Disney looked at it at one point

and thought it was ridiculous.

So, again, it's the classic story of people always reject

what they don't understand.

Ultimately, I contacted a guy by the name of Richard Sallis,

who was the marketing director at Playmates Toys.

And I tell him, "I have a really interesting property.

"I've got to send you something first."

I call up my friend Richard,

I said, "Richard, you get the box?"

He said, "Yeah. What is it?"

JOHN HANDY: And Playmates manufactured action figures

for all kinds of companies, including Mattel.

But they weren't marketed under their own name.

So, we were interested

in possibly getting into the action figure business,

but I only wanted to do it if we could do something

that was completely different.

And one particular day, these black-and-white comic books came in

about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

And Karl Aaronian, who was the marketing guy, and myself

were asked to evaluate these

and see what we thought, if there was anything there.

Richard Sallis, who eventually became my boss,

and really the key to Turtles in many ways,

threw me a couple of the comic books across the table

and said, "What do you think about this?"

And I guess I gave the right answer, because I got hired.

And we both independently fell in love with them

and thought in their current form,

they're a little too adult for kids,

but in a different form, the essence of what they were all about

would be perfect for an action figure line.

The more we worked with it,

the more we had tangible things in our hands,

the more we decided this was gonna be really big.

And being the over-promoter that I am,

I told everyone in the company,

"On Friday, you're gonna see

"the best product line you've ever seen in your life,

"it's gonna change the face of Playmates Toys."

So everyone came.

We sat around this big table,

and Karl and I proceeded

to tell the story of the Turtles and show these products,

and we were so into it, we weren't even really

watching the reaction of the crowd,

which wasn't particularly good.

(INDISTINCT TALKING)

I remember sitting in my office with Karl,

and we were polishing up our resumes.

Just basically we gotta get out of here, because we just had...

We just wasted three months

and the company's not that happy with us.

And in comes Richard Sallis,

who was the head of marketing,

and he said, "Hey, guys, I really loved the Turtles on Friday.

"That was great. Great product line."

And we were just silent, and I said, "Mr. Sallis,

"it would be awfully great of you

"if you had said something in the meeting,

"we needed a little bit of support there."

And he goes, "No, you lost the crowd,

"the crowd was against you,

"but it's not the end. It's never quite the end."

The comic wasn't reaching a broad enough audience.

So, we knew before we could sell a single toy,

we had to produce the backstory in animation.

We had to tell the story through television

and bring it to the kids.

It was 1985 or '86

when an advertising agency

named Sachs Finley came to me with a comic book

and put it down on the table in front of me

and said, "Fred, can you make a TV show out of this?"

First I kept staring at the title,

and I thought, "This is cool."

And I said, "Well, I'll look at it,

"but I think it's safe to say

"I can make a TV program of just about anything."

They went to a writer named Chuck Lorre.

Chuck Lorre created Grace Under Fire,

Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men.

He's the most successful sitcom guy probably of all time.

At that time, he was doing animation

and he was already moving into sitcoms,

and he just didn't have the time to do it.

He said, "But I know this guy

"who would be perfect for it."

And working with the writer, David Wise,

who was, in my opinion, what really set

the keystone of the whole franchise.

He said, "I'm calling because

"we're going to be doing this new show."

And with great embarrassment in his voice

he said, "It's sort of about teenagers and mutants."

And I said, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?"

And you could hear him

fall over backwards at the other end of the line.

You could hear the back of his head hit the floor,

when he picked himself up, he said, "You've heard of it?"

I said, "I have the first five issues of the comic."

So, very cleverly, while Playmates Toys was designing these toys

to be made from the comic book,

we were making the TV show.

WISE: It's such a genius title,

it's such a genius concept.

If we do it right, it could be a hit.

And so really, especially those first five episodes

that set the table for everything else that followed

was a collaborative effort between Playmates

and Fred and everybody else.

EASTMAN: Playmates Toys.

Playmates Toys flew us out to California

and started discussing the Turtles as toys.

Added into the mix shortly thereafter

was Turtles as an animated series,

and even in those days, you're talking '86, '87,

you still had to have this partnership between

the animation and toy companies as commercial exploitation

and get the thing out there so everybody makes money.

This is very neat.

LAIRD: It's pretty nutty.

(IMITATING SCREAMING)

Let's talk first about action figures.

In December of 1986,

we signed our first license with Playmates Toys.

Kevin called and says, "Get over here,

"we got big news."

So, Jim and I hopped in the car and went over,

and they said Playmates had accepted the Turtles and they were gonna do it.

(ALL CHEERING)

And it was just great, it was just amazing.

(LAUGHING)

Yeah! Yeah!

Mom goes, "This is my dream come true."

It was a surreal moment to think

less than three years

after we scraped together the money

to publish this first issue of the Turtle comic,

we were gonna have a TV show and a toy line.

Ladies and gentlemen,

this is for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Wait a minute, is it on? (GRUNTS)

(CORK POPS) (ALL CHEERING)

We should do a massive toast.

(ALL CHEERING)

In the early iterations of our product line,

we had a lot of things that we were

looking at and struggling with.

We thought we would take everyone who would be

a recognizable kind of character in New York City,

a fireman, policeman, baker,

most of them were bad guys,

and they had weapons relating to their profession.

Powerfully spring-loaded leg right here,

you'd cock it back

and then you got your trigger in the back, and you aim this thing.

And Kevin and Peter had to look

at all these things about these crazy bakers

that had pizza throwing devices and all this stuff.

LAIRD: There's an aspect of this character that disturbs me,

and it's sort of related to what we were talking about earlier

about drifting over into the really silly stupid realm.

EASTMAN: Yeah, too beyond. Too much.

We did some goofier things,

and even the figures themselves,

quite frankly, were probably too ambitious,

because we had sculpted figures that were huge,

and some of the bad guys were muscle-bound

and probably would have been a $10 figure in 1988.

You have to go as far as you can

and iterate as much as you can

and then pull it back in.

If you start narrow focused, you'll stay there,

so we blew it out as big as we could.

The key for playsets in those days

is let the playset be a character as well.

So if you remember Snake Mountain and Castle Grayskull

and all these things, they had characters to them.

So, we were even struggling with what would the Turtle...

Would there be something built into the walls

of the Turtles' lair in the sewer

that would be a character that could also talk and be part of it?

But I think what happened

is Bill Carlson felt like that looked like a deity.

He said there'll be no deities in the Playmates line,

so we had to cancel that out,

and it didn't hurt anything to get rid of it

because it really didn't need that.

That was just a place for them to hang out

and it made it less complicated

to explain what that character was anyway.

Like anything else, we retrenched and said, "Okay,

"let's dial it back a couple of notches

"and let's try to make this a little more realistic."

So, it meant making the figures somewhat smaller.

This to me is like the perfect size.

EASTMAN: Is that the size you want?

That's the size we're going for.

I love it.

Three and a half inches was the scale we picked,

and that's small,

that would be the size of a G.I. Joe,

but with the bulk of the Turtles, they looked bigger.

And then that scale worked with

all kinds of vehicles that we could create.

We put the essence of the Turtle into every product,

so the van had the turtle shell top

and the helicopter had that grimacing face,

and we just had turtle essence in all of the stuff that they had.

The Turtles' lair playset and the Technodrome

were these golden opportunities

to put everything in its correct context.

They were almost legendary among my friends.

WISE: I basically wanted a mobile villain's headquarters.

So I had the idea of this big giant thing on wheels,

and I said, "It's this huge globe,

"it's like a world, it's like a Death Star on wheels."

So, that's what the design did.

What I didn't say was,

"It had a big eyeball on top."

That wasn't my idea, that was a design idea.

My physical contribution just on the action figures alone,

taking one that was already posed out

and deciding to cut that up as a posed figure.

Not with the arms straight down and the legs straight out,

and cut the limbs and bias the forearms and put the ball sockets in,

and actually realized that that makes a better figure than one that was

traditionally before that.

They were all straight up and down

and you put the pose on them.

Well, we started with the first size study that Steve Varner did

and actually made the articulation based on that.

VARNER: He just had the black-and-white comic book, that's all he had.

He just showed me the comic book and it was really

up to me to come up with my version of it.

And to begin with, at least on these first ones,

there were no drawings involved,

I just did it in 3D.

I just kind of went,

"Okay, well, this is what I would do to make it the way I like it." (LAUGHS)

The only differences, really,

is that first one that we did had a tail, which we lost.

But other than that, it just pretty much stayed the same.

There was a lot of focus on the fact that they were in the sewer.

And what's in the sewer, you know?

Nasty, ugly, stinky stuff,

and how can we play that up, but in a nice clean way

for consumption? Not literally, hopefully.

Most toy guys would realize from day one

that you've gotta sell multiple characters, figures,

and if they look identical or similar,

that's gonna be tough to do.

That's probably the only limitation of Turtles I can think of.

It's perfect in every other respect,

it's unique, it's exciting,

is that a Turtle's a Turtle.

So, from day one, I think he realized,

even in the graphic novels

where they all had red bandanas,

that there had to be more differentiation of the Turtles.

If you have four characters,

especially four characters who look alike,

you want to give them distinct personalities.

In the comic, the only way you could tell them apart

was by what weapon they were carrying.

AARONIAN: Now, that ended up being done with color more than anything else.

So, the bandana colors, the pad colors and the skin colors.

And then the added initial on the belt buckle

was just a way to reinforce that.

The whole idea was that you could

immediately tell the difference between the Turtles

by looking at the figures,

whether they were in the package or not.

WISE: And when you have groups of four,

there's sort of a classic archetype four.

And there's a reason for that,

because it's kind of like

spirit, mind, body, left foot, I don't know.

If you just looked at the comics,

at our drawings of the Turtles,

you couldn't tell one from the other, except for the weapon.

You couldn't say one's the leader, right?

But everyone who reads it,

all these little kids, they know Leonardo's the leader,

they know Raphael's the crazy one,

they know Michelangelo is the goofy one,

they know Donatello is the serious one. Right.

And I think once the kids start getting into the stories,

and especially if the animation is gonna be on TV,

and they're gonna be absorbing these kinds of stories

and the toys will feed into the TV and vice versa.

And I really thought, "What will work for these guys

"and what will work for making a TV series?"

Well, you need a leader, he would be the most

into the martial arts, and the lore of the martial arts

and the tradition and the training.

You need the science guy, the gadget guy,

the MacGyver guy, and that obviously became Donatello.

You need a sarcastic one, and that became Raphael.

You need somebody

who really embodies the teenageness

of the fact that these are teenagers,

and who embodies that spirit of fun

and that is gonna be Michelangelo.

And I will tell you that my original idea with Michelangelo

was to make him kind of street.

And, in fact, you will notice the very first line

spoken by a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle

in the first episode

of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is what?

DONATELLO: Chill out, homeboy.

It was a modest, focused toy line.

A half-dozen assortments,

10 figures, and that was about it.

HANDY: Toys "R" Us loved it, thought it was super fresh

and were very excited about it and said

that they would take a major position on it,

and we started moving forward.

So, the TV show first aired late '87

between Christmas and New Year's.

And the ratings were great.

* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

* Heroes in a half shell

* Turtle power

The very first Playmates

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures

hit the shelves and they sold out.

Your kids are gonna be real familiar with these characters soon,

the cartoon show debuted just last weekend

on almost 200 stations nationwide.

MALE REPORTER: For an adult, as you can imagine,

the whole idea seems, well...

Pretty radical.

They keep on adding good guys and bad guys.

MALE REPORTER: At such a frenzied pace

that you wonder how the workers in this Chinese factory

can keep up with the demand.

Guess what, they can't.

* Splinter taught them to be ninja teens *

So as we laughingly said, the first night

of the TV shows being on the air,

we heard all those trucks rustling out

and all of the toys going out to all the markets there.

So, that's where it became the biggest hit ever.

EASTMAN: And when it actually appeared in TV Guide,

and the shows aired

and the ratings were good, and we're sitting in our living rooms

and watching these, it's like, "Oh, my God,

"it's really happening. This is amazing!"

I recall it being slightly surreal, because

we had done this thing just for fun.

And it really kind of took on a life of its own.

Playmates was delighted about it,

so I was delighted after.

So, I waited a couple of weeks,

then I contacted them again.

I said, "When do we do more?"

And they said, "That's it. There is no more."

MALE ANNOUNCER: From Playmates.

And I said, "What?

"I mean, we got a big hit here."

He says, "No, we're satisfied."

Playmates, Richard Sallis, had indicated,

"We did so well, we did so many million."

I forget the number, but it was something like 25 million.

All right! Now we can relax, catch some boob tube

and forget about all that weirdness we just went through.

And I said, "Well, who's got the rights?"

He says, "Well, we had the rights to the five

"to produce and distribute.

"So, you'd have to speak to Mark Freedman of Surge."

And I said, "Mark, what'll it take to get this?"

And he said, "What did you want to do?"

And I said, "Well, I want to do more of them."

And he liked that idea,

and so we came to some conclusion,

some idea that I would get the rights.

(THEME MUSIC PLAYING)

And the first assignment we got from CBS involving the Turtles

was an order for 26, which was extraordinary

because they usually tested the waters.

But the waters were already tested,

the Turtles were out there, they were a raving success.

The Turtles turned out to be the saviors of the city.

They're, like, totally rad, man.

Yeah, I want to be a turtle when I grow up.

APRIL: But who are they? Where did they come from?

It's a complete mystery.

And with Turtles on five days a week on the CBS, came on Saturday,

we're on six days a week,

and for a couple of heartbeats or so

there was something happening on Sunday.

They were on seven days a week.

We were turning out a show every seven weeks.

Six to seven weeks.

A show turning out to go overseas.

And they would have an additional six weeks to do something.

So, within a 13-week cycle, we'd have from beginning,

from the recording, to a finished product, edited, delivered.

It was fun to be associated with it.

But there was no place to really go out and have bragging rights,

to go out and sit in a bar and say, "Do you know that

"I'm the guy that's putting this show together?"

(INTERVIEWER LAUGHS)

In the first episode, I contrived a scene

where Michelangelo has to surf.

They're in a building that's being flooded,

and there's a file cabinet that goes over and he jumps on it,

and I remembered from Peanuts

in around '64 or '65,

Schulz did a sequence where Snoopy is surfing

and he goes, "Cowabunga!"

That's where I got it from.

MICHELANGELO: Cowabunga!

When Fred heard the recording session, he said, "You know what,

"that 'Cowabunga' really works as a catchphrase,

"let's use it again." And I went, "Yeah."

And so the next time, in the next episode he's going, "Cowabunga."

And then they're going, "Cowabunga, dude."

It's like "cowabunga" and "dude."

Putting them together, that was my genius, folks.

Cowabunga!

The teenager needed to be in there,

and I thought, "Well, what do teenagers do?"

They eat pizza, they watch videos.

Fred quickly had the idea they should put funny stuff on the pizzas.

Who had the pepperoni and ice cream?

DONATELLO: I want some of the jelly beans and mushrooms!

WISE: I mean, it was a contest to figure out what kind of

bubblegum, gefilte fish, caviar, matzo balls.

These characters, Rocksteady and Bebop

were designed initially by Playmates,

so they were brought into the show immediately.

We had no qualms about them.

EASTMAN: These are some ideas we have for mutant characters,

or I should say Pete has.

Now, this is cool.

This is very neat!

This is a good one. This is a punk warthog

with snot gun, I believe,

or something similar. WOMAN: Mmm-hmm.

But after a while, they started developing some other

elements that became very complicated.

Here's our famous Turtle Van.

That's a little complicated to draw.

These are some of the acetates.

As I think by now, everybody knows that these acetates are

tracings of the drawing and then painted on the back.

WISE: And in animation, unlike live action scripts

where you generally just write in master shots,

and if there's a fight scene, basically you say, "They fight,"

unless there's plot stuff going on.

In animation, you break it down into shots

and they don't necessarily follow that,

but it's to give them an idea of where you're going.

And we look to you to start.

You go first. Always.

I'm like Senator Foghorn.

Let's look to the guy with the biggest mouth.

(ALL LAUGHING)

Are you rolling?

My first encounter with the Turtles

was a call from my agent.

I mean, it was really nothing, no big deal.

I mean, it was great to get a show.

My agent called me and said, "You have an audition for a show

"called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." I said, "What?"

Stu, the director, came in and he said,

"You guys are not gonna believe this,

"I'm gonna be directing this new show,

"and I want to bring you guys in on it,

"but look at this." And he opens his bag

and he pulls out a copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

One of the original comics.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? What?

It was just the mix, it was the chemistry.

Everyone had to have chemistry,

but particularly the four of us

had to really feel like roommates.

Yeah, we don't get many humans down here.

Tonight I dine on turtle soup.

(MAN LAUGHING)

AVERY: I remember the first session when I came in,

and from the very first session that I met

all these people, and it was just...

It was a party, it was a joy. It was a joy.

CLARKE: Originally, when we first started doing it,

they didn't know whether Towney or I,

who was gonna be Leonardo

and who was gonna be Michelangelo.

We were supposed to then switch back and they never did.

COLEMAN: They sort of wanted the surfer dude, kind of valley guy stuff,

and the only thing I could think about at the time was Sean Penn

in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

And so I kind of drew upon that

and did a bit of my version of that.

Let's show them the Turtles know how to party!

We've gotta practice!

That was pretty much...

I felt like the Professor in Gilligan's Island.

Well, no matter how it happened,

it's up to us to do something!

And he said, "Just kind of be yourself with Donatello."

So, I was. I mean, I just...

This is my voice

(IN HIGH VOICE) and I just kind of pitched it up here.

Welcome aboard the Turtle Blimp!

It's almost Shakespearean,

it's almost over the top

and Shakespearean, in that sense.

(IN DEEP VOICE) The same way I would do this, I would go,

"Mislike me not for my complexion

"the shadow of the burnished sun,

"to whom I am a neighbor and near born."

(LAUGHING MANIACALLY) Killers!

That's quite a brain you've got, Krang!

Of course it is, it's all I've got.

FRALEY: Underneath, secretly, I was playing a Jewish mother, with Krang.

(NASALLY) This is what I get,

I shouldn't expect anything else.

(IN NORMAL VOICE) You know? They never knew, but it was funny.

SPLINTER: I in turn named them after my favorite Renaissance painters.

They wanted him to sound like a very learned man.

The sensei, the teacher.

It's news!

Wait, come back with my hiding place!

And when I had to do Vernon,

I wanted to get as far away from that as possible,

so I got into a little bit of a higher register.

(IMITATING) April, come on, let me do something, let me get some credit.

I came in one day and they said, "You're doing Bebop."

I'm real good at video games.

(IN LOW VOICE) I had to make it really low.

(IN LOW VOICE) I did Rocksteady,

and I just made him like a big, dumb kid.

Third floor, lingerie.

And that is how they became

the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Cowabunga, dudes!

Hiya! (GRUNTING)

(IN HIGH VOICE) I am Donatello.

(IN LOW VOICE) I'm Shredder.

(LAUGHING MANIACALLY)

This is April O'Neil, Channel 6 News.

You should have seen some of the outtakes, these people are insane.

This man is crazy.

(IN NASAL VOICE) Rule the universe!

They're all crazy. Him, all of them together.

(IN LOW VOICE) It was a pleasure being Splinter.

(IMITATING) I've always been Donatello, even before I turned green.

Wait until the world gets an eyeful of this!

* Turtle power

The five-part miniseries airs

and all of a sudden it's like a little tremor before an earthquake.

We could just sense that

kids were watching it, and they liked it.

There was something going on, it was almost electric.

Today's hot new heroes

are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

(AUDIENCE CHEERING)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The crazy crime-fighting Ninja Turtles.

These heroes on the half shell are now in the top 20

best-selling toys in the country.

Your sons love those Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

They do, it's an amazing story.

Even adults like them too!

FREEDMAN: Gentlemen, it's history in the making.

MAN: Where you at? Aim that way.

Okay, you're gonna narrate.

I'm gonna narrate. History in the making.

(INDISTINCT TALKING)

And almost any parent of young children can tell you

this is an idea whose time has come to the silver screen.

It starts with a gentleman by the name of Gary Propper,

who was the road manager for the comedian, Gallagher.

And he found the first graphic comic book,

and Gary Propper's manager and Kim Dawson

used to direct Gallagher's Showtime specials.

Kim was a pretty experienced director of those shows

and knew a lot about television,

but didn't really have a lot of

influence or friends directly

in the motion picture industries.

Listen, Golden Harvest is so right for this

because Golden Harvest did the Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee films.

And they had the best martial art guys

in the world, which everybody knows.

And I went to Tom Gray, my boss,

who looked at me like I was smoking dope.

I said, "Bobby, I'm not even interested in that title."

You know, "Why would I even be interested in that?"

And he said, "Well, it's gonna be big!"

I went, wallpapered Hollywood for,

off and on, three months

pitching it to everybody,

who also thought I was on massive doses of drugs.

I'd go in and pitch it, and they'd go, "Turtles?"

GRAY: He said, "Well, would you do me a favor and have a meeting with Kim,

"at least tell Kim why you don't want to do it and whatever."

And I was more interested in the food

than I was in listening to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

As I was pushing out of the booth,

I took one of the magazines,

and I looked at it and I had an epiphany.

I suddenly got it. I said, "Wait a minute,

"this is nothing more than our Chinese stuntmen.

"We're the best kung fu makers in the world.

"We put four of our best stuntmen in suits

"and we shoot this in Hong Kong,

"we can make a movie like this!"

We talked about doing a live action movie

using animatronic Turtle figures.

I remember talking on the telephone with Raymond Chow,

and he said, "What do you think you could make the movie for?"

And I said, "I think we can probably do it

"around two and a half, three million

"if we do all of it in Hong Kong at the studios."

The initial writer they brought us,

Peter and I completely freaked out.

Trying to figure out how are we gonna get this

stereotypical Hollywood kind of guy

to understand our characters and the importance

because a lot of pressure was on us now.

Fortunately, Golden Harvest hired this director,

his name was Steve Barron.

I had seen a reel that he did with Michael Jackson and a-ha,

and I knew he was working rotoscopes

and all these kind of techniques,

and I really liked what he was about.

BARRON: Golden Harvest had had a script written

and they'd come away from

the original material, which a lot of movies do.

They come away from the book

and they think because it's a film,

you've gotta come up with the scenes that work in film, so called.

And I felt that a lot of these scenes that were in the comic books,

the original few book volumes

were great movie scenes.

We had discovered a young writer

who was writing for Wonder Years, called Todd Langen.

BARRON: So, I brought him in and we actually sat in L.A.

at the Mondrian Hotel for two months,

and we locked the door, and I had all the comic books,

and I ripped out all the pages that I just felt were movie scenes.

It was gonna take six months to prepare

all of those uniforms, the props,

everything ready to shoot on time in July,

and I didn't have the money, so I gambled.

I was emotionally committed, but I didn't have the guts

to go back and say, "I think this is not three,

"it's looking more like seven or eight."

These are the original

ideas for that sewer, which actually...

When I finally talked it over with the director

and producer, they didn't change very much.

Well, texture gives you atmosphere,

especially this disused pumping station down in the sewers,

which was their home.

And the very first sketch I did of their home was this one.

They collect stuff that comes down the tunnel,

they wander about finding all kinds of interesting things.

So, it was creating an environment,

because there was a big battle in the sewer,

and they lived in the sewer

and so much of the action happened there.

We built all this out of fiberglass to stand up to the stresses

and had actual water pumping through it.

We really lucked out on that first movie

for two main reasons,

Steve Barron, the director, and Jim Henson.

Steve Barron, very creative guy,

had a real good vision,

solid idea of what he wanted to do

within the fairly limited budget he had to work with.

And Jim Henson, fantastic talent.

We really got lucky to be able to get him to do the creatures,

and he nearly didn't do it,

because he was really not happy with,

early on, the violence in it,

in relation to his Muppets and his fan base.

It was something very risky for him to put his name to.

He'd had not a lot of contact with the film,

although he and Steve Barron were good friends,

and obviously he and I were father and son,

so he stayed in touch with the film in a large way.

At one point, he was concerned that

there wasn't enough money to finish the film,

and I think he was trying to help with that,

because it was made on a very low budget.

I started having second thoughts

about doing it as a Hong Kong movie,

but I was somewhat afraid to go back to Hong Kong

and tell them that I needed more money.

Playmates were telling me that

Christmas was gonna be huge for the toys in '89,

and so I felt confident that I'll sell the film.

I just took a risk, I took a gamble.

And then I went to the marketplace and I got killed!

Nobody wanted the movie.

At the same time we'd been seeing all the design concepts

that Jim Henson's Creature Shop had been doing in London.

Building, sculpting the heads and the bodies of the costumes,

and sending us video tapes of the tests of the people wearing them.

BARRON: There was also a thing where we needed to test quite a lot of

stages of the Turtles in London.

So, we thought we'd get one guy from London,

and so we could constantly use him to test the first prototype.

So, I had maybe 180 grand in cash

and I got an $8 million budget,

pay or play with Henson.

And the deal that I thought I had

that would have saved all of this

has just died.

I said, "Raymond, I need $6 million."

He said, "Tom, we don't have $6 million!"

"I don't know if we'll make money, but I'm so convinced

"that if you give me the money, we'll open

"and we'll get our investment back.

"At least that."

And it was a pause and he said, "Okay,

"I'll go find it."

Okay, so now what?

Now what? Now what?

The first thing was

we needed the main, the principal Turtles

and the characters to be cast who were gonna be inside the suits.

SISTI: So, I went and I did what I call my Full Tilt Bozo performance.

Spinning around and jumping around and doing my lines.

And then I finished with a big flourish and a roundhouse kick

and put my foot through the wall.

So, there I was with my foot stuck in the wall,

and thank God he laughed

and he said, "Anyone who would put that much energy into the performance

"deserves to be one of my Turtles."

And he asked me to be Michelangelo.

It was a very sweet, lovely script and silly,

and I'm silly,

and working with turtles, like, why not?

Seemed like a good idea and I was up for it.

And anything that's got Jim Henson's name attached to it.

Went in, I actually met Steve Barron,

the director, the first audition

and, from what I remember, maybe the only audition.

It was one of the easiest experiences.

And we just talked about punk rock

and the Sex Pistols and things like that, and I got it.

And I got to wear Sid Vicious T-shirts throughout the whole thing,

so I was really into that at that time.

MAN: Thirty-six, take seven.

BARRON: Ready, and action!

MAN: We were awesome, bros!

So, I was the puppeteer captain,

and then once the film started shooting...

So, I had to find the performers

and develop the hand controls with everybody,

and then once the film started shooting,

I handed that function over to Kevin Clash.

CLASH: I had another role with Ninja

where I was kind of the puppet captain for the movie.

So, I was the one who had to go to Steve and say, "Listen,

"Raphael's not gonna work, his head is not working,

"and we have no idea when it's gonna be up and running."

And they would lose their mind.

HENSON: With Steve Barron, who started talking to me about

how we could do these Turtles,

it was really important to him that, if possible,

there was no wires going to the characters,

no cables going to the characters.

I even remember we had a test sheet

that showed the character had to be able to do a forward handspring

then a flip and then drop through a manhole cover,

was what his litmus was.

He wanted it to be able to do that move

and still also be an animated character.

They were seriously challenged in those suits.

There were times where

you would have to rip a head off and give them some oxygen.

I really felt like, "I better do my job fast

"because this guy's gotta get that suit off now!"

CLASH: I remember Leif getting sick inside one of the heads,

which was very interesting.

It was like, "I'm gonna be..." And it was too late.

SISTI: The whole rig weighed about 70 pounds.

So, between that and the fact that we were suddenly

thrown into the midst of these things where you could only see out of

two little tiny holes in the front of the head,

it got a little hairy at times.

It was very difficult to get out of their suits.

They had... All of the cables and everything

went down the back of their necks.

So, they would be able to take the head off,

but they couldn't take it totally off,

they would have to put it off to the side.

And all of the servos and all the mechanisms

were actually inside of the back of the shell.

BARRON: Then we built these wooden horses

that we'd put around the set.

So that the best way to rest this 65 pounds on your back

was to lean forward in a certain position, which they sort of...

They found that position, built these wooden horses

and so they'd sit on them on the set.

So, 11:00 at night in South Carolina somewhere,

and these four turtles would be dead on these horses

in the middle of the fields,

and it was a very eerie image.

Any times that there were any kind of animatronics

where there was any dialogue going on,

you'd have the hero suits,

and they would be doing their thing.

And then anytime that there was any kind of fight sequence,

then that's when we would step in.

HENSON: Initially, nobody was sure

what the second unit was gonna shoot.

Steve thought he wanted to just give me some sequences,

like flashback sequences,

to just let me shoot and have fun with.

Then he found he had to shoot the drama,

and couldn't shoot the fights often, to stay on schedule.

So then I had to start shooting fight sequences,

which was a lot of fun for me,

which was not at all what I was expecting going in. (LAUGHS)

Although I had been involved

with the creation of the characters right from the beginning

and knew they had to be able to fight.

So I had been working with stuntmen

all the way through the preparation of the film.

Normal film speed is 24 frames a second,

and the Turtles were cumbersome and a bit slow,

and I wanted to have them

believably able to use those muscles.

So, we shot a lot of it at 23 frames per second,

even the dialogue stuff,

which was kind of unusual.

I don't think it had been done before.

And that would just... Only one twenty-fourth of a second,

but it would just sharpen up their movements a little bit.

So, when you'd see them on set,

they'd be a tiny bit slower than when we got them on film.

And then we'd use 22 and 23 for the ninja fights,

which is very common in Hong Kong, anyway.

I tell you, the technology was a challenge.

When you talk to some of the puppeteers

who actually had to program those heads of those Turtles,

they would program all of these different expressions

and different things they would want the Turtles to do,

and the next morning, everything would have crashed

and they would have to start all over again.

It was very frustrating,

because it was very primitive at the time.

We were shooting very close to the Wilmington airport,

and every time the guys set up for a shot,

the Turtles wouldn't react

or they would react when we're not ready,

and we suddenly figured out

that the interference from the radar...

We had to go on a military frequency

because the commercial frequency

was too close to our own frequency

for the radio waves.

We had to figure out all these things going on.

HOAG: We used to have something we called Major Turtle Breakdown, MTB.

Sometimes you'd see a Turtle,

suddenly a jaw would drop

or an eyeball would go off in a weird direction,

and something would happen,

so you wouldn't have them there.

So, I got used to working with, if necessary,

a paper plate on a C-stand or nobody.

Where's Raphael?

Hmm? MAN: Cut it.

Then they would always say, "Okay, we'll shoot the rat."

Because the rat was hardwired,

it wasn't fully radio-controlled.

Um, I'd like to do that again, if I could.

The truth is Splinter took a close-up much easier

because we weren't trying to hide a person inside of Splinter.

Splinter was a hand puppet,

so all the interior of the mouth was really there.

The Turtles were tough because the actors inside

were looking through holes in the actual head.

If the mouth was open, they could see a little bit through the mouth,

but the truth is if you put a lot of lights on,

the camera would be able to see right inside

and see that there was a person in there.

When I was a kid, I watched very dark fairy tales

and read dark Grimm's Tales,

and even though you'd find them a bit spooky,

that was the most exciting thing and engaging stuff.

HENSON: That was a controversial decision, to say the least,

in the making of the film.

I think there was a lot of concern from the studio

about how dark the film was.

CLASH: Steve had

unbelievable vision for this movie,

I mean, unbelievable.

He really didn't want anybody to really "see them" see them.

That was a whole thing at the beginning, as far as

not letting the audience, but teasing the audience.

He really made you feel like you were

in a sewer with these four turtles.

OFFICER: You all right, ma'am? APRIL: Yeah, I'm fine.

In hindsight, I know that was the right decision,

that Steve thought, "I'm gonna keep the film moody

"and contrasty and dark,

"and that's gonna help me to allow

"the cameras to get a little bit closer."

I felt, "Let's just really try

"and get into these eyes of these creatures."

Even though they weren't real,

and even though everybody was worried about that.

There's a big scene with Splinter and Raphael,

and it moves from one to the other,

and nobody had been that close to an animatronic

in animatronic history, I don't think.

I am here.

My son.

The darkness gave the film a gritty credibility

that I think is the difference between it making $20 million

and it making way over $100 million,

and in the end, God knows, $500 million.

It was fortunate that,

I think most of the guys at the studio here,

Jim Lawson, Steve Lavigne, and Ryan Brown,

Mike Dooney, Eric Talbot,

were all able to go down to the set,

because it was in North Carolina

at the old Carolco studios.

And we were all able to walk around on their backlot,

where most of the street scenes were filmed.

It was a trip. (LAUGHS)

I don't think any of us had ever been on a movie set before.

There, 20 yards away, 20 feet away,

was some of the Turtles in full costume,

in the stunt costumes,

playing around, one was playing around with a Mexican hat.

And it really... You froze dead in your tracks

because it was night, it was live,

and it was a real Ninja Turtle, you believed.

It's like, "There they are and they're alive and they're real.

"This is amazing. This is amazing on every possible level."

It was virtually stunning.

(INDISTINCT TALKING)

It's a very exciting moment in history.

Hopefully history's in the making.

LAIRD: All right, show them the production.

It's like they reached into my brain and Kevin's brain

and pulled out what we felt these Turtles should look like,

and then they did it.

In foam, latex and acrylic paint

and bits of leather.

They just did it.

Steve Barron, I think, just because he wanted to be nice

or maybe he thought we would be great in the parts,

asked Kevin and me if we would like to be

in the background of a scene as garbage men.

And I'm not really comfortable with doing those kinds of things,

so I said, "Thanks, but no."

But Kevin was up for it.

I seem to recall that at a certain point,

you can kind of see this blurry dark shape

moving across the screen behind one of the Turtles

way off in the distance, and I think that's Kevin.

FREEDMAN: When you see a film being shot,

you only see little snippets,

you see some dailies, just short segments,

you don't see the vision of the filmmaker put together on film,

so it's very, very hard to judge.

Now the film is together

and Tom Gray calls me and says, "I want to show you the film."

It was Tom Gray, it was myself, Mark Freedman,

Peter Laird, Kevin Eastman,

there may have been one or two other people from Mirage Studios,

and we're in a theater without children,

and we see the film with no audience reaction,

and we start to shake, we get scared.

We're not sure if we like it, we're not sure if it's good,

we start doubting ourselves, we start thinking about it,

second guessing, you name it.

We're scared.

(GONG STRIKING)

People were cheering this trailer.

And these weren't necessarily little kids as well.

They were just people who thought this looked great.

We get to the movie theater

about 45 minutes before the first showing

on a Friday night in March of 1990,

and we're first on line,

I looked behind me and I don't see anybody.

I said, "Well, isn't that special?"

And within 15 minutes,

people show up and the line grows

out the movie theater, around the block.

Ya!

I love being a turtle!

FREEDMAN: When the credits rolled

and the audience erupted in applause and cheers,

I think I grabbed onto my wife Renee and I said,

"I'm not sure what this is, but it sure feels good."

We opened at 25 million, or 26 million.

Broke all single records,

non-holiday playing time,

in the history of the business.

That Monday morning after we opened on the record week,

every single studio guy that had seen the film

and passed on it in the year and a half prior to that

called me, all wishing me congratulations, everything.

"I wish we had seen it. God, how did you know?"

All that and, "Oh, by the way, can we have the sequel?"

And I said, "Fellas,

"the sequel stays with the believers

"and that's New Line Cinema."

Huh?

ALL: Cowabunga!

I went out to dinner with Jim after that

and we drove past a movie theater,

and there were lines of kids with the whole outfits on.

And we actually saw one of the ushers come out,

and at a certain point he had to tell them

that they weren't gonna get in.

And, man, we saw the emotion that happened down that line.

Jim and I watched it

and he said, "Wow, this movie's a big, big hit."

So, yeah, that was the last film that he was on.

I was glad that he was around to see

the success of Ninja Turtles also.

From my point of view, it's very humbling

that people would, after all these 20 years,

that they would still be into something that we helped create.

All the hard work, all of the people that said no,

it just went out the door. We did it, we made it.

Coolest part is that on camera they worked,

you believed they were real.

I cannot sit here and honestly say

there is anything I would change

about them to make them better.

I remember watching that movie kind of religiously,

almost every day. The first one, anyways.

Going to bed or before I went to bed,

it wouldn't feel right if I didn't watch that movie at the time.

I don't know what that was,

but it definitely had an impact on me.

I do remember the feeling of

the first time I heard the theme song, which was...

At that moment, I just kind of instantly knew

that it was gonna be a lifetime investment.

The great thing about the Turtles was that

they were so unbelievably huge when I was growing up

that you had to be a Turtle fan.

There was the Thundercats and He-Man toys,

but then there's this one green toy that stood out,

this one toy that was so different.

I remember just even the typography of it,

the fact that it was made from the shells was always really cool.

I was really into toys like He-Man and all that stuff.

I saw these toys and I was like,

"What is this? I don't get it."

You know, "Do they like pizza or something?"

It just didn't make any sense or whatever.

So, I got Donatello

not really knowing the context of what it was,

of what he belonged to or whatever.

And then other kids in school

would be like, "Oh, you have Donatello!"

And they have Leo or somebody and they go together.

If I were to be a world leader,

then I would definitely have to say

that being a kid and growing up with Ninja Turtles

definitely affected the way I view the world.

EASTMAN: We would have a bunch of discussions

with our agent, Mark Freedman, of longevity,

and he always said, "Look, kids, it's gonna be intro year,

"the banner year, and then the discount bin year.

"Three years tops for any successful toy item

"and then you're done and gone."

AARONIAN: Usually if a toy line, especially action figures,

if they can last three years, that's fantastic.

A three year life cycle is really good for this industry.

The percentages of a successful product are probably one in 10,

so it's very low.

Without a doubt, Turtles affected my life.

I was obsessed with Ninja Turtles!

Everybody wanted to be the Turtles.

Everybody was either Mikey, Leo,

the geek, Donnie, or the badass wannabe, Raphael.

Somebody could set a Barbie doll in front of me and a Ninja Turtle,

and I was just drawn to the Ninja Turtle.

I think it was the action.

You see something, especially in a group,

you just can't help but to just be like, "Oh, my God,

"I want to be this one, I want to be that one!"

It was just real to me.

I don't know anybody my age who wasn't crazy about the Turtles.

Every school had almost every class filled with Ninja Turtle fans.

I like Michelangelo.

Leonardo.

Raphael.

Donatello.

Mikey.

I remember walking downstairs Christmas morning

and I got Leonardo.

It's really like everything that kids would want.

And I like the Turtles,

but the most best is Splinter.

So, I made this Turtle Van out of a shoe box,

and that shoe box came with me everywhere.

Around that time, it was my life.

They at one point had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Valentine's Day valentines.

Come on, that's a no-brainer.

I gave you the "Cowabunga, dude" one.

But it pretty much took over the world.

And I think a lot of kids who grew up with it

know exactly what I'm talking about.

Now we're becoming successful in Canada,

now we're becoming successful in Mexico,

now it's the Tortues Ninjas in France.

* Tortues Ninja, Ninja Tortues Ninja *

(LAUGHING)

And then we're doing...

The name has to be changed to

"Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles" in the UK

because they've outlawed "Ninja."

It's still successful there.

Rock, dudes! We did it, we won!

It was kind of thrown out that,

"If you guys want to try to come up with some ideas,

"you can send them to Playmates,

"and if they get used, that's cool."

Probably the toy I'm most famous known for is Rat King.

BROWN: They took Leatherhead, Ray Fillet, the cockroach, Scumbug,

Wyrm, Mondo Gecko,

toy Antrax was created by Mike Dooney and Dan Berger,

and then the Canadian Royal Mounted Police Moose,

and that's the one they picked, obviously,

because that makes the most sense,

it's more than a basketball-playing giraffe, or...

I did an elephant, too.

Well, the elephant's a witch doctor,

so I don't know if that's politically correct,

but at the time it was accepted.

I did Sergeant Bananas and Wingnut from Screwloose.

It was almost a rule

that you could not have a character

with two arms the same or two legs the same.

One of them would have to be a toilet plunger

or a robot leg or a tentacle,

and it was cool!

They did some really amazingly creative sculpts and designs

and paint jobs and stuff.

Mutagen Man.

Actually, I think I did the preliminary design for that.

Turtles have been kind of the Barbie of action figures.

You can apply almost anything to Turtles.

BROWN: Playmates decided nothing sells better than a Turtle,

so they were starting to concentrate on just Turtle variants.

I submitted a lot of stuff,

a lot of really bad stuff.

I had this line of mutant people, like a plumber.

I had Motorhead, which was a mutant cabbie,

a traffic cop who had a stoplight for a head.

Also, can we talk for a second,

about to blow your minds,

about the video game.

TRACHTENBERG: There's a couple tiers of the video game.

There's the original game, the Nintendo game

that was in the movie Wizard, that was impossible.

ALBRECHT: It is the hardest game.

But the arcade four-player beat 'em up.

That video game is almost, in its own category,

bigger than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were in their category.

That video game was special in its own right, you know?

I remember playing people and I was like,

"I have to be Donatello, that's my guy."

Not because of his skills,

but because that was the guy that I related to the most.

TRACHTENBERG: Turtles in Time at the arcade.

$20, and we were so close to beating it.

We ran out of money, and that was our allowance of five weeks.

ALBRECHT: Man, back in the day, you had to pump money in...

So, produced through the studio, the Archie Comics...

Steve Murphy wrote a lot of those,

Ken Mitchroney and a lot of the guys drew all that stuff.

We produced it in house and published through Archie.

BROWN: Pete and Kevin said,

"Do whatever you want with the Archie book," and we did.

I had some ideas I wanted to do

and no one else wanted to do it.

I think Mike Dooney had done

an adaption of the Murakami-Wolf show.

DOONEY: So, I was actually watching it on TV at home,

we didn't even have a VHS of it or whatever.

I was watching it on TV and I had the storyboards,

so I would draw it that way.

And I felt that there was some other things we could do with it

if Pete and Kevin agreed with me,

and I talked to them and they said, "Yeah, that'd be great."

Then I talked to Murph and wondered

if he'd partner up with me, because I couldn't write it.

If something in the book

influenced someone to maybe recycle

or make the world a better place,

I think it's all for the better.

BRAMMER: They were just goofy and strange enough

to where you can do a lot of things with them,

and that's one of the things that makes them so popular,

they can go to an alien world,

they can run around downtown New York.

You can just use them in different situations,

and it always just seems to work.

We also produced live entertainment.

In fact, we opened up on Radio City Music Hall.

You couldn't stage a play, so to speak, for little kids,

so instead they had the Turtles become rock stars.

The day of the opening, the Turtles were just above

the Radio City Music Hall marquee,

and they were performing one of their songs live,

and it was a terrific show.

And that show went on the road,

and the Turtles appeared live across the country

in venues everywhere and internationally as well.

The summer after my sophomore year of college,

a friend of mine was working

at a theater company as an intern.

Todd Holoubek ran into a State rehearsal and said,

"Does anybody here want to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?"

I'd heard the name Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, I thought it was funny,

I didn't really know what it was.

I think everybody in the group said yes.

So, we went to this rock and roll office.

A guy named Steven Leber ran this office.

GARANT: So, they needed anybody who could go out

and put on the costumes and do the advance work.

So, you would travel one city ahead of the tour

and do promotion.

They were producing a rock and roll Turtle tour

called the Coming Out of Our Shells Tour.

GARANT: And the songs that they were singing

were on this big giant show at Radio City Music Hall,

which had sold out a four-week run at Radio City Music Hall.

So, it was this big show and Broadway dancers were in the outfits.

* We're the Turtles!

* You can count on us!

And on the subway home, my friend Ben is going,

"You know, it would be kind of cool to sort of

"get paid to travel the country and be a turtle."

And I'm like, "Yeah, it would be kind of cool to do that."

And by the end of the subway ride, we had convinced ourselves

that we were gonna drop out of school

and become Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

And that's what we did.

So, it's this vinyl suit

with big rubbery attachments

and a hard plastic shell and the robotic head,

which is filled with servos and whirring gear

and electronics, and the eyes open and the mouth moves

and you control it with a remote control.

Me and Mike Black both did an appearance as the Turtles

at a pizza restaurant somewhere in Juarez, Mexico.

They were doing a show in Texas,

but we were gonna go into Mexico in Juarez to promote it.

And the idea was we were gonna go to this ice cream store

and greet kids at an ice cream store and wave,

but when we showed up, there were thousands of kids there.

And there was no crowd control,

there was no cops,

it was just this sea of people.

And we went up on the roof of this thing

and it was like Saigon.

We were up on the roof in these turtle outfits

as a sea of Mexican children were just...

And we had pizza to throw down at them and T-shirts.

I'll never forget looking through this turtle mask

at these thousands of kids

just massed outside this store

cheering and waving,

and we're dancing.

It was kind of a profound moment, because

it brought home not only the phenomenon of the Turtles,

but there was also something sort of larger and sadder

about the state of our world

in seeing all these poor kids

who were just as caught up

as their American counterparts in this thing,

but had no access to it,

in the way that their American counterparts did.

It was kind of a bummer, but the ice cream was good.

* We gotta let the music be

* You know you gotta fight to be free *

We were afraid that this was a one-off.

Obviously, so was New Line, so was everybody.

The whole industry said,

"It's a one-off, it's Cabbage Patch,

"it will never be another one."

So we rushed,

we came up with a concept.

We got that thing shot and on the screen in one year.

That's pretty amazing.

And then we decided,

"Let's air it out for a year. Let's...

"It's got muscle in it."

It did from 134 to 82, that's not too bad.

So, when we did the third movie,

we tried to make it more towards the first movie,

which had a bit more of an edge and a bit more of an epic feel

and the back to Japan storyline.

LAIRD: The first movie I see as a huge step forward,

maybe even a huge leap forward,

and the second movie was a huge step backwards,

so we kind of ended up in square one with the third movie.

EASTMAN: It's really hard to describe,

even when you're going through it,

when you're in the middle of it.

I remember the biggest effect it had on probably both Peter and I

was that we went from guys that got into the business

to write and draw comics, tell our own stories.

In, say, 1986, '87,

we were still drawing roughly 90% of the time,

80% to 90% of the time,

and then handling business 10% to 20% of the time,

and then the following year, it was a complete reversal.

LAIRD: Kevin and I, we had kind of been growing apart

as friends and also business people.

He actually moved out to the west coast,

I think, in the early '90s.

At that time, I had

a number of other creative things that I had.

I owned Heavy Metal Magazine

and we were producing a new movie there.

LAIRD: And we ended up realizing,

I think both of us came to the conclusion

that you can't really run a partnership this way.

We'd already gone 10 years, or at least seven years

beyond where they thought it was going to go.

I'm grateful for every single one of those years

and experiences,

so I signed over creative control to Peter.

LAIRD: Back in 2001, I started up the Turtle comic again,

really doing it myself except for the penciling,

which Jim Lawson did.

I was plotting it, writing it, lettering it, toning it,

doing some inking on the first few issues.

And I was really having a whole lot of fun with it,

and I thought, "This is great, because I'm able to pick up

"about 10 years after the last time I did a regular Turtle book."

And although it did appeal to a bunch of people,

I also started getting a lot of people commenting that,

"Jeez, I really liked the old Eastman/Laird ones a lot better."

And I think that the problem

that people were having with it

actually relates to something,

one of those fortuitous circumstances

that comes along every so often

where two people of largely different personalities

can get together and work together on something

and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

It's actually one of the things I kind of regret,

about the fact that Kevin and I have not

been so close over the years,

because he and I went through this together and no one else did.

And I'm sure there are things

that he would say to me or I would say to him

that would spark some memory in our heads,

like, "Oh, yeah, I remember when that kind of goofy thing happened."

Pete! LAIRD: What's that, Kev?

See, we had a design idea here.

See up here where it's all white...

LAIRD: My favorite Turtle has always been Donatello,

because he's the pacifist of the group.

Kevin's favorite Turtle is Raphael,

probably the most aggressive of the Turtles.

And I think it was the combination of those two approaches

that really made those early issues something special.

RICHARDSON: So, it's been two and a half decades for the Turtles,

so we've seen lots of generations of

five to 11-year-olds come through,

but they all react similarly

when it comes to the Turtles, so there's something...

The core of the Turtles is appealing to kids.

But now we're seeing parents, especially dads

coming up with their son,

and the son's three or four years old,

and the dad's like, "I loved the series,

"the original Turtles, when I was a kid,

"and now my son has found it on his own."

LAIRD: The sale of the Turtle property

was something that had been considered for a long time,

and then in October of 2009, we signed some papers

and got some checks and that was it.

We're walking down the toy aisle, the action figure aisle,

and this mother's kind of dragging this kid out of the aisle going,

and the kid's pitching a fit going, "Mommy, please!"

And just as we're getting there, the mom was like,

"No, no, no, I'm not buying you

"one of those stupid Ninja Turtles,"

and went off.

And Peter and I looked at each other and went like,

"Holy, what did we do?"

These characters were as real,

and are as real, even today,

for so many people,

because it just touched so many lives.

The Turtles is a great story from that standpoint,

it's a story of two guys that borrowed money

and had a dream and took a comic book to press.

It's lightning in a jar, it really is,

and you can't create that on purpose,

you just got to do it from your heart.

To put it in perspective, the peak year

we shipped 100 million units of figures and vehicles.

Which I would guess that

that is the biggest single year

that any action figure line has ever experienced.

If nothing else ever is said about this franchise is that

it changed so many people's lives,

and at this point in life, it's all good.

Certainly when we got the job originally, none of us,

and I'm sure you've heard this from everybody else on the show,

nobody knew that we'd be here talking about it a generation later.

There is something about that central concept of the Turtles that is timeless.

Four outsiders brought together under a mentor,

living in this world

and trying to make their way,

it's a fabulous sort of parable for adolescence.

Even The Avengers are big on the movie screen,

but the Turtles also had a TV show

that was on every day, that kids watched,

they had three movies out, they had an album and a tour.

So, if The Avengers also had songs about being Avengers,

and were going on tour on stage as The Avengers,

there's no comparison.

I do think that there's something just built in the core

of these four green guys

that is endearing forever.

How I was working in a lobster restaurant in Maine,

met a waitress that I really liked,

we fell in love,

she was going to school in Amherst,

I moved with her to Amherst,

happened to have a getting-by job at a pizza place,

just happened to be on the bus

on the right day, at the right time,

to find this magazine that somebody left behind

that made me pursue my career goal

of wanting to write and draw comic books

to this place in Northampton, which led me to Peter.

What if that person who had that Scat magazine

hadn't dropped it on the floor of that bus

that Kevin was taking from Amherst to Northampton?

It would never have happened.

There's too many...

Too many happy accidents.

(INSPIRING MUSIC PLAYING)

(YOU GOT THE POWER (TURTLE POWER) PLAYING)