Going through the Catholic school system, my trinity of role models were Michaelangelo, Jesus Christ, and Mom and Dad (together they counted as one)—strictly in that order.

I grew up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their stories, and I still love them to this day. To come up with such a concept of the most outlandish grouping of words, and then treat the material with as much genuine care and respect as the creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird did for so many years is nothing short of phenomenal in my eyes. When the cartoon first broadcasted in 1988, the Turtles instantly became pop cultural symbols for this country’s youth, forces of good that encapsulated in us all young and hopeful in heart the passion to do what is good even during difficult times. They instilled in us the ability to accept who we are and grow in ourselves with our special talents that are unique to us. But most of all, they gave us our forever unquenched craving desire to gorge on pizza pie topped with the most outrageous of toppings.

We treated the Ninja Turtles as our heroes, as the only true American heroes left in a country morally and spiritually bankrupt by DiC cartoons. We were happy to make the Turtles happy and buy their cookies, their cereal, their gelatin dessert, their Ellio’s microwavable pizza no matter how much the crust tasted like a strip of soft cardboard, and the sparse cheese, like mozzarella fish flakes. That they spoke with surfer lingo straight out of a 1960’s Frankie Avalon Beach Blanket Bingo film made them all the radder and more bodacious of dudes. That on top of all this we could create an infinite amount of jokes in art class based on the real Renaissance artists, well, that was just icing on the cake—or should I say—just extra cheese on a large pie to go.

But in the retail marketplace, the Turtles were no joke. They meant serious business. Licensing executive, Mark Freedman, made a legendary agreement with Eastman and Laird reportedly on a napkin and set out to market the Turtles everywhere and on everything—from toy stores, clothing stores, grocery stores, even ice cream trucks.

Playmates Toys was one of Freedman's first stops. A deal was made to turn the Turtles into plastic, and in the first year of production, the action figures brought in more than $25 million in sales, which quickly rose to $145 million in the next year, and then to a whooping $500 million in group sales in 1990 (link).

That year, 1990, was The Year of the Turtle, arguably the very peak of the Turtle craze. The massively popular Fred Wolf cartoon series was in its fourth season and not losing any steam with kid audiences across the country (and across the world). CBS had acquired the Turtles cartoon for the fall lineup that year and gave the heroes in a half shell a whole hour on Saturday mornings in addition to their regular four-day afternoon weekday schedule.

The accompanying toy line was hotter than anything on toy store shelves in 1990. The year brought the release of the Giant Turtles, those bigger plastic versions of the Turtles that had cloth belts and removable weapons that were just large enough to hit a cat over the head with—not that I ever did.

In the regular 5" figure line, having exhausting all of the major players from the cartoon, Playmates began releasing for the first time toys based on minor characters that would show up for only one episode, if any episode at all. This was when you had such figures as Ray Fillet (a beefed-up manta ray with a winning smile), Pizzaface (a zombified pizza chef who probably doesn't wash his hands before making a pizza), and Mondo Gecko (a hip skateboarder reptile that made geckos cool long before Geico enslaved their kind to sell car insurance).

Playmates would still continue to ship out variants of the Turtles, like Mikey in a blue and pink surfer wetsuit appropriately named "Mike, the Sewer Surfer," or "Don, the Undercover Turtle," a Donatello figure in a trench coat disguise that made it look like he was either trying really badly to keep his identity a secret while out in public or else wanted an easy way to expose himself on the New York City subway system.

And then there were all of those wonderful vehicles too big to fit into toy chests that also hit stores in 1990, such as the Mutant Module, the vehicle that Shredder used to tunnel from underground to the surface. (I wonder whose job it was to fill all those holes he made around the city. Shredder could be so inconsiderate.)

If you were as big on role-playing as I was as a kid, then you probably had Michaelangelo's Sewer Exploration Belt in 1990, which comprised of basically a compass, tongs, and other useless plastic that hung around your waist. But! Everything was coated in a slime green color! I wore mine during the kindergarten Christmas recital underneath my Shepard robe in case Bebop and Rocksteady popped up to try to pour ooze over the baby Jesus. I'd have my compass and mutant tongs to foil their plans and earn my eternal place in cloud Heaven.

Every boy I knew owned a Ninja Turtle figure. If they were cool, they owned all four Ninja Turtles. If they were awesome, they owned a Technodrome, the best toy ever created.

To stress how important these toys were back in the day, at my school, if you didn’t have at least one Turtle figure, you were quite honestly a social outcast. You see, most recesses involved going outside with our figures stuffed in our pockets, each of us offering a character or two to contribute to the story of the day (if there were doubles of a figure, you tossed a coin to decide which was the evil twin/fake clone). Often storylines came to one of the Turtles delivering a massive blow to Shredder or another bad guy, which gave us the creative power to then throw the offending action figure as far as we could through the air (and pray that the nuns didn’t see). When throwing Shredder's goons grew tiresome, we’d put away the toys, and slip off our shoes a little and kick them high in the air instead. There was plenty of kicking and throwing in those days. We were all very destructive children. In many ways, I still am.

Also around 1990, I distinctly remember attending the best birthday party of my childhood—and possibly my life—and it wasn’t even my own birthday. The boy was rather wealthy and lived in a giant house, and his parents spared no expense on buying all of the officially licensed Turtles party goods—hats, tablecloths, napkins, plates, candles, cake pans, even Ninja Turtle party favors. Homemade pizza was the main course. (I honestly believe that the heroes in green are single-handedly responsible for refining the palette of every male who grew up during the nineties.) Everyone at the party even got a bandana to wear! And the best part to me? This kid’s last name was Angelo. I was pretty content on being an only child up to that point before I knew that my last name could’ve been Angelo. My full name could’ve been Michael Angelo. It was an awkward drive home when my parents picked me up later that day; the contempt in my eyes burned.

It wasn’t all happiness and good memories with the Turtles, however. I experienced one of the most crushing events of any young boy’s life—the first loss of his loved ones. It all started innocently enough with a day at the beach.

The four Turtles, their plastic bodies splashing water—in and out, up and down—swam in the August summer sun yawning waves with the aid of my hands.

“August is the month of hurricanes,” my mother told me by the water’s edge. “Powerful hurricanes, thousands of miles far away, so strong that the ocean trembles and makes undertows. Dangerous for swimming. No swimming today,” she warned and called for me to get away from the water and join her on the beach towel.

Nothing was as powerful as the Turtles, I thought. I couldn’t swim that day, but the Turtles could.

One by one, I let go of my most beloved toys into the Atlantic Ocean, and returned to the hot sand where I paved roads with a shovel around my sandcastle.

When it was time to pack up and go home, I went back to the water, to the seas picking up, to pick up my Turtles.

“What’s the hold up?” my mother asked, collecting the day’s items into a white plastic bag.

White sprays rose over the jetty as I approached the rocks and moved towards the edge, jagged and moist. Were they hiding? “My Turtles,” I said, “I can’t find my Turtles anywhere.”

She came to the rocks, grabbed me away from the waves, and turned my body to hers. "You didn't put them in the ocean, did you?"

I told her I did to let them swim. She brushed the sand from her towel and wrapped me in it and broke the earth-shattering bad news. Tears began in my eyes as some saltwater shot by, and all the way home my mother tried to explain again and again that my Turtles couldn't swim, especially not during hurricane season. I never believed her. I refused to ever replace them in case one day they showed up again from their long swim. They never did.

Believe it or not, sales of turtles shot up in pet shops during this sudden rise of TMNT's popularity. In an even more heartbreaking story, I have to confess: I begged for a turtle of my own to care for when I was young. It was a box turtle that liked to live in a cloth Playmobil Indian teepee in my room. Although he moved like, well, a turtle, performed no real tricks, and was always messing up his water dish, he was a good pal up until that fateful summer afternoon when Mom forgot to bring him inside from the locked car and I went carefree to the arcade.

I imagine he ascended—slowly—to The Bigger Teepee In The Sky that day, along with all the other real ninja turtles abused by children and forgotten by parents in the early nineties. I cried for days after finally discovering him upside down in his beloved teepee.

I now pride myself as an animal activist, with my main deployment of activism being never to touch another living thing again.

There were several controversies surrounding the Turtles. With anything that becomes popular draws the critics out to dissect and psychoanalyze the day's popular trends. TMNT was an easy target for the "shield our kids away from violence" family groups for its argued over depiction of violent robotic ninjas and mutant animal freaks.

One of the more outlandish claims came in a February, 20th 1990 editorial by John J. O'Connor in The New York Times. Connor charged the TMNT cartoon with racism because of the characters Bebop and Rocksteady.

"African-like beasts with decidedly grotesque features," he wrote of the characters, and then went into a musical history lesson: "rock steady was a musical form devised in Jamaica in the mid-1960's, while be-bop is a form of jazz with origins in black music of the 1940's. What's the message?" (link).

I don't know, Mr. O'Connor. I give up. What is your message? And I'm pretty sure that Rocksteady was caucasian before his "African beast" mutation. So, there! He's mulatto!

Film critic, Roger Ebert, addressed both controversies in his review of the first movie:

"Concerns have been expressed about the Turtles recently on two subjects: the level of violence, and the presence in some Turtle stories of characters that may imply negative racial stereotypes. There is no racism in the film version, and the violence is fairly routine, as these things go - stylized and not very graphic" (link).

Go tell 'em, Roger! This almost makes up for the three-star review of Cop And A Half.