From Masters of the Universe to G.I. Joe, many of the boyish franchises of yesteryear had their very own magazines. I'm not talking about some one-shot, four-page pieces of crap that came free with action figure purchases, mind you. I mean real, monthly magazines. Such publications rarely performed well, because while a toy franchise can cool off considerably and still be profitable, it takes a real peak period to get fans to subscribe to its goddamned magazine.
But even a low amount of subscribers spelled success. These kinds of magazines fiddled with the notion of actually being content-driven, but they remained advertisements at heart. If you can get people to pay to read glowing praise for the toys and products you're hawking, you've done a good job regardless of whether you have 10 subscribers or 10,000.
On the whole, such magazines were better than you might think. With just enough real articles to feel like a real magazine, it was of course more fun to read the many tributes, comics and fan letters about our favorite cartoon characters. In the summer of 1990, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles won their very own monthly rag. After intense debate and a "potential title" list longer than your car, they steered to the avant-garde and called it Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Magazine.
It was a good time to try something like this. Comic books were white hot again, and more and more kids were spending time at comic book stores...comic book stores with magazine sections that rarely devoted shelf space to the likes of People or Spin. That's where I picked this baby up, and I have no regrets for having passed up that month's issue of The Silver Surfer, because hell, once Marvel put Reynold's Foil on issue #50, everyone knew that shit jumped the shark.
Like most of the toy and toon-rooted magazines before it, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles benefited from having a real editorial staff. Maybe they weren't the best in the business (if they were, they wouldn't have been covering Donatello), but they were at least passionate enough to do everything in their collective power to make the magazine more than a pandering advertisement. They wanted it to have real articles with real meanings, and though I'm sure I would've been just as happy thumbing through 32 pages of Krang-related word scrambler puzzles, it was nice to voluntarily digest honest thoughts and ideas without needing to pen a book report afterwards.
The opening page features a message from Leonardo, who writes about as well as any author I've ever read. Splinter wasn't just teaching the ways of the ninja down there, apparently. The letter is kind of sneaky, with Leo suggesting that those who subscribed to the magazine would become bona fide members of the Ninja Turtle team. "We're glad you're part of our team. We want you to be with us!" Hard sell from a hard shell. Hahahah hoooo.
The issue provided equal parts real articles and colorful gibberish. I came for the gibberish, but those real articles are what made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Magazine something I'd carry to the dinner table and be really proud when I told my family to "shhh" because I was reading, dammit. That's right, Mom. Put it in your pipe and smoke that bitch.
"Notes To The Underground" was a recurring feature where they'd print letters from crazed Ninja Turtle fans, but they seem almost too generic and polished to be legit. This also presents the problem of needing to believe that kids heard that Warren Publishing was putting out a TMNT-related magazine, and sent letters in just in case they included a section where such letters were printed. In other words, some fifty-year-old divorcee with knee cramps wrote every letter on this page.
So, assuming that the letters were fabricated, we can also assume that the magazine's authors considered children as universal idiots. Take Paul Lockyer's gem: "It is most excellent that the turtles have a magazine. I will always get it. I eat pizza whenever I can." Is he writing a fan letter, or playing The $25000 Pyramid?
Jason Ayres's letter shows a little more thought. Addressing Donatello directly, Jason remarks that he's the best turtle "because he combines ninja fighting with making things." At least young Michael Lewis had realized his own limitations, instead opting for the safer avenue of crapping out a Michaelangelo doodle in crayon. The flipside of that piece of paper read, "Mine name is Mikey to!"
Most of the boy toy magazines to arrive before and after this one's run had similar sections. I loved them, not so much for the reading material, but for the excuse to break out legal pads and pencils to write out big long love letters to cartoon characters. This was an outlet for everyone who ever wanted to thank Raphael for the perfectly legitimate excuse whenever they screamed "damn" in front of the grownups. "But Raphael said it in the movie!" Lessened the punishment when we were aided and abetted, ya dig?
It's "The Fresh! The Radical! The Maximum!" This was the magazine's attempt to educate readers on the latest news, trends and gossip from pop culturedom; namely, "hip hop haircuts" that allowed us to have hair that wasn't afraid of no ghost. I remember this fad well, but it never quite hit hard enough around here for kids to be walking around with cool shit like Batman logos on their skulls. Usually, it was the logo for the New York Yankees. The article says that such hairdos were called "cut-outs," but that's news to me. I don't think we had a word for them around these parts. If somebody saw one, they just pointed and screamed "asshole."
Another blurb details the newly cooperative trade laws agreed upon by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but to give it more of a kid spin, they whittle the meaning down to this: In Soviet Russia, Nike sneakers find you! We're then instructed to watch out for hip commie stylings coming from there back to here, simplifying the Soviets' fashion sense to "worker clothes and clunky military watches with tiny bombs and oppression inside."
Finally, there's a shorty about how if you look at our television-watching history over the course of several decades, trends indicated that people would be watching twelve hours of TV everyday by the year 2096. I think the Internet funked up that theory, but the basic point of "people sitting on their ass doing nothing" for twelve hours a day could very well be true a lot sooner than 2096. I'm personally at a 22 hour best, and we're barely through 2007.
The "Ninjas In Training" article lasted a few pages and didn't really interest me back in 1990, mainly because the thought of me wearing a ninja uniform only brought visions of street punks standing outside the strip mall dojo punching me in the gut on the way in. Still, the article made sense within the context of things. The Ninja Turtles were ninjas, and every company on the planet mistakenly took their popularity to mean that kids were nuts about ninja stuff. In truth, we were way more crazy about turtles and mutants and pizza, and blimps with team logos on them.
Though the article has been understandably dumbed down for immature audiences, it had all sorts of legit karate info that went well past the surface levels of "hiYAH" and "practeese." Like, I never knew that karate actually meant "empty hand," and I certainly never knew that it was kosher to follow up the word "monk" with "religious dude" in parenthesis.
On a related note, the only karate place I still run into around here is right next to an IHOP, and it seems to have worked out some kind of symbiotic relationship with the pancake house. The restaurant is littered with karate gear on the walls, and the front door to the karate place has a sign on it reading, "Ihop Door 1 Over." This also explains why I live near the only IHOP in the country with "ninja bacon" on the menu.
"Cruisin' With The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" was four pages of total filler, featuring cartoony images of the Ninja Turtles placed over stock images of random kids skateboarding. That's pretty much all it is, though weird text blurbs try to weave a story out of it. Like, we learn that Michaelangelo's been so busy fighting crime that he's lost his once-championed skateboard prowness. There's also a neat bit where Raphael gets attacked by a giant dog on his way to the skateboard park's snack shack, and I'm not making that up. I guess, when you're a freelance writer and you get a gig writing text blurbs under pictures of cartoon turtles and live action skateboarders, you really would kind of need to smoke crack before settling down at the keyboard.
Reading doesn't come any lighter than this, but at least the pictures were good to cut out and tack up on our bulletin boards. I mean, we were in grade school...what were we really supposed to do with those bulletin boards, anyway? It's not like we had electric bills and insurance receipts to keep track of. If you were a kid with a bulletin board, it was all about highly-graded scantrons and pictures of Leonardo on a skateboard.
The mag featured a full-page ad for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cereal," which could best be described as the malformed love child of Chex and Lucky Charms. I already wrote a lot about that stuff, but in an effort to stretch out an article that's already too long to a new level of too-longness, I've got something important to show you...
It just so happens that I'm the proud owner of about a dozen sealed boxes of TMNT Cereal, and for years, I've been intrigued by a recipe on the side panel for "Fruited Mutant Pizza."
A lot of cereals have wacky recipes on the side panels. Some are mildly appetizing, but in most cases, the recipes are so goofy and weird that I'm never sure if the cereal companies just put them there to screw with people. This is a good example. "Fruited Mutant Pizza?" A "pie" made of cream cheese, cereal bits and pineapples? Surely the recipe's creator never truly believed that anyone would use the side panel for anything more than an interesting thing to look at while eating breakfast, but after years of progressively piquing curiosity, I had to know the truth.
I had to cook a Fruited Mutant Pizza.
I won't bore you with the complete play-by-play, but it's a process of many steps, involving melting down corn syrup and pudding, mixing giant globs of cream cheese with seventeen-year-old cereal pieces, and finally merging everything together into the vague shape of a pizza.
While the recipe advocates fruit toppings (pineapples, blueberries and whatnot), I felt that candy would work better. Just to stay true to the recipe, I did add one maraschino cherry on top. It might seem like a relatively easy process in digest form, but I think I could've funded, built and opened a real pizza parlor in less time than it took to make one Fruited Mutant Pizza. And the end result? Something ugly.
Though I admit that my obsession with adding unneeded green food dye to the mix for extra TMNT faithfulness definitely upped the gross factor, there's no denying that the Fruited Mutant Pizza would've been disgusting even without it. Never mind the fact that I used ancient, expired cereal -- even if you bought and used a new box of Corn Chex, it's still a dish best served to someone you completely and totally hate.
So yeah, my verdict has to be that cereal companies often use their "side panel recipe" space to publicize inside jokes and tongue-in-cheek to-dos. On the other hand, the recipe was written by someone at Ralston, a company more notable for its many brands of dog food. Not all cereal box recipes are losers, and there's no better proof than a Ooey Gooey Banana Ghost.
Fruited Mutant Pizza, you make me want to wash my mouth out with bible pages.
Sticking to the subject of pizza, here's Raphael's "Pepperoni Puzzler." This bodacious brainteaser challenged us to figure out which of the four pizzas was different from the rest, which isn't so unusual until you look closer and realize exactly how this challenge was issued. Splinter gave Raphael four seemingly unremarkable pizza pies, and just as Raph donned the cutest little dinner bib you ever did see, his ratty master made things more interesting with...a poem.
Four pizza pies there are here,
In size they're all the same.
One pie, alas, is different--
Can you this rogue pie name?
I don't remember the episode where Splinter mutated for a second time into an annoying amalgam of Yoda and Wheelie, but if he feels like being a cryptic rhymer, sure. I won't deny you the pleasure of figuring out the correct answer, even though I really like spoiling things just for the heck of it.
Considering that this "summer" premiere issue of TMNT Magazine came out a long while before summer, it's no surprise that they pushed the holy hell out of the first live action Ninja Turtles movie. As things turned out, the movie really didn't need an extra push from a magazine sixteen people read.
The article is about what you'd expect it to be: A picture gallery. There were some really great and some really headscratching photos of the still very foreign concept of "live action Ninja Turtles" -- more than enough to whet and whip our TMNT-related appetites into a crazy frenzy that extended to all reptiles and all Neapolitan dishes.
I loved that movie to death, and I guess now would be as good a time as any to tell the exciting story of how I went to go see it on opening weekend. Ready to blow a gasket?
Okay, so, on some long ago afternoon -- opening weekend -- one of my brothers takes me down to a now-defunct theater for hot turtle action. My brother wasn't exactly the most solicitous when it came to feeding my stupid passions, but for whatever reason, he really wanted to see it.
The line stretched on forever, and we were at the end. To this day, I've never seen a line quite like this for any other movie. It didn't just saturate the theater lobby -- it went all around the street, through the parking lot, forming a strange pattern that I'm sure looked like one of Raphael's sais from an aerial view. We weren't too worried about the show selling out, because the theater had dedicated so many screens with so many different showings that, at worst, we'd just have to wait a little longer than expected.
As the line moved, I explained the finer points of Ninja Turtledom to my brother. He was clueless to the lore, and that's a bad place to be when an eleven-year-old is hepped up on Ninja Turtle goofballs. With great pride and animation, I told him about the mutagen, and about how each Ninja Turtle had a different weapon and bandana color, and about how Shredder was a bad man. I expressed concern over whether or not Krang would be in the movie. He made the mistake of asking who Krang was. I told him, at length.
Finally, we saw the film. You don't need a blow-by-blow; you've seen it, too. But that theater...I'll never forget it. People running up and down the aisles, people sitting in the aisles...popcorn and candy flying through the air...various Turtle-related audience chants. It was like the movie theater from that old Friday the 13thAlice Cooper music video came to life. My town wasn't known for any particular hotspots, but on that long ago Friday, this was the place to be.
On the drive home, my heart kept on racing as we discussed what we saw and what it meant. Having been brought up on the Ninja Turtle cartoons without any real knowledge of their comic book origins, I took serious issue with Splinter being a legit rat and not a mutated Hamato Yoshi. It just seemed so much more logical that Splinter would've been a mutated human rather than some gerbil who did karate chops in a birdcage. I'm all for suspension of disbelief, but that was on par with buying that Ellen Brody could kill a great white shark by driving a boat into it in Jaws: The Revenge.
I guess my story doesn't have much of an epic climax. We got home, and that was it.
Oh, I did lament in the car over the film's serious lack of Krang. "They're probably saving him for the sequel," my brother said. I still hate him for being wrong.
The first T.M.N.T. movie was a truly good film, and I don't think that was lost on us, even as kids. We would've loved it if it was bad and stupid and nothing but a popcorn pleasure, but even as kids, we recognized that the movie had more smarts and heart than most of those other "cinematic experiences" marketed to us during the weekday Disney Afternoon block.
My point is, the film's actors felt like real actors, and I was totally positive that Elias Koteas was about to be launched onto the Hollywood A List all on account on his stunning turn as stick-wielding anti-hero "Casey Jones." Despite a respectable and mostly busy career, I can't say that my assessment was on the mark.
Still, he was a huge star to us in 1990, and a two-page interview with Elias was nothing to feel gypped about. The hard-hitting questions delved deep into the man behind the mask. You wouldn't believe the highly personal line of questioning thrown at Koteas. "Do you ever take vacations?" "What's your favorite kind of pizza?" COME ON. At least ask him if the onscreen chemistry with Judith Hoag led to a little sumtin' sumtin' in the backlot.
One of my favorite sections of the magazine, "Rad Reptiles," sought to teach us all about real life reptiles, I guess assuming that if we liked the Ninja Turtles, we were okay with learning about other slimy, scaly creatures, too.
I'm really glad that they picked the Komodo Dragon. Love those nutjobs. I still cannot see a Komodo Dragon without immediately singing the "There he is...YOUR KOMODO...DRAHHHAGON" song from The Freshman, even when I'm sitting at my computer all alone at three in the morning. It's nice for life to have a few constants.
I won't say too much about what Komodo Dragons are like, because honestly, whatever you envision a Komodo Dragon doing is probably ten times more interesting than what Komodo Dragons really do. That's not my testimonial against the cool factor of Komodo Dragons. I'm just saying that if you tell the uninformed that something called a "dragon" exists, they're probably gonna expect wings and wizardry, not sleeping and attacking goats.
Having an article like this in the magizine helped me feel like I was reading something "real," and that helped separate TMNT Magazine from the many mini-sized Kenner, Mattel and Hasbro toy catalogs I ripped from action figure packages and carried around like pocket bibles.
Those who know a thing or two about Komodo Dragons should realize from reading the scanned article that its writer actually researched the subject pretty extensively, which is to say, he didn't just stretch out some of the more obvious facts and pad the rest with words like "tubular." I'm also impressed with the writer's ability to focus in on the animal's more kid-oriented statistics. "Every few years, Komodo Dragons scarf down a native or tourist." See, that's how you keep people interested. It's why every nature show on television now focuses on how even the most seemingly innocuous animal can tear your heart out and shit on it if it tries hard enough.
I'm not including scans of every ad from the magazine, but I should feature a few. Even though I've reviewed another of the Olympic Sales prize pages in an older article, this version was just too good to pass up.
Refresher course: By joining the Olympic team, kids were sent a kit consisting of several glossy catalogs, which they were to carry from door to door, desperately begging neighbors to buy overpriced wrapping paper and assorted chocolate goods. For each item sold, kids would receive a fixed amount of cash or a "point" good towards a prize. The money formerly amounted to one dollar per item sold, but by the '90s, Olympic got with the times and offered kids two dollars per item sold.
I participated in Olympic's pyramid scheme several times throughout childhood. My earnings/winnings never amounted to much, but it sure was fun imagining all of the big time prizes I'd get. Surely, everyone in the neighborhood would want to buy 5-7 items each once they saw my cold, innocent ass standing at their front door with glossy catalogs in tow. I used to convince myself that I'd be able to sell 50 items with ease, and stare at ads like the one above figuring out how I'd divy up those 50 points. Then I'd get all depressed because it took 60 points to get a Game Boy. What the hell was I going to do with an LFL Stationary Set? Fuck that.
Confession: I completely neglected to scan a multi-page comic book wherein the Turtles deal with a newly-forged mutant named "Lobsterdude." I'm ashamed, because Lobsterdude ruled. Sadly, I spilled the world's biggest and strongest cup of black coffee all over the magazine pages shortly after scanning; thus, there's no going back now. Use your imagination. Picture a Ninja Turtle made out of a lobster instead of a turtle. That's Lobsterdude. One love.
