This might be obvious if you caught last week's installment of Ask Chris, but I've been thinking a lot about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lately. More than usual, I mean. Because let's be real here, there's nobody who was a kid in the la
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Q: Why do you think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has survived and thrived for 30 years? -- @ballsmonkey
A: I have a whole lot of affection for the TMNT, and I don't think that's just because I was the perfect age to drag my parents to Pizza Hut so that I could get (and subsequently wear out) a VHS tape of the one where they fought the giant robot rats. Don't get me wrong, the nostalgia's a huge part of it, but it's not something that's unique to my age group. The fact is, if you've been a kid at any time in the past three decades, you've more than likely grown up loving those characters just as much as I did. And that in itself, the staying power that this strange franchise created by two dudes in a kitchen, is interesting.
The thing is, even though I tend to think of TMNT as the archetypical unlikely success, the more I think about it the less I think that it actually was all that unlikely.
Each weekday, ComicsAlliance brings you a carefully selected variety of links from around the web about comics and comics-related media, including movies, video games, toys, and whatever else might be worth noting. Quite frankly, these are items you may just need to know about to have a productive day. Take a look at today's hand-picked links after the jump.
Funko has released a flurry of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles product images, with the world's most fearsome fighting team (and their foes) being produced in a number of formats. Heading off the live action TMNT movie's August 8 release date will be new 2.5" tall Mystery Minis, 3.75" Pop! Vinyl figures and Wacky Wobblers based on the 1987 animated series.
Art: It looks like Nintendo's Pokémon Art Academy will teach North America how to draw in the fall.
Toys: Penn & Teller, Bret Hart, Stephen King, Leonard Nimoy and the band R.E.M. are set to join NECA's The Simpsons 25th Anniv
The 1990s were a very strange time. Imagine, if you will, a world where the single most popular thing in the entire world was a media franchise about four adolescent anthropomorphic turtles who wore domino masks and knew karate, and that this popularity was so great that they appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to sing songs and promote an arena tour where they would perform more songs instead of doing any actual karate.
If you're having trouble imagining that, and I understand why you would, don't worry. It actually happened, and thanks to Brett White, who unearthed video of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' appearance on Oprah to promote their Coming Out Of Their Shells tour, you can spend the next 45 minutes witnessing one of the most surreal talk show appearances of all time.
We were intrigued last week when Nickelodeon gave us a first-look inside Andrew Farago's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History, but now that we've finally gotten our hands on a copy of the 192-page hardcover published by Insight Editions, we can confirm our initial assumption: It's a righteous tribute to 30 years of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's party dudes.
Fans got a pretty solid look at the four stars of Jonathan Liebesman's live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie in action figure form a few months back, but now the rest of the cast can be seen in all of their plastic Playmates prestige. Click through for a good look at Shredder, Splinter, April O'Neil, what appears to be a Foot Clan soldier, and a trenchcoated Raphael from the first series of TMNT 2014 movie toys.
Click through to see what's shaking this May 6th.