#them in leather jackets with a boombox was pgood too I'll be fair

[snackugaki-jestsjapesjokes]

Lessee, the comic that started it all published in 1984, I popped out the aether and into the world in '85. All of two earth rotation's worth years old when the iconic, original cartoon aired in 1987.

1990 rolls out in theaters at my ripe Turtlemania target audience age of 5. Fuckin' rip to me, ig. I was never gonna make it out alive. Seeing TMNT on everything, everywhere was like the entire first decade of my life. The sky and ocean are blue, fire trucks and the fast chucks are red, my school pencils and the sun were yellow and turtles were green... and also red, also blue, and purple, and orange.

Then there was the Out of the Shadows music tour, the Christmas album turtles, the Archie comics run... By 1991 with Secret of the Ooze came out and the minute I saw Kuya Ernie 'Surf Ninja' Reyes Jr. being froggy with The Shredder, I was insufferaaable. I was spin kicking and blade handing everything (didn't help Mighty Morphin Power Rangers aired soon after).

God the 90s were just brimming with (child) martial artist TV shows and movies, weren't they.

I think one of the weirder things for me is that at its height in the 90s, the turtles occupied a very solid space of "Cool Older Kids" in my little TV-addled pre-internet head. In most of their incarnations, til Next Mutation, they started at 15 and aged from there. Comparatively I would still be in the single digits or freshly entering my preteens given any 90s iteration. In the Archie comics they got to age to their 30s, in Next Mutation they started at 17. I never considered the day I'd come to be "older than" the "Cool Older Kids" one day.

But also lol, they're make believe they're whatever age they need to be for whatever story they're in, canonical, fanmade, official or unofficial.

The other little thing I found strange as a child but understandable as an adult was I knew they parodied things. Made fun of stuff happening in other TV shows, pop culture in general. And as quintessentially 90s they were... the turtles who were meant to 90s teens at their height did not really seem much like teens I knew. Their slang seemed very Californian which tickled my little native Californian fancy but it contrasted with one of my only New York points of reference: Ghostwriter. As an adult now, I know back then it was the people in the show production, full adults, aping what Kids These Days seemed to be doing, what was popular to them (even if it wasn't). All seasoned with the in-jokes and pop references of their generation, which honestly makes me fucking holler when these new iterations do it with things from my time, re: Mutant Mayhem.

By the time I had access to the internet where I'd come to know fandom as I came to understand it then, Turtlemania had died down. Ninja Turtles: Next Mutation ended up only having the one season. And anime was just beginning to get clubs in middle schools. When I Iearned how to ask Jeeves to get anywhere all I wanted to know about was Sailormoon, Yuyu Hakusho, and Fushigi Yugi. I barely remember anything else I looked for if it wasn't anime-related.

Okay, TMNT Fandom.

I saw a post by a young fan saying that the Ninja ninja Turtles were now as old as their parents at forty. So I'd like to know who else is as old as or older than the ninja turtles franchise.

I'll start: in 1984 I was five years old. I saw the cartoon in 1988 and fell in love and I'm still there, in love. It's really deep. I don't think I can climb out.

Goobers.