Think How Much Better I’d Have Turned Out With Only 2 Pricier Ninja Turtles Instead Of A Dozen Cheaper Ones

I recently embarked on a project to get rid of a few of the boxes of my childhood crap that have been sitting in my parents’ basement for 30 years. That included one entire box of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures.

Yes, as a boy growing up in the ’90s, it was pretty much mandatory to be into the TMNT. And, I mean, you couldn’t really get by without the four core Turtles, right? My brother and I had no trouble acquiring and dividing up Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Leonardo.

I mean, you have to have someone for the heroes to fight though too, right? You throw Shredder into the mix, of course, and later Krang. You maybe don’t strictly need Rocksteady and Bebop, but in the course of a serious three-hour play session on a Saturday morning, one can’t really start with the Turtles fighting the big bosses immediately at the outset.

Now, even as a male child in the ’90s, you maybe feel just a little bad about not having even one female-presenting action figure, so you get April as a bit of a DEI hire. And April doesn’t want to be around without Turtles sidekick Casey Jones -– plus, it’s not like the four TMNT don’t have other friends too!

Before you know it, you have a dozen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures and then 30 years have flown by. At least you’re in good company: during the first four years of production, approximately $1.1 billion worth of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys were sold, making the Turtles the third-highest-selling figures ever at that time behind only the G.I. Joe and Star Wars toy figure franchises.

I couldn’t remember what a single TMNT action figure cost in the ’90s, so I asked my mother, who was, after all, the one actually buying them. Her recollection was about five bucks. That checked out with the info I found online. Five dollars meant a little something more in the early ’90s than it does today. Yet, over maybe half a decade of birthdays and Christmases, plus even a few little rewards for being good for my childhood cataracts appointments, acquiring a dozen Ninja Turtles to give as gifts to me did not become an overwhelming financial burden for my parents, both working people.

But what if they’d insisted my brother and I make do with only two Turtles action figures apiece at dramatically increased prices? Imagine that world. I suppose if I really had to pick I could have lived with Donatello and a single lonely Foot Clan soldier for him to repeatedly flip over his head with his bō staff.

Going without so many of the others might have sapped a little joy from my childhood, sure. However, maybe that sacrifice would have led to all sorts of toy manufacturing jobs that even back then were being done overseas coming to the U.S. Just think: instead of being a moderately successful lawyer, right at this very moment I could be doing injection molding in a dimly lit factory, producing toys — only two or three each, mind you — for today’s children.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have turned out to be a radical left lunatic. In that timeline, going with less as a child could have helped me learn to appreciate a president who bedecks the Oval Office in pounds of tacky gold clutter and openly accepts hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency bribes at the same time he’s repeatedly telling us that our children should be happy with “two dolls instead of 30” as his tariffs hike prices on everything (he has since revised the numbers of dolls somewhat as he’s doubled and tripled down on this statement).

Oh, what a world, what a world! What is an action figure if not simply a masculine-branded doll? Getting up to a dozen of them, geeze, I was getting it wrong all along.

I mean, I did have a lot of fun with them as a kid while playing with my brother, and I did just sell them at more than double their original purchase price even having been played with and with the weapons and other accessories all jumbled up and mismatched. But no! Giving up being impressed with what used toys are worth 30 years later and forfeiting a lot of fond childhood memories would truly have been small prices to pay if only my parents had had the foresight to support American jobs that nobody here wants to do.

We will never know for sure how much better I could have turned out if I had only had two Ninja Turtles instead of a dozen. Now let’s all shut up and just say “thank you” as we chew down whatever further shit sandwiches we are served.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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