TMNT @ 25

Hard to believe that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are now in their mid 20s, but it’s true. Of course, since they were already teenagers when the series began in 1984, in real time they’d be closer to 45. But I digress.

Yes, 25 years ago this week, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird first published the comic-based tales of four pizza-eating, wise-crack-spouting, martial-arts-practicing man-turtles, and they did so without the backing of a major publisher. TMNT represented one of the rarities in comic book publishing: a successful, self-published title. The simple black-and-white comic spawned an empire built on TV shows, action figures and millions of dollars worth of merchandising.

To celebrate, New York City, home base of the fictional turtles, declared a “galabunga” this week. Festivities include lighting the Empire State Building in green on Thursday, which will coincide with a screening of the 1990 film at the Tribeca Film Festival. The first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film was made on a budget of $15 million and went to gross more than $135 million at the domestic box office; at the time, it was the most successful independent film of all time.

Oddly enough, all this Turtle talk spawned a surprise Thursday morning when it was announced that a new Ninja Turtles movie was in the works; this one will combine live-action and CGI. The last Turtles film was 2007’s CG-animated TMNT. Read the complete article on MTV’s splash page here.

And for further discussion of Turtles’ history, click here to read the New York Times article