Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures
action figures based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Action figures based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise have been produced by Playmates Toys since 1988. Staff artists at the Northampton, Massachusetts based Mirage Studios have provided conceptual designs for many of the figures, vehicles, and playsets and are credited on the packaging of the products they created.
Between 1988 and 1997, Playmates produced around 400 figures and dozens of vehicles and playsets. About US$1.1 billion of Turtles toys were sold in four years, making them the third-bestselling toy figures ever at the time, behind G.I. Joe and Star Wars. Influenced by the success of He-Man, G.I. Joe and Transformers, which had promoted toy lines with animated series, Playmates worked with Murakami-Wolf-Swenson to produce the first Turtles animated series, which premiered in 1987 and ran for almost a decade.
Getting started
The first TMNT license came in the form of a role-playing game by Palladium, followed by miniatures from Dark Horse. Within a year, First Comics began to reprint the early issues in color volumes; four were produced, stopping at issue 11. These sold well, and Eastman and Laird were soon contacted by Mark Freedman, a licensing agent who believed he could make something of the Turtles. Freedman took the idea to a variety of toy companies, only to be turned down by those who felt the concept was not popular enough to support a toy line. Only one company expressed interest, a little-known California company by the name of Playmates Toys.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7694449. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1997 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.