Well, Christmas has well and truly gone and most people, I would guess, are feeling that horrible post-Christmas slump, myself included. Despite fervently insisting I didn’t want much this year, I did get some fantastic gifts (including the most amazing bean bag chair. It’s bright orange) and decided I’d write a bit about one of ‘em.

Just a little history. When I was a kid, around six or seven years old I reckon, my brother and I were huge Turtle fanatics. I was a bit too young to have collected much of anything myself; but him, being five years older, had accumulated quite an amazing assortment of stuff. He’d handed most of it down to me at this point — he was getting older, losing interest in toys and games and moving on to that dreaded football hooligan stage. One thing that never got passed on, for some inexplicable reason, was his complete set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or Hero Turtles, as they were dubbed over here) collector’s medals. He never showed any real interest in them, as far as I recall — they just sat in their little cardboard sleeve, tucked away under my mum’s bed, pristine and glorious and wonderful. I would often crawl under there, pull them out of the bag they were confined to and just sit there for hours on end, under my mum’s bed, taking all the coins out and carefully replacing them again like some sort of tremendously boring jigsaw puzzle. My memory is hazy, and perhaps it’s rose tinted glasses clouding my vision, but I remember being completely in love with these little things. But, seriously, what self-respecting kid would have ever played with coins? It’s like stamp collecting. My excuse: these were not just any coins. These were Ninja Turtles coins. I bet if there were Ninja Turtle stamps, you would have played with them too.

Eventually, as all things do, they sort of faded out of existence. I really don’t know what ever happened to them. I would guess that they were thrown out at some point, but I couldn’t pinpoint when or why.

Nostalgia aside and flash forward 11 years, Christmas Day 2009. I was presented with a nicely wrapped gift, rather small and square. Investigation ala poking, prodding and even a bit of sniffing deduced only so much: something wrapped in a carrier bag. Having asked for nothing more than Left 4 Dead 2 and a nice set of dumbbells, I was flummoxed. With a cautious eye, I carefully peeled back the wrapping.

OH MY GOD.

Could it be?…

YES

YES

YES

YES

YES

They look quite a bit different than I originally remember, however I’m going to attribute that as an unfortunate side effect of growing up. They’re a helluva lot smaller than I thought, and for some reason are quite difficult to pop out of the case (though that may be because these have been untouched for many, many years — and had a lot of crap crushing them by the looks of things) but here they are, in most excellent condition, and oh my god the Woolworths bag!

This is pretty much the coolest bag I’ve ever seen — shamefully, I’m more excited about the plastic bag than I am about my original TMNT collector medals!

Nonetheless, I finally managed to coax Michelangelo out. I still get that same glee from holding one now as I used to, all those years ago. They’re difficult to photograph properly, on account of being shinier than a Twilight vampire, but hopefully you can see the detail:

Just look at them, they’re amazing. I want to mount them in a frame and hang them on my wall. That is how cool they are.

The back of each coin has a rather generic image of all the Turtles together. Now that I think about it, it would have been pretty sweet if they’d had a rear shot of the character or something.

That’s quite an unstimulating “Cowabunga” there, boys. I’m guessing the budget didn’t quite stretch to printing an exclamation mark.

There’s some really nifty artwork on the packaging as well. I would have bought the case for the inside cover alone:

That’s what we all really wanted to see when we were kids, the Turtles beating the crap out of everything. It’s the only reason anyone ever watched the show. Krang and Shredder would bicker like an old married couple, which was usually enough to entertain older generations, but when it came to the kids all they were interested in were four gigantic green amphibians flipping out and killing lots of dudes. I especially love the little Shredder just poking out of the corner there.

On the back, there’s a bunch of little character cards with a brilliantly-worded sentence about each one. It’s so wonderfully corny.

Rocksteady’s gets me every time.

I’ve been unable to locate any information on these things online, past people selling them on eBay, which is kind of disappointing. The date on the back of the case says 1990, apparently they were published by a company called Wallace, but I can’t find any mention of them anywhere, either. I’ve seen quite a few incomplete sets of these coins up for auction before, so I’m thinking they they were probably collectibles in a magazine or something. It’s difficult to imagine any eight year old actively going out and purchasing some ‘boring’ old coins, especially considering the vast array of other amazing toys and games the Turtles had to their name, so I’m highly doubting they were ever actually marketed in the same way as all the other merchandise. Mind you, our boys have had far stranger stuff licensed under their names. Back in their prime, you could stamp those lovable green faces on anything and you’d pretty much have a guaranteed sale.

A quick search on eBay shows that the Turtles also had another medal collection released in the same year — this one came mounted on a ‘medal action’ wall chart and the complete set totalled 12 medals, this time gold. I found somebody else selling the wall chart alone with no medals, further strengthening my theory that the medals and cardboard mounts may have been sold, or collected, seperately as opposed to purchased as one item.

I think I’m going to invest a little time seeing if I can’t discover where they originally came from. I’m willing to hazard Woolworth’s as a guess, judging from that amazingly cool bag. In the meantime, has anybody else got any thoughts? Any other weird or obscure Turtles merchandise?

Tags: eBay, oldies, retro, tmnt, toys