Trying to Bring Turtles Out of Their Shell
They’ve evaded hordes of nasty Foot Soldiers and outsmarted the evil mastermind Shredder. But can the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reclaim toy land?
Playmates Toys of Costa Mesa is preparing to relaunch the 9-year-old Turtles, once toy land’s best-selling action figure line. The key to the launch is a live-action show to appear on Fox in the fall that will introduce the Turtles to a new crop of youngsters.
Few toys have attempted the comeback facing the Turtles. Domestic sales have skidded from a peak of $430 million in 1990 to $30 million last year--a respectable amount but hardly a hit.
Toy industry analysts say the Turtles face a tough climb back to the top. Toy aisles are expected to be especially crowded this year with tie-ins to “Star Wars,” the upcoming Walt Disney Co. motion picture “Hercules” and Universal’s sequel to “Jurassic Park.”
Video games are expected to remain popular, cutting into action figure sales.
“It is a very difficult environment,” said Sean McGowan, an analyst with Gerard Klauer Mattison in New York. “Given how crowded the market is, if [Turtle] sales stayed flat, that would be an achievement.”
Playmates is far more optimistic. President Richard Sallis said the line could take in $100 million in sales, thanks in large part to the Saturday morning TV show. The company will unveil the toy at the annual Toy Fair trade show in New York next week.
The updated Turtles are older and more serious than the pizza-eating mutants of the early 1990s. They have a new sidekick: a female Turtle named Venus de Milo, an expert in the martial arts. She’s been added to the gang to attract young girls to the toys and show.
They face a new set of villains. Shredder is destroyed (finally) in the early episodes of the new series, to be replaced by an evil overlord, the Dragon Hell King.
When not dealing with bad guys, the Turtles are working out their angst about being teenage mutants, exposing a dark side to their formerly goofy personalities that might elude young viewers.
“Life is more difficult for a teenage mutant of 18 than one of 13,” said Turtle co-creator Kevin Eastman, explaining the change in their personalities.
The Turtles were launched “fresh from the sewer” in 1988 with help from an animated TV show produced by Playmates. After two years in syndication the program, featuring Turtles that had been mutated by radioactive slime, moved to CBS, where it became the top-rated kids show.
That success was followed by three live-action movies. The first film, released in 1990, grossed $133.1 million. The final film, released in 1993, took in $42.2 million.
Few toys have made successful comebacks. Mattel tried to bring back He-Man in the late 1980s, but he was trampled by the Turtles.
More recently, Mattel relaunched the Cabbage Patch Kids, which racked up sales of $600 million in 1985. McGowan said the dolls rang up sales of about $100 million in 1996--”and they chewed up hair.”
Probably the most successful comeback has been that of Louis Galoob Toys’ Micro Machines. McGowan said sales peaked at $125 million in 1990, then skidded to $40 million before rising to $200 million in 1996, thanks to a line of “Star Wars” vehicles.
Analysts aren’t ready to rule the Turtles out. Noting that Playmates has kept them alive thus far, McGowan said: “I am tempted to say that if anyone can do it, they can.”
