Turtles Action Figures and merchandise

I'm so glad I was a kid in the Ninja Turtle craze of the eighties/nineties.

Remeber these? Like I posted elsewhere, my first ever proper action figure was one of Leonardo.

It was in the summer just before the Christmas where all hell broke loose (the Christmas where you couldn't find Turtles figures ANYWHERE!).

I had Leonardo first. He was my fave turtle by a mile. Then, the following Christmas, I got the other three, along with April. I can still remember opening the box and being the happiest kid ever. I got a huge snooker table that year too. Must've been 5 or 6 at the time. Ah, the memories.

lol one of my friends had a Rat King figure and traded it for a Foot Soldier. A common, crappy Foot Soldier. It's the RAT KING we're talkin about here!

And, one thing that is very odd - why were the action figures skins colourred differently? I remember Leo being a dark bottle green. Mikey was a sickly shade of pure green. Raph was a light shade of green (like the toon colour) and Donny was BROWN!

I assumed it was based off the comics, and I always thought they looked way better with different skin colours.

My brother and I owned every single character until most of the turtle toys just became Barbie dolls . By this I mean they stopped making new characters and all you could by for a while was the same 4 turtles in different outfits. Ex: Samurai Turtles, Turtles in Space, etc.

Yeah that was so annoying.

Why do toy companies think kids want to buy the turtles over and over? They do it with everything. The Spider-Man action figures are STILL doing this crap. And it looks like the new Ninja Turtle toys are doing the exact same thing.

Bebop and Rocksteady were hard to get hold of - why? They were main characters!!! WTF!

I had 3 sets of the turtles and only one Splinter, April and Venus

I had that pizza shooter, that was the coolest toy ever.

I recently bought leonardo...