Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Museum Exhibit Opens

Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman were sharing a house in the small coastal city of Dover, New Hampshire, when they first created the characters that would define their legacy. Now, over forty years since Kevin Eastman first doodled a photorealistic Turtle with nunchucks strapped to his forearms, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are a global phenomenon worthy of their own museum exhibit. Not bad for a pair of struggling artists who started out selling a Marvel Comics parody to make enough money to pay back a relative.

Eastman famously borrowed $3,000 from his uncle to get the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issue printed. He and Peter Laird’s humble ambition was to sell enough copies of their self-published debut to pay his uncle back and have some pocket change left over. The duo never even intended to publish a second issue, as evidenced by the Shredder dying at the end of issue #1.

But something happened that Eastman and Laird never counted on. The Turtles blew up in a major way. Soon, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made the leap from comics to television, toys, and video games—all of which are on display at the Woodman Museum.

Kevin Eastman calls Dover “the birthplace” of the Turtles and considers the New Hampshire city “very historic and very important.” What better reason for a Dover museum to house the first exhibit dedicated exclusively to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles exhibit at Woodman Museum features memorabilia from every era of the team’s long career. From their humble black-and-white beginnings to their beloved Saturday morning cartoon, whatever version of the Turtles you first fell in love with is represented here.

Life-size bronze statues of the four Turtles and Splinter guard the exhibit like a group of pizza-loving gargoyles.

Among the museum exhibit’s highlights is a pristine copy of the original 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade cabinet.

Despite its quarter-sucking difficulty, the four-player beat-em-up was a favorite of many ’80s and ’90s kids. Visitors are even allowed to interact with the display i.e., grab a joystick, and kick some shell like the 20th century never ended.

Meanwhile, the exhibit also features everything from Turtle backpacks to Christmas ornaments and even some signed, first-run comics valued in the tens of thousands of dollars. “The [Teenage Mutant] Ninja Turtles are a multi-billion-dollar international franchise, and they originated here in Dover,” said Jonathan Nichols, the executive director of the Woodman Museum.

The director went on to say that it was a “no-brainer” for the museum to open a Ninja Turtles exhibit and calls it a “celebration” of the “history of the Turtles from their creation to today.”

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles exhibit at Woodman Museum is part of a bigger effort by Dover to embrace its role in the Turtles’ creation. Last year, a historical marker was erected near the museum, recognizing Dover as the birthplace of the Turtles, while a few blocks down, a decorative manhole cover was placed in front of an empty lot where Eastman and Laird’s house used to be.

Source: Boston.com