I put out a Nerdy Show & Tell Video showing off a pack of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cards from 1990. The pack was from the second series, which was the blue wax pack featuring Donatello on the front. As part of the video, I wanted a little more information about the card packs and discovered something a little weird when looking for more information.
The wax pack that I had in hand featured an offer for a full set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie cards for $19.95. Some of the packs I saw online featured an offer for a full set of the first series of cartoon cards. Were there two different packs of cards?
I have a copy of The Official Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Treasury, released in 1991 by Random House, which mentions trading cards on the back but doesn’t include anything about the two card series on the interior pages. As an aside, it’s a very fun book to flip through. Half the book focuses on the products (and comics) available before the “surge.”
A bit of searching and I came across an eBay listing that pictures both variants of the packaging with each of the offers. You can see some of the portions of the offer that can’t be seen when the wax pack is still sealed.
Is that it? Nope! When I was cruising around different eBay listings, I noticed that they had a price while the pack in front of my didn’t. Turns out there were four variants of packaging. Check out this listing, which shows the packs without the quarter pricing with both variants of offers.
I believe that’s the full look at the four variants of the second series packs.
Each of the sets of card offers something that wasn’t available in the original packs of cards. For the First Series, you get all 88 cards and 11 stickers that were previously available in individual packs, plus twenty two cards that feature art from the Mirage Studios comics.
This wasn’t the first time the First Series cards were available. You could have purchased them from an offer on the back of the card from from the first series too. You can see it in this eBay listing.
The movie cards didn’t offer you any additional cards or stickers, but you could get them in a singular package rather than in individual packs. The box offer for the movie cards appears to have been the same offer that was available on the back of the movie packs. There was a second option to buy the movie cards in a two-pack, for some reason. They were both offering 132 cards, and despite the larger box’s claim of having behind-the-scenes cards, they were a part of the full 132 cards rather than a bonus. You can see the different in these two eBay listings.
The one thing I’ll say about all of these cards is that it’s a shame that they’re currently left to eBay listings and second-hand stores. Through the years, Topps has released multiple books of their old non-sport cards, including licenses like Star Wars, Star Trek (also IP owned by Paramount), Jurassic Park, and Mars Attacks, but no Ninja Turtles book.