I fell back in love with action figures in 2012. I moved into my first solo apartment since a divorce and before going any further, I’d like to acknowledge that this is a cliche. I never fully lost my connection to action figures and toys from childhood, but there were two sets of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that I fell in love with.
The first is a knock-off set of the NECA Mirage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles originally released in 2008. I bought them on eBay in 2013. These figures were unlike any I had encountered before. While I still owned some toys from childhood and occasionally picked up a figure, I hadn’t truly collected until then. In college, I developed an affinity for Toy2R’s vinyl Qee toys, and my lifelong love of the Muppets led me to acquire a few Palisades figures, but it was sporadic. However, in 2013, my collection truly took off.
The second collection featured the 2012 Playmates Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Their detailed sculpts and impressive articulation offered endless opportunities for playful expression. I quickly fell completely in love with these figures. At the time, I was working as a social media manager for an amusement park in Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY, often walking around with my phone, several phone lenses, and a separate camera. I brought a bit of my work home and created a Tumblr account dedicated to photos of my figures.
The photos I captured truly reflected the moment, enhanced by filters from various iPhone apps. These effects helped disguise the phone camera’s limitations and gave me a creative outlet during my commutes to and from Coney Island. As I snapped more shots, I started searching eBay for collections of TMNT figures and found new purpose for some Palisades Muppets figures, especially the Swedish Chef’s kitchen set.
The Tumblr account provided me an outlet for my collection and gave me a good excuse to expand it. While I was living in an apartment that had the space, I really enjoyed having a collection on display and spending a few minutes a day setting up some pictures. It was cathartic.
Ultimately, the 2012 Playmates and 2008 NECA turtles sparked my love for collecting again. They’re probably some of my favorite figures of all time, sentimentally. There’s a great yin and yang between them. The NECA figures carry a fantastic gravity to them and the opposite of their 2102 Playmates counterparts.
It was a joy that helped me get through a tough time. At some point, I managed to get a staph infection in my knee. I didn’t really have a great amount of time to plan my trip to the hospital for a full week, but I grabbed one of my all-time favorite figures and went. When I wasn’t completely unconscious due to the high volumes of drugs I was being administered to, Ray Fillet was keeping me company.
I switched jobs a few times, the collection grew, Tumblr got more weird in a bad way, and Instagram really started to eat Tumblr’s lunch. Instead of starting fresh, I just kinda let it go. What I didn’t let go of is the figures or my passion for collecting them.
One last photo from 2012, this one from a trip to New York Comic Con. I was admitted as Press through a social media connection to Chevy. How I became press through Chevy? That’s a story for another time.
