Imaginary Worlds - Bonus: Turtles and Toys Outtakes

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

In the previous episode, I interviewed documentary filmmaker Isaac Elliot-Fisher about He-Man and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Isaac had so many great anecdotes about the history of those franchises that I couldn’t fit in. In this bonus episode of outtakes, Isaac explains the history of the term toyetic, the haphazard way He-Man came together, and why the 1990 live action TMNT film was so much darker than the cartoon show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everybody, welcome to another bonus episode of Imaginary Worlds. In the last episode, I talked with documentary filmmaker Isaac Elliot Fisher about He-Man and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Isaac had so many great anecdotes about the history of those franchises that I couldn't fit into the previous episode. So, I'm going to play those outtakes for you. I started the interview by asking him to explain where the word toyetic comes from. Toyetic is now known as a term for toys that are so wrapped up in marketing. You don't know if the show is a commercial for the toys or vice versa. But Isaac says that wasn't the original meaning. It is a funny term. And if and I love the term. And I think that if this story is true, it would make it so much

better. Because there's a story that the term toyetic is coined by the famous Bernie Loomis, who was the head guy at Kenner Toys, and famous for literally inventing the modern, or what would become the modern action figure toy realm. And apparently the story goes that Bernie coined the term while trying to explain to Steven Spielberg why Close Encounters of the Third Kind would not make a good toy line. Sorry, Steven, that's not very toyetic. Can you imagine a Richard Dreyfuss action figure having a breakdown with a pile of mashed potatoes accessory? It would be just, yeah, you know know this is not a good idea yeah but it really took off though there was like this you know famously the reagan administration was really into

deregulation that was this whole thing where children's television in the u.s had to have some educational content you couldn't you couldn't just create a cartoon show to sell toys. And they're like, why not? Well, the 70s really belonged to the groups of people that were against marketing to children, specifically helmed by a woman named Peggy Charon. And Peggy Charon, who founded a group called Action for Children's Television, was they were, I guess, during the 70s, their big thing was protecting kids' health from a food and teeth and body perspective because they were really worried about sugary cereals, essentially. So the story goes that there was a post-Heart of Oats cereal that was being marketed by a cartoon character named Lioness the Lionhearted, who nobody remembers. the lion hearted who nobody remembers and apparently there was a line drawn at some point in the late 60s early 70s where that was like nope you can't use a on-screen cartoon character to market to children if you think about it you have that decade of the 70s or so where you

know prior to the 70s and the 60s and in the 50s you've got sort of the invention of marketing directly to children through things like the Mickey Mouse Club, Mr. Machine, that toy was popular on television, those type of things. And then after that, you have this period of time where shows like Scooby-Doo and the Flintstones and stuff like that, which were hugely popular shows, didn't have really a consumer product tie-in the way that we remember them in the 80s. So the 80s is a really specific decade for this for a lot of reasons. And yes, He-Man kicks it off and arguably G.I. Joe was happening at the same time,

the Hasbro reboot of G.I. Joe. But they kind of kick it off and accidentally fall into this. And then the explosion that happens after, there is an inherent, very capitalistic response or a conclusion out of this where basically the free market had to regulate itself to create good content. And I think out of it, we got some pretty creative and pretty inspired stuff. So you said that He-Man fell into this by accident. I thought that it was like Mattel was upset that they had missed out on Star Wars and they're desperate to come up with something. And they were thinking of toys to begin with. Right. I mean, wasn't it like toy first cartoon story after? Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, like they were still everybody was still because, again, the lead up time to creating something

takes so long that like to get a product from concept to shelf. So the big problem with Star Wars for everybody was that George basically came to the toy companies too late at whatever time of the year that he approached all these toy companies. They're saying they're going, well, it's going to take us six or eight months or more to get product on shelves. So I'm sorry, but we can't. And at the time, using a movie or television franchise as a basis to make product was incredibly risky. And they usually didn't do it. The first one to successfully do it is Six Million Dollar Man in the late 70s. And that was a huge risk. And it was obviously a huge

success for Kenner. And so Star Wars had sat down with Mattel. They said, sorry, we can't have product until March. We're not going to hit Christmas. We're not going to have it until March. And so forget it. And so they pass and they end up landing on Kenner through this strange confluence of events. But Bernie Loomis takes the risk and sends out those empty boxes with the slip that says, we owe you a figure in three months. And that was the empty box Christmas. But that idea that they took the risk, because Mattel, if you remember also, had just done Clash of the Titans, the Harryhausen film, and it bombs. So they put like a half million dollars into buying the license, half million dollars into tooling, half million

dollars into inventory. All of these toys go out on the shelves and the movie just it doesn't do well no my my 10th birthday party was a clash the titans themed birthday party and you got the toys you were i bought all the toys i never i had all of them they're me i bought them i love the look on your face because you're like wait a minute he's wrong this was a huge deal they were stuck with so many you should have bought the rest of the inventory i should have i didn't know so mattel was sitting there panicking is there going we can't we can't move the stock what we're good what are we going to do so they they said no and so the weird thing is the everybody wants to think that in retrospect they want to think that oh mattel must have seen it coming they must have known the deregulation was going to come and they could go in and do commercial cartoons that would sell

product. This does not at all would happen because what ended up happening is they had also at the time, because of the desperation, Star Wars comes and goes, or doesn't come and go, it comes and stays, I should say. And they go, shoot, we missed this. So they make a deal with Dino De Laurentiis to do toys for Conan. So they're like sitting there going, okay, we're designing these toys for Conan. One of their main designers, a guy named Mark Taylor's drawing all these designs. And then they realized the movie's rated R. And they go, oh, I don't think we could do this. We're backing out. And at the same time, Mattel had this interesting structure as a company at the time, which is unfortunately no longer the case in almost any toy company, as far as I understand it,

which was there was a division within Mattel called preliminary design. And preliminary design could come up blue sky, just ideas. They're all partying. They're all crazy hippies. And they're doing all sorts of crazy stuff. And they could just come up with wacky ideas that were not influenced by the marketing division. So marketing couldn't go in and say, make us this. We're just going to make this. So you've got Mark Taylor in marketing product design, designing Conan. And they're like, well, we missed Star Wars and we can't do Conan. And then you've got this guy named Roger Sweet, who's inside the other division, the blue sky part. He was trying

to come up with redesigning their big success. Their big major male action product was a product called Big Jim, which was a tall figure, like a 12 inch figure that was similar to Hasbro's Big G.I. Joe, the original GI Joe. And there's this guy named Derek Gable who, in the documentary we filmed, has this great British accent. He goes, Roger said that he looked too wimpy. Everything was too wimpy. So he bulked it up and made it massive with clay.

And he said, here's three themes. And he did a guy with a tank turret for a head, a guy with a very specifically a tank turret for a head a guy with a very just like very specifically bubba fett helmet with a point on it so it was a missile head bullet bubba fett and then he made like a furry frank frisetta-esque barbarian and he called it he-man and so we got this guy mark taylor over here he's already just sculpting and designing conan let's just tell him to burn all the things that say Conan, use the same sculpt and bulk them up and change them. And so that's why when you look at those really, really early photos of like product tests before He-Man's toy looks like He-Man, he's wearing like the Frank Frazetta horned helmet. So he looks like Conan still. Not a lot

of people, I think, realize that that is the proto thing. And he'd always, and you know, Mark Taylor claimed, well, claimed is sort of an unfair thing to say. In his story, he had been drawing this barbarian character since he was a kid and had a skull face bad guy and had a castle. And he had his whole idea. So if you take all these three or four different people's ideas that were floating around, they mash them up, they create a product line. They basically fall backwards into this success. But then in hiring this company, Filmation, to do an advertised commercial for the Castle Grayskull playset.

And one of the first female animation directors in the business for television, a woman named Gwen Wetzler, headed up a team within Filmation. And they did full animation for this thing. And it's somewhere in there, Lou Scheimer at Filmation said, well, hey, this could be a show. And then, you know, the rest is history. A special message from your family jewels

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Isaac has produced two documentaries about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and he got to know the creators pretty well, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. I asked him how Kevin and Peter first met. Turtles is the most amazing, which is why we've done 15 years of documentary films on it it's the most amazing happy accident rags to riches just two guys holding on for dear life story so i'll try to unpack it in such a way like if you go to 83 84 you've got a guy in you know middle massachusetts who is a nerd and and wants to get into Jack Kirby-esque comics. And him and some other guys are doing this little paper Xerox thing that people would do back then and go, okay, we've written our own little stories and our little sci-fi mag, and we're going to do Xerox, you know, staple together comics and hand them out,

free handout. That guy was named Peter Laird. But another guy named Kevin Eastman is taking a bus one day and finds this magazine on the floor. And he's like, well, cool. This guy draws really cool stuff who is this goes to the office they're like he's like i want to draw you know some stuff with you guys and they're like oh yeah we're pretty much not doing this anymore but you

might like this guy peter laird here's his here's his contact information you know here's his mailing address and so you know kevin finds this this comic on the bus goes to the office and asks if he can work with them. They send him the mailing address for another guy named Peter Laird. He mails him a letter. He says, hey, I really want to get into comics. I think you're into the same thing. And Peter's like, yeah, come on over. Let's hang out. Kevin walks into his apartment and there's a Jack Kirby pencil page from the comic book, The Losers on the wall. And this like blows Kevin's mind because it's his favorite comic in the world. So they immediately hit it off and like, hey, let's be buds and let's draw stuff together.

And to make an incredibly long, complicated story short, Kevin moves in with Peter and his soon to be and would be at that house wife who was going to she was going to university to become a teacher. And, you know, Peter is a fledgling illustrator for newspapers. And Kevin just moves in and they're staying in this house in Dover, New Hampshire. And one night they're joking with each other and they're drawing stuff back and forth. And they come up with this concept of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These two men sit side by side, write everything together, paste everything together, pencil everything together, paste everything together, pencil everything together, ink everything together. They pass the pages back and forth. So every single page of the comic book is a pure amalgamation of those two talents and those two ideas. That is, I think,

a very, very unique story within comic book history because you've got this zero ego scenario where the two of them literally were doing everything. So you didn't know where one guy's pencil or one guy's ink started or stopped. And so they go and they do this 40 page comic book. They've got the story of the turtles and the turtles is a pure melting pot of pop culture reference influence. You've got the turtles is origin is basically the continuation origin of Daredevil where the same canister hits Daredevil, it falls down the sewer, and it makes the turtles. Instead of stick, you've got splinter. Instead of the hand bad guys, you have foot. So you have all these things. And of course, it's very much Teen

Titans and New Mutants. And the cover is Ronin, like it's the Ronin cover. You know, it's all of this mashed up amalgamation of pop culture into one idea that is homage or tributing everything that they love about comic books. And in a way, it's actually amazing to think that the Turtles as teenagers, as characters, then become not only synonymous with pop culture, but they are of pop culture. They are born of pop culture and they consume pop culture because they're teenagers in a sewer consuming things that come down the pipes and go, wow, look at this comic book. Wow, look at this VHS tape. So their even character consumption of pop culture is within them. So it's a really amazing thing that they kind of just accidentally kind of came up with and created and all of those

ingredients and then calling them Renaissance artist names and everything like that lands this thing that then becomes infinitely malleable. And you can do anything with those characters for all of eternity. Now in the episode, we cover the creation of the toys in the cartoon show. But I wasn't able to include this story about the 1990 live action film and how it got made. It is very much based on that 1984 comic book. A lot of kids were confused because we were used to the cartoon, right? Splinter was a man who mutated into a rat. Well, actually, no. In the comic book, he was a rat who learned jujitsu from watching his sensei in his cage, which is confusing. And then he's like getting revenge for his sensei's murder so when you watch

the live action film and you go wait that was a bit different and and a lot of the people if it makes sense when you look back at it because steve barron the director and jim henson creature shop were all in the uk and the turtles hadn't hit there yet they were only handed they were only handed the comic books this is what you've got. And there was a Hollywood guy, even the birth of that movie is bizarre because there was the road manager for the comedian Gallagher ended up with the rights

to do this as a comedy. And it was going to be brutal. And it had been written by this crazy kind of Hollywood guy that has never written a thing since. So they took it to Golden Harvest, which was famous for Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Kung Fu movies, right?

This is obviously where we're taking it. So it's independent. So they're like, okay. But they brought in Steve Barron, who had directed a bunch of episodes of The Storyteller with Jim Henson. And they got Steve Barron because he had done Money for Nothing, Dire Straits,

Aha, Don't You Want Me, Baby, Billie Jean. He had done the biggest music videos, period. My childhood man. Right? And they're like, he's so good. He's different. We're going to bring him as director. And he's like, this script is garbage.

So he took the comic book, ripped it up into pages with this guy that wrote The Wonder Years, a guy named Todd Langdon. And they were in a hotel in L.A. And they just went, okay, here's the story. It's the comic book, first 10 issues of the comic book plus the one shots, this is the story. And the only thing that they really added to the story was a motivation for Shredder that he says, that Steve Barron says, comes from a story he read out of the States somewhere where there was a guy that was manipulating young children in a very Fagan, as he says, you know, very Dickens Fagan-esque way. And it's like, Oh, that's, that's interesting. So they gave the shredder a motivation to take and manipulate these young kids in the streets to, to do what he wanted them to do.

So it made this very dark, very gritty, very adult, Jim Henson creature shop independently financed out of like uh shall we say backdoor financing out of hong kong that was like not above board whatsoever to get it done because they actually lost their distribution deal in production and they had a four million dollar pay or play deal with henson and they had to find money so they made it for like 10 million dollars total when new line came in at the very end after they had to find, quote unquote, find $6 million to make the movie. And it was, yeah, there's some stories in there. So then they put it out in the first weekend, it makes $20 million. Boom. Huge. And then they're like, yeah, but there's a problem here. We need to change everything

and make it really colorful and catified in the second movie. So how did all this affect Kevin and Peter's relationship? And that's the thing, is that at the end of the day, there are these two super caring, super kind, nice people, and it didn't make them bad people. It was absolutely fascinating. But at the end of the day, when you look at managing that much business, how could it not affect two creative people and their relationship? Because again, the insanity of that fragile relationship in 84 to say these two creatives are going to write and draw and create this one piece of art as a singular piece of art. And there's these hilarious, we would pick up on these little interviews on TV where

Peter would be like, they'd be asked by reporters, what's it like when two guys from Hollywood or two guys from North Hampton get millions of dollars? And he's like, well, you know, it's the simple things in life, but we drive nice cars now. And he goes, we haven't gone Hollywood. And you can literally see Kevin on the other side of the frame going, uh, well, cause he's about to go Hollywood, right? Like Peter's state, he's 10 years older. He's very, he's very much like a Spock kind of guy. And he stays in one place in Northampton. He builds one house.

He has one kid. He stays married to one woman. He just, this is what he does. He doesn't fly anywhere. He didn't go anywhere. And Kevin's running off going, don't you want to go to the premiere in Paris? Don't you want to go here?

Don't you want to go there? And he's like, no, I'm good. And Kevin's running around buying the Batmobile from the 89 movie and buying a tank for his girlfriend and buying this building and that building and this and that then he starts the tundra publishing which which flames out and burns down horribly and costs him ungodly amounts of money but all the while being such a generous person is so generous to artists and really wanted to like yeah we're gonna do a publishing company i'm gonna pre-pay you for art you're gonna do it so he's like you know

living the high life and going hollywood and trying a lot of crazy and creative things he buys heavy metal magazine right and saves i didn't know that yeah and so heavy metal magazine from the 90s on is kevin eastman oh wow kevin's wife julrain, is on every cover. And then they did the Fact 2 movie, the second heavy metal movie. Kevin single-handedly takes the original heavy metal movie and pulls all those music rights and makes it work for home video because it was a mess. Right? Because you couldn't have home video with all those amazing songs. So he gets that out to the world. He keeps that thing alive all the way into the well into the 2000s and eventually sells it.

And now it's unfortunately demising, but that's not his fault. And so he did all that stuff. And at some point along the line, if you look at the progression of the Turtles, they stopped doing comics together. They like after about issue 10 or 12, they really couldn't,

they had to focus on business. And then that drives them apart. As we heard in the episode, the tension between them came to a breaking point with the live action TV show that was produced by Saban. Kevin eventually sold his half of the stakes to Peter and Peter sold the whole franchise to Viacom. So for 20 plus years, they really didn't see each other. They spoke a little bit off and on. And then in 2015,

we brought them both. They had done a signing together the day before at the anniversary celebration at Rochester at the Comic-Con where they, or the little convention where they had launched the Turtle Book. And they'd done a signing together for the first time in like 20 years. And it was five years into us working with them. And we said, Hey, you know, we're really close to Dover, New Hampshire. Why don't we go, why don't we go head over to where you guys invented the turtles in 84? And Peter was the one who kind of said that day, you know what, we could, we could probably go do that. And, and the next day, Kevin and Peter and me and Randall and Mark, my business partners and Kevin's wife and Peter's daughter all went over to this empty

lot where this house was in Dover, New Hampshire. And I said, listen, we had already delivered our first documentary to Paramount. It was going through QC and we couldn't really change anything. But I said, here, I'm going to put a mic on you. Just go and walk on the lawn and say whatever you want. And they walked around for like an hour and a half. And it was amazing. It was like they reminisced about everything and everything that was this and that we created this and this is what we did together. And they had this really kind of coming together moment. So that's why we had to do a second documentary, which is eventually coming out. That is it for this week's bonus episode of Imaginary Worlds.

We'll be back with regular episodes next week.