It was a quiet day in 1984 in Dover County, New Hampshire, but it was not meant to be, at least not for (Kevin Eastman) and (Peter Laird). Not only did Kevin doodle a sketch at an impromptu humor sketch event, but the duo was so pleased with the image that they kept it and refined it, and this slightly comical image was the prototype for what would later become known as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
That year, Eastman was 22 and Laird was 30. At that time, they absolutely could not imagine that the small monsters written by the two of them would become popular all over the world in the future, and they could not imagine that the God Turtle would go through a big ups and downs, and they could not imagine that the two of them, who accompanied the God Turtle along its bumpy path, would go their separate ways because of the different concepts in the future.
Fate is so tricky.
On May 30, 1962, Kevin Eastman was born in Springvale, Maine, in the northeastern U.S. Eastman's high school years were spent at the local middle school, Westbrook High School, in Westbrook, Maine, when he and his classmate and close friend Steve Lavigne became obsessed with comics, and the two of them reserved their after-school time for comics. At first they just read and shared their newly purchased comics, then they started to try their hand at drawing, and the duo began to publish their own comic books as a goal in life. The popularity of the mutant superhero genre in American comics at the time had a profound impact on the duo's future comic book creations. Kevin Eastman Steve Lavigne After his high school years ended Eastman had to start working at a restaurant. Instead of giving up on his dream of creating comics, Eastman became even more determined and worked hard at it. Eastman worked at the restaurant during the day and created comics at night, and when he finished a story, he began to look for people among the restaurant's customers who were willing to pay money to help him realize his dream. Whether or not Eastman's harassment of the diners caused dissatisfaction among the restaurant's owners, only Eastman and the owners themselves know for sure. What we do know, however, is that Eastman's simple and beautiful plan didn't work out, and the diners just hurriedly filled up their stomachs and then left, with no one interested in his graffiti or willing to pay for Eastman's graffiti. His dream of becoming a cartoonist was rock solid.
Things took a turn for the worse in 1983, when a girl broke Eastman's embarrassment, but this was not the beginning of a beautiful love story. 21-year-old Eastman was still working as usual, waiting for a chance to find customers interested in his cartoons after work, when a new girl came to the store, and soon the two of them got acquainted, and Eastman realized that she had attended the University of Massachusetts, and the girl knew that Eastman had a near-obsession with cartooning. Eastman learns that she attended the University of Massachusetts, and the girl learns that Eastman has an almost fanatical interest in comics. Soon the two left the restaurant, Eastman followed the girl to Hampden, Massachusetts, and through her introduction, a local underground newspaper was willing to publish Eastman's cartoons, Eastman began to work in this newspaper, where he also met a person who influenced his life.
Born on January 27, 1954 in North Adam, Massachusetts, Pete Laird was a poor cartoonist, and at the end of 1983, at the age of 29, Laird came to the Hamptons to start illustrating for the newspaper, earning a low fee of only $10 for a single illustration, which was obviously not enough to sustain his daily life, so Laird also worked part-time for magazines such as The Prophet. Laird also illustrated for magazines such as The Prophet on a part-time basis to make ends meet. The two shared a common love of cartooning, and they both made a career out of it. Soon Eastman and Laird became acquainted, and soon the two began co-writing short stories that were serialized in the newspaper. Pete Laird at New York Comic-Con '08 In 1984, the two were discussing a new short story in Dover County, New Hampshire, when the discussion serendipitously turned into an impromptu humor sketching session, where they began to doodle twisted and grotesque images on paper, then laughed at the freshly baked monsters, and then scribbled on their paper again, soaking in the serendipitous relaxation of the moment. The two of them were so absorbed in this accidental relaxation that they forgot about the hardships of life for the moment. When Eastman doodled a standing turtle with an eye patch, the two felt that the image was very good, and then they refined the prototype, and soon finalized the final image, which was the original look of the famous "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles".
The duo was so excited by the chance doodle that they felt more people should see the character, so they began to give the image some scattered and disjointed short stories, and the comic was completed shortly thereafter. The plot and worldview of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles still didn't escape mimicking the mainstream comic book elements of the time; in the early 1980s, Marvel Comics' demons and New Mutants dominated the comic book landscape, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was dominated by both of those elements, which would later become the main tone of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In May of that year, Laird and Eastman began to raise money in various ways, but the duo's piecemeal scraping together of money was still more than the $1,000 that Eastman had raised from his uncle Quentin in the form of a loan. After a series of preparations, the duo premiered the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book at a local comic book convention held at the Sheraton Hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, under the byline Mirage Studios. The first volume of the first Turtles manga volume one of the first Turtles manga begins with the Purple Dragon Gang going to war "It was a studio, but in reality, it was just a kitchen table and a lap top for crouching." Whenever I recall the scene, Eastman will always unconsciously say this sentence, which can be seen at that time how the life of the two people are in dire straits. Limited by funds, the comic was black and white and printed on cheap newsprint. Only 3,000 copies were printed for the first run, but they were quite substantial: 40 pages in black and white was not only a lot of pages, it was also several sizes larger than the mainstream comic books of the time. It's fair to say that the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book was quite generous, and it wasn't easy to debut 3,000 copies of such a substantial comic book. The duo also paid for an ad in Comic Buyer's Guide #545, a pamphlet distributed at Comic-Con, a move that gave the fledgling Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mirage Studios some visibility at Comic-Con.
At the end of Comic-Con, the duo had made a lot of money. Although the income from the 3,000 comics was only enough for them to travel home and a small amount of living expenses, and even the $1,000 they borrowed couldn't be repaid, the duo had broadened their horizons and learned about marketing, and the trip had changed their previous thinking of "just drawing good comics". After Comic-Con, the duo went back to drawing for the local third-rate underground tabloid, but at night, they began working on a follow-up story to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Laird's years of experience in the media and the Comic-Con experience led to a greater investment in advertising, one of the factors essential to the Turtles' success. In the days that followed, Laird was very clever in producing a four-page informational soft advertisement, which made no mention of the quality of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic itself, and was silent on the author's name, but provided a summary of the story with an added description of the story, along with some small information on the characters and some beautiful artwork, leaving only the corner of the last page with the following words "Produced by Mirage Studios" in large letters in the corner of the last page. Laird placed four pages of soft ads in all major media outlets, and some media-rich ads ran on TV and radio, and even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles profile-style ads appeared in the Associated Press and United Press International, which made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame. Thanks to Laird's advertising and marketing strategy, the duo received orders totaling five times the number of the first print run when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles followup comic was completed, a 15,000-copy order that made the duo a fortune.
Laird remembers the scene with a mysterious happiness still on his chubby face, "Basically, we each got $2,000 from the net profits, which gave us plenty of time and energy to work on the comics: it was enough money to pay the bills, and it also allowed us to live a life where we could buy macaroni, cheese, and pencils. life." Of course, it's even better news for Eastman, because the net profit mentioned here doesn't include the thousand dollars or so that Eastman paid back with interest to the man who picked up his uncle in the first place. At this point, the relationship between the two men, who had just gotten a taste of the Turtles, was simple and solid, and the two men were on their way to becoming professional cartoonists. They began publishing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic books under the Mirage Studios name, releasing bimonthly issues, but the commercialization of Mirage Studios increased the workload significantly, and the two were already too busy. As a result, Eastman invited high school friend and longtime friend Lavigne to join Mirage Studios in 1984, and the latter gladly accepted the invitation, and the three began working together on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series of comic book stories. The comic books were still being published at their original size until October 1985 with issue #5, when they began to revert to the mainstream comic book sizes of the time. At the same time Eastman and Laird hired Ryan Brown to join the studio as a comic book assistant, and it was from this issue that Mirage Studios redefined the comic book color scheme, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles colors were revamped to be more in line with the tastes of readers at the time. A year later, Jim Lawson, and Michael Dooney joined Mirage Studios. These six men were responsible for the entire workload of Mirage Studios, and by this time the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had already formed a popular trend and Turtle culture.
Beginning in 1987 through 1989 for the first volume, the second volume, rebooted and creatively designed by Murphy, ran from January 2004 through May 2010.The Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book was released in 1987, co-penned by the two founders, Lavigne, Brown, and Lawson. The two-volume, 70-book Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story fills in the blank time points in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story drawn by Eastman and Laird, while also eliminating the divergences in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story, which are interdependent and complementary. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stories were bimonthly, as were the Legend of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stories, and the two were interspersed with each other in empty monthly releases, which allowed Mirage Studios to have a comic book released every month, during which time the first volume of the story was completed and the drawing of the second volume proceeded to be released. Of course, due to the popularity of the Turtles, their work is not only limited to drawing comics, in addition to comic book publishing, toy design, peripheral product licensing and manufacturing, and even the construction of the factory in Florence, Massachusetts, etc. are their work, and more and more people joined them, but also some of the people left halfway through the process, it is necessary to mention that, the later to join the Murphy (Murphy) until 2007 still held the position of creative director of Mirage Studios until 2007.
Perhaps you're surprised to learn that building a factory is a part of a comic book studio's job description, but don't be. We've only told you about the state of Mirage Studios, and we haven't said a word about the expansion of the business, which is not surprising when you get right down to it. THE LEGEND OF THE TURTLES FIRST COVER The cover of the last Legend of the Turtles comic takes us back to the winter of 1986, when Turtles branding agent Mark Freedman took off his thick scarf and knocked on the door of Eastman and Laird's room, and Freedman's presence opened up another way for Mirage Studios to make a fortune. They commissioned Dark Horse Miniatures to design models of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for them, and soon invested in a factory specializing in the production of the models. The models were used as giveaways for an issue of the magazine that was elevated to a special collector's edition, but also for a book they commissioned called Palladium Books (Pallas, Pallas, daughter of the god of the Libyan Trinity, Greek goddess of wisdom, was stabbed to death by Athena during a war game with her and was renamed Pallas Athena in her honor). Athena.) props in a role-playing tabletop game designed by the company. The Turtles cover, commissioned by the duo from Pallas Book, a well-known tabletop game design company at the time, was far from enough; the profit-minded Friedman and Laird and Eastman, who had been corrupted from a life of poverty by the unlimited "money" brought by the Turtles' sudden popularity, had even greater ambitions.In January 1987, the trio visited the California-based Turtle Factory, which had been the site of the first Turtle game in the world. In January 1987, the trio visited Playmates Toys Inc. in California and entered into a partnership agreement with Playmates Toys Inc. to begin preparations for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' foray into digital animation and modeling toys. Soon the preparations were complete and they found the professionals they needed to take Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the toy and animation industry.
A few months later, the creative team at Playmates Toys Limited, represented by Jerry Sachs, Murakami-Wolf-Swenson Film Productions, represented by animators Fred Wolf and Karl Aaronian, and several A marketing group specializing in the digital marketplace was formed with veteran advertisers from leading agencies and Bill Carlson, vice president of Playmates Toys. Aronian soon brought in several designers to begin packaging the Turtles, using the worldview and story of the first volume of the manga as the basis for a complete new worldview, while also amplifying the humor elements of the manga, which were established at this time to set the stage for the future, as well as the theme and tone, which is one of the elements of the success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. Playmates Toys also contacted the writers at MWS Animation and asked them to come up with some funny battle slogans, which later became the classic slogans in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, such as "Heroes in a Half Shell" and "Turtle Power! （Turtle Power!" were born at this time. The anime and toys were produced at the same time, and the rights to peripheral products such as mugs and T-shirts began to be sold in large quantities, with Turtle merchandise covering every aspect of people's lives in the areas of daily necessities, snacks, stationery, toys, and so on, with the aim of selling Turtle-themed merchandise to a group of new fans consolidated by the manga's popularity and the anime's success. However, the animated miniseries was a huge disappointment, both in terms of ratings and market, and the response was not good. At this point, the three of them were at an impasse, not to continue to spend the previous investment will be a waste of money, a large amount of money into the but little effect, but also must continue to spend money to maintain the daily operation, on the other hand, face to face to buy the Turtles merchandise rights of the guys also began to frequent door to door. In the end, the three agree on one thing: the money can't be wasted.
The miniseries began to be shown over and over again on TV, with brainwashing reruns until the end of the third run, when there was some good news in the marketplace, with a slight increase in sales, and consumers beginning to notice Turtles-themed merchandise. Even more fortunately, because of the small fluctuations in the market caused by the animation, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" attracted the attention of venture capitalists. Soon the project team received a venture capital investment, which they used to continue producing the Turtles miniseries. The difference was that with sufficient funding, the quality of the animation took a qualitative leap, with the length of the animation increasing and the quality of the artwork improving, which turned it from a miniseries into an animated drama series. This time they will look to liberalize, with the money, the financial atmosphere is also thick, they and Columbia Broadcasting System (Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS) reached a cooperation, in the CBS radio and television network to broadcast the new production of the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" animation, the animation quickly in the United States, the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" in the true sense of the first climax is at this time!
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Turtles quickly became a frenzy, selling Turtle-themed merchandise such as picture boards, breakfast cereals, video games, stationery, sheets and towels, cameras, and so on. 1990 saw the end of the indie revolution and a steady rise in independent film. On March 30, 1990, the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film was released, grossing over $200 million at the box office worldwide, making it one of the most successful independent films of the year.
The quality of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1990 live-action feature film has to be mentioned, the film also spawned three works: with Saban Entertainment (Saban Entertainment) called the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles next mutation (Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation) series of feature film series on September 12, 1997 in the Television Network. Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation even featured a fifth Goddess Turtle, Venus De Milo, who was axed after only one season due to poor ratings caused by shoddy production, and the fact that Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation became the last of its kind was like the horrible curse of the Turtles: The Next Mutation franchise, which made later generations The fact that "The Next Mutation" became the last of its kind was like a horrible curse that "no Turtles feature film can survive", making it the only officially licensed Turtles feature film. Two other films were released in succession, making the three live-action feature films the Turtles movie trilogy.
After completing the first order, Eastman and Laird's happy and simple professional comic book career didn't last long after they each received $2,000. In 1986, Mirage Studios' comic book business was on the right track, with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Legend of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles released in interspersed filler months, and with the rights to the franchises being purchased by a variety of merchandise dealers one after the other, the studio was steadily making great strides forward with the Turtles' popularity, but the studio's success was not as successful as it could have been. The studio was steadily making strides forward with the popularity of the Turtles, but Eastman and Laird still felt it was too slow. This led to a business partnership with agent Friedman to enter the digital industry, as well as collaborations with modelers, tabletop game design companies, and others. By this point, the duo became too busy with business to put the pencils in their hands - as the Turtles became a huge hit and attracted many other media and authors, Eastman and Laird, in an effort to make the Turtles more famous and internationalize and diversify them, began to approach authors and invite them to build their own Turtles universes, and even later to nakedly They even went so far as to sell the rights to the manga, a move that sent chills down the spines of some of the old fans. However, these were only a very small portion of the fans, with the anime and the two manga, there were a large number of new fans joining every moment, so Eastman and Laird didn't care about that at all, at this point the duo only cared about how to maximize the Turtles brand to cash in, in other words, they only cared about how to be able to make more money. Not only did the money make them lose their way, but it also made the Turtles lose their way, with crises lurking on all sides, ready to strike the lost Turtles at any moment.
During that time, they seldom participated in the real creation of the Turtles, and instead allowed the writers of those comic book companies who had purchased the rights to mess up the Turtles' world that had already been constructed. As a result, the worldview and story of the Turtles series began to be confused, with various versions of the stories and plots as well as the characters' stances and personalities contradicting each other, and the Turtles from various parallel universes taking the stage at the same time. To add insult to injury, the Turtles do not have an official standard storyline as a direct result of Eastman and Laird abandoning the Turtles manga. What's worse, without the creative input of the two founders, the official Mirage Studios comics are ridiculously inspired by the various licensed Turtles comics, rewriting some of the best stories for publication, which not only confuses the Turtles, but the official Turtles as well. At the same time, Mirage Studios didn't particularly recognize which version was the officially sanctioned one, and this kind of blooming was fatal to a comic series that had come a long way from scratch.
In 2001, Eastman began releasing his own version of the Turtles: the IDW version, and the rivalry continued for eight years; on March 1, 2008, Laird bought out Eastman's remaining interest in the series, and the two went their separate ways as Eastman officially retired from Phantom Studios. Laird recalled the experience by telling the press, "He [Eastman] was just too tired and needed a break." Interestingly, when asked about this past, in 2002 Eastman told the public that as early as 1993, the two were living in different places, with Eastman moving to California and Laird living in Massachusetts, which shows that the differences between the two had been a long time coming, and it was only in the Turtles decline that it was fueled before it finally erupted. Although the two men went their separate ways, they had a chance to reunite and work together again, or more specifically, a chance to go back to the days when they were working on Turtles comics, with no business, no money, no profit, and just two comic book enthusiasts with pencils in their hands that never stopped working: ironically, it was still the Turtles they were writing that brought the two men back together. 2009 In 2009, Eastman and Laird were invited to work as writers and consultants on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Forever, a long overdue and emotional endeavor that prompted the sob storyline of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Forever to feature the duo's sob stories.
At the end of the movie, which shows the duo working as they struggle to finish the first volume of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, the two stop what they're doing and decide to eat first, with this simple, but darkly meaningful line of dialog in the segment devised by Eastman: "I really hope they sell." At the end of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Forever", this line designed by Eastman hides deep meaning and emotion In 2003, the high-quality animation of the 03 version of the Turtles injected a shot in the arm to the dying Turtles who had been dormant for many years, and the rights were purchased by the Nickelodeon Cable Channel in 2009 and released the same animation in 2012, which is the 2012 version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which is still unfinished, with a good quality and full CG production.
Nickelodeon and partner company Paramount Pictures also came up with plans for a CGI-animated (live-action film with computer-generated animation) movie of the same name, and the animation and movie even had co-creators Eastman and Laird as consultants, but the movie was delayed from coming out in May 2014 due to script and other issues. Here's Mickey always happy to tease idle Raphael after being punched back and escaped from prison William Fichtner will play Schraeder Turtles movie set at the same time hold the rights to the Turtles Nickelodeon cable channel has also entered into a partnership with Blizzard Activision to launch the 2012 version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animation-based trilogy series of games, the game's first installment of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Breaking the Shadow of the Turtles was released in July 2013, and the next two are in the works. This time the game is quite high quality Turtles from scratch, experienced a big hit after the sudden decline, decline after the rebound, rebound again into the doldrums, and now the dawn of the rise once again shine. Fortunately, after two big ups and downs as well as the two co-founders of the Turtles and not be knocked down, they will be more determined to continue to move forward, this time there is a good owner of the Turtles animation, film, game triple play is about to debut, which may be the Turtles with the momentum of the Turtles will rise again.
Conclusion As Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Forever tells us, without the original Turtles in their infancy, there would be no Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series at all, however, Eastman and Laird's ambitions were just too great, just like Slade in the animated movie, who was blinded by his desires. The duo were later pitted against each other by their different business philosophies that were commercialized, and eventually went on a path of breakup. The Turtles suddenly and rapidly declined after quickly taking over the heyday of the multifaceted field, and through the animation and movie, the Turtles who fell into the doldrums have now risen again and are headed for yet another peak. At the end of the movie, we are presented with the Turtles' origins in their purest, and best, form, as two young men revel in their Turtles' image and story, but with a hint of anticipation and trepidation for a future full of variables and unknowns, but more than that, they are confused and unsettled: "Hey, what do you say we eat and then come back to work?" "Sounds good." "Pizza?" "Yeah, pizza." "I really hope they sell." "Yeah, I hope so too." It was impossible to turn back the clock, but at least, the turtle would still be determined to keep moving forward.
