My favourite series of action figures when I was a kid… was Real Ghostbusters. But not far behind were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! The first set was released in 1987 and was a huge part of my childhood, as each birthday and Christmas🌟 would reveal a few new members of the line-up, straight from the demented mind of Laird and Eastman, or from whatever brainstorming session the marketing people at Playmates had that year. Usually, there would b🍒e a few variations of the Ninja Turtles themselves, occupying a new profession or with new weapons. Those were usually all right, if a little lacking in imagination.

You would also have the secondary characters, pulled straight from the TV show, as well as brand new creations that never appeared anywhere else in the franchise. That’s when things would s⛄ometimes get weird. Those brand new mutants would often follow a simple formula: take an animal that would look funny or cool if it was standing up like a human, and then give them an occupation that fits the first stereotype that comes to mind. So for example, the only mutant Kangaroo to appear was also outfitted with your typical Crocodile Dundee uniform. That may sound like an extremely lazy idea, and you would be right, but somehow it did not make this list!

We went through the entire Playmates toys ser𒅌ies, wh🐻ich somehow lasted until 1997, to pick the best action figures ever released, as well as the very worst ideas to ever make it to toy stores’ shelves. Despite their popularity, not every TMNT action figure was a winner, and it’s worth taking a trip down memory lane just to take see the real stinkers.

25 LAME: Pizzaface ไ 🍌

Pizzaface was, simply put, a dirty, disg✱usting pizza chef. The toy was created to be as gross as possible, with stain♊s all over, and a removable peg leg that was actually an oversized pizza cutter stuck into a pizza box.

His hand was shaped so that he could hold an axe, but he could also hold his own leg.

If he did, he would then fall over because of the lack of balance. Not the best of concepts! Pizzaface was supposed to be Shredder’s private chef, which makes me think that🎃 the quality of the food in the Technodrome cafeteria wasn’t that great.

24 LAME: Midshipma🦩n Mike

Straight out of a Village People video was Midshipman Mike, a useless variation of the Ninja Turtle’s party animal. This was a r🉐otten idea for two main reasons. The first one was that Mike is already a turtle, which is pretty low on the list of animals that need a boat to get on the water. The second is that no one ever looked menacing dressed like that unless your name is Popeye. Even then, the real sailor man needed some performance-enhancing substances to get the job done.

23 💮 AWESOME: Usagi Yojimbo

The coolness factor of this action figure was twofold. First of all, it’s a bunny that’s also a samurai, and that’s like the greatest combination ✱of words you can come up with for a kid. Second, Usagi’s appearance and storyline in the cartoon was so awesome that you couldn’t wait to get the action figure of such a rad character. The character was actually a crossover, since Usagi Yojimbo had his own comic series at the time, and had been a pretty cool character on his own for a while.

22 ♔ LAME: Tattoo ♚

Tattoo’s name at least fitted the gimmick, since this sumo was packaged with a sheet ꦚof stickers which you could stick wherever you wanted on the action figure to make it live up ꦛto its name.

The problem? Those stickers didn’t not really hold up for all that long.

W🤡ithin a few weeks, you were left with a very plain, untattooed sumo wrestler. At that point, the figure lost the one cool thing it had going for it, and forever stayed at the bottom of the toy box.

21 AWESOME: Meta🅘lhead

I take it back! “Samurai Bunny” might be cool, but “Robot Ninja Turtle” is even better. That guy was unbeatable when 𓆉I would organize my action figures into a wrestling promotion. Not only that, but he was also a tough boss characters in the arcade games, so that was a truly spectacular character. It was like a cross between The Terminator and TMNT, so it was like the ultimate fantasy for a child growing up in the early 90s. Had it been equipped with a Super Soaker, it would have been the perfect toy of the era.

20 👍 LAME: Halfcourt ꧅

Halfcourt is the perfect illustration of what I was talking about in the introduction: Take a funny-looking animal, put it on two legs, and think of the laziest trope you ass🍬ociate with it. In this case, we had a giraffe, and as we all know, giraffes are tall! That’s how we ended up with Halfcourt, the basketball playing mutant. That’s cool in theory, I guess, but TMNT was supposed to be about mutants fighting it out for the safety of our world. Whose side is that giraffe on? This feels like an idea that was never truly finished.

19 ꦆ LAME: Raph The Magnificent

Here we have a variant of Raphael which happens to be dressed like a magician. Not like a D&D🔜-style wizard, whi𝓀ch would at least have been a little intimidating, just a regular, birthday party magician.

When Raphael really wants to take it to the Foot Clan, he puts on a top hat, draws on a moustache and practices juggling.

I’🃏m glad Raphael has hobbies, but so do I, and you won’t see me go challenge an evil inter-dimensional criminal mastermind dresse🍨d like a bowling player.

18 AWESOME: Triceꩵraton

That guy was so goddamn cool. He was a dinosaur before Jurassic Park came around and made them the hottest thing around. Triceraton was a trailblazer. He was a bright orange triceratops built like a superhero and armed to the teeth like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando. The shiny armor was just icing on the cake. It didn’t cover anything except for his chest, but Triceraton was so tough that he di♛d not mind bullets. The torn pants made him look grungy, which was very trendy at the time. Great design all around, superb action figure.

17 🏅 LAME: Toon Bu꧃rne

When I was a kid, looking to escape into a strange new world using nothing but action figures and my own imagination, all I really wanted to be was an overweight journalist eating a sandwich. When you have your toys and you imagine bringing down an intergalactic syndicate, you bring along your Ni🅷nja Turtles, an intimidating Rhinoceros Man, some dude made out of solid rock, and the newscaster stuffing his face in a too-tight shirt. Toon Burne was a disappointment to any kid who ever received it.

16 AWESOME: Movie Star Sub Series 🀅

After a few years of the Turtles dominating the airwaves with their cartoon series, it was time to conquer movie theaters. Not one to miss such an occasion, Playmat🅰es Toys created a new line-up which looked closer to the animatronic꧅ costumes featured in the film.

The result was picture perfect.

They 💖appeared exactly as they did on the silver screen, and that was enough to make them my favourites from the moment I got one. All that was missing was the official TMNT garbage truck so I could re-enact the movie’s surprisingly dark end🥀ing.