You can sort of grasp just how popular the Ninja Turtles were for the tail end of the 1980’s and the first half of the 1990’s, just by looking at all the advertising featuring them… Even when it wasn’t supposed to be about them. Here’s another classic Comic Ad, this time with the X-Men trying to flaunt their superiority to the TMNT. This ad shows off what is supposed to be some cool kid (complete with slicked back hair, jean jacket and shades), basically saying he’s too cool for the Ninja Turtles because he’s into the X-Men.
Poe Ghostal (of PoeGhostal.com!) sent this one in and confirms that obviously the advertising worked on at least one kid. He said that this was the ad that got him reading X-Men (and buying the ToyBiz figures) instead of watching Ninja Turtles. Powerful stuff indeed.
I don’t recall the exact date or anything where I stopped caring about the TMNT as much, but I did collect these X-Men cards for a while. I used to love to get them and see what each characters powers were, their strength levels and such. Plus they usually had good bios, information and quick summaries. They were pretty good cards and definitely helped me maintain interest in the Marvel Mutants.
The Ninja Turtles needed trading cards. Sure they had the original ones that followed a couple of seasons of episodes, but cards like these ones for the X-Men might would have helped them compete. Then again, it’s the X-Men who are trying to convince people to like them over the Turtles, so maybe the TMNT didn’t need new cards to compete anyway.
