Eastman to the cities and towns here in Pioneer Valley have been generous. That particular request, one of hundreds the cartoonists have received since their success, was not granted. Laird for $6 million to set up a trust to support art and music programs at Northampton's schools. Musante Jr., who has seen state aid to the city drop for three straight years. "We're hurting like every other Massachusetts community," said Mayor David B. In a time of local budget difficulties, the Turtles and their creators, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, have also been a source of economic salvation for the area. The invasion of the highly commercial Turtles has come as a shock to some, and a delight to others. Once a working-class mill town, many residents refer to Northampton as "little San Francisco" because of its eclectic mix of artists, writers, liberal-minded academicians, shopkeepers, executives and old-line Yankees. Sales hit $1 billion last year.įor Northampton, a city of about 30,000 people in central Massachusetts, being the birthplace of Turtlemania fits somewhere between its claims to fame as home of President Calvin Coolidge and a large annual homosexual-rights parade. The Turtles, and related paraphernalia like Pizza Thrower tanks and Flushomatic torture chambers, are now the nation's top-selling toys. Named for Renaissance artists, the slime-green warriors have gone international with astounding success. And, dudes, the rest has been Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtle history.Īs the story goes, the Turtles were mutated to human-size by contaminated sewer ooze, then trained as Ninja warriors by a similarly afflicted rat with an Asian background. There was a time when talk about sewers in this New England city drew little more than a sniff from buttoned-down residents.īut eight years ago, all that began to change.įour crime-fighting turtles, armed with karate chops, wacky weapons and adolescent wisecracks crawled from the storm drains into comic books aided by two local cartoonists.
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