Pixel Dan: I’m obsessed with the history of how toys are made—especially the original Playmates TMNT line. Today, thanks to my friends at Definitive Films (the team behind Turtle Power: The Definitive History of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), we’re diving into newly unearthed interview footage with Steve Varner of Varner Studios—the prototyping house behind classic TMNT, Toxic Crusaders, Star Trek, WildC.A.T.s, and more.
Steve opens boxes of prototypes from the late ’80s/early ’90s and walks through the real production pipeline: clay originals → silicone molds → wax masters → hard copy masters, plus the paint master used to communicate paint masks to factories. You’ll hear how Varner’s team often made at least two hard copies: one unpainted for tooling and one painted to guide deco—aka “soup to nuts.” We also glimpse jaw-dropping unreleased pieces—including the long-whispered Toxic Crusaders “Snail Man”—and a wild Jim Lee TMNT crossover concept tied to Playmates’ licenses of both TMNT and Jim Lee’s characters at the time.
If you love production-level details (shrink during casting, parting lines, articulation decisions made after a one-piece sculpt, and how wax/urethane hard copies traveled to the factory for steel tooling), this is candy. If you love lost toys that never hit shelves, it’s a feast.
⚠️ Good news: Definitive Films is offering a new documentary cut packed with hours of never-before-seen TMNT archive footage—and Steve Varner is auctioning select prototypes shown here. Links are in the description. If you went to the theatrical re-release of the 1990 film, that unreleased opening reel you saw? Yep—Definitive Films.
