4 out of 5

I own (or have owned) a few books that examine TMNT’s media contributions outside of comics. They’re fun, but they often go subjectively “wrong” by trying to be too definitive. Or, for a life-long fan like m’self (who was perhaps alive when Turtles first launched…), the book will be pitched a little too shallowly, making it moreso nostalgia bait.

Runner of a Ninja Turtles news site that – via Internet Archive – looks to have gone defunct in either 2018 or 2023, Matt MacNabb pairs with collector Robert Barbieri to not give us something definitive via this slim Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Collectibles book, while also aiming it pretty squarely toward the sufficiently nerdy; i.e.: a good compromise.

Amberley Books and whoever edited this provide an effective printing, somewhat charming with its occasional flubs: misaligned text; photos printed with duplicated captions or captions that mis-refer to something; some odd spacing choices. More importantly, the text is bright and the font readable; the spine is stable but easy to spread; and the full color photos (generally three or four to a 9″ x 6″ page) are well detailed. MacNabb does some high level history, and divvies up the toys and knick-knacks as the pre-cartoon stuff, the cartoon stuff, the movies, the music tour, the modern stuff (which was 2017 for this book), and the video games. The latter two sections get very short shrift, but that’s okay – MacNabb is pointed at his nerds, who are more interested in the NES and Gameboy TMNT games than, say, the PS2 / PS3 ones; and certainly a rundown of the music tour VHSes is more worthwhile than adding pages for Nick-era TMNT stuff, which tended towards retro retreads anyway.

The biggest sections are for the pre- and post-cartoon toys; these are a lot of fun, and find a good balance between due diligence and finding some rarities to show off. (Completists can use a kinda sorta checklist in the back, but I feel like that’s more to see if you can spot your toys; it wouldn’t work very well as an actual collectors list…)

I do think the movie section could’ve been built out more, but that’s balanced out by including a ton of the random stuff – the dollar store finds; the bookbags. I itched to know artist credits on occasion for those kinda items, but that’s going pretty deep. For the price point, and the “purpose” of this book as more of a celebration of collecting TMNT than anything else, it hits right.