I wanted to share my very interesting find with you, of course I needed more info on the items so I did some research and as I like to call it "fell down a rabbit hole". I went to a goodwill out of my town today with a friend and found this whole bag of vintage teenage mutant ninja turtles plushies. They are marked ace novelty co. and marked 1989 (so these are real vintage). I was intrigued by them cause they are new in package, meaning that these are in the very same bag they would have been shipped in back in 1989 and no one has opened them. So of course I wanted to know more about ace and here is what I found online.
"Ace Novelty has been in business for over forty years. Ace was located in Seattle, Washington from 1951 to 1982 when they moved to Bellevue, Washington. On October 3, 1997 Ace Novelty moved to Woodinville, Washington. In June of 1996 Ace Novelty was purchased by Play By Play Toys and Novelties of San Antonio, Texas. Offices and warehouse facilities are also located in Chicago, Illinois, Los Angeles, California, Miami, Florida, New York, Spain, Hong Hong and Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. The Promotional Products and Premium Programs Division for the company are done through the Ace Novelty office located in Woodinville, Washington.
(Special thanks to Wakkas Warner for providing the info!)
Boy, just like the company itself, Ace Novelties plushies are "all over the place". These plushies are not very high quality for the most part, being used primarily as amusement park prizes and such. Their stuffing ranges from a "dryer lint" type stuffing in the smaller plush to styrafoam pellets in the larger ones. There are even several different kinds of the same size plushies that were made in the same year!"
The page I got this info from was about animaniacs toys but hadn't been updated since 2000 (wow that is crazy, someone wrote the blog above in 2000 and never looked back). It seems that Ace got the manufacturing rights to make these toys in the likeness of popular characters like warner bros who own looney tunes so back in the late 80s they got the rights to the ninja turtles. Now a days I don't think this is even possible with all the copy right infringements that happen but maybe bigger companies can still do that? Seems to me Ace Novelty Co. was/is a provider of carnival/festival toys. So basically these are the prizes you would win when you pay $25 at one of those fair games that you already paid $20 to get into and $30 to eat and I better digress here. They did move into a brief time in the 90s were they made actual toys that were in stores but as it always does that ended and they went back to what they knew best, toy prizes. Ace is still in business today you can buy their carnival prizes on their website, ebay and amazon. Of course it is just the little plastic breaks easy things but atleast they are still around.
I know this post wasn't really about the ninja turtles plushies I bought but thought this was a pretty neat find in a random goodwill on the east side of the us, in a relatively small town. These guys have been kept in their bag for 30 years! No one ever wanted to open them, poor dudes. I don't think I even mentioned that I only paid 2.99 for the whole bag!! That means I paid .25 a piece for 12 vintage turtles and some history. I am going to sell these guys at some point but now I just need to figure out what to do I really want to sell them all together in their bag but people may not be interested. We shall see, thanks for hanging in and hope you enjoyed this show and tell/history lesson...
