Gogo dodo plush1/14/2024 I was sorting through it the other day and realized that this stuff is crazy enough that people might get a kick out of it. I even had a Baby Turtle birthday cake in 1986įor all of this stuff, I produced material. I even offered a mail-order pen and pencil deal for a couple of years, but if you sent Baby Turtle money, good luck in ever actually seeing your writing utensil set. Company came to own printing services, hotels, restaurants, an airline, office complexes, a travel agency, a gas station brand, and even a cable-based news operation called Channel 3, which covered the entire state of Wisconsin, allowing me to produce regular weather forecasts under that moniker. Simultaneously, I also started my own fantasy corporation called the Baby Turtle Company, which served as the umbrella organization for any kind of pretend businesses I wanted to run. The pictures soon evolved into a personal comic strip, which I officially began in 1982 to share with friends and family, and which grew and evolved as the ’80s progressed. I was a precocious child for whom such a character worked well. Baby Turtle was a mythological jack of all trades. He could take on even the bawdiest of my family’s fart-joke humor while also being a pretend business tycoon. The voice I gave him was essentially Frank Welker’s “bubble voice” (later epitomized by Gogo Dodo from Tiny Toons). Baby Turtle was funny in a sort of obnoxious and prankish way. He may have loosely represented me, but in fact I gave him a persona quite different from my own. The turtle was instantly my favorite stuffed toy, and because I was a creative tyke, I began drawing pictures of him and gave him his own personality. He lives in storage and only comes out for photo shoots. Today, the original Baby Turtle toy still exists, though it’s a bit worse for wear. I remember that I ordered the silver-dollar pancakes, which were small and tasty, and the new plush turtle sat on the table and watched me eat them all.įorty years later, he’s considerably worse for wear: There on the shelf in the restaurant gift shop, sitting all alone, was this fuzzy, green and yellow, plush turtle with a silly grin on its face. Pancake, which still exists and operates – essentially unchanged – to this very day. It all began in the summer of 1979, when, at the age of five, I was on vacation in the Wisconsin Dells with my mother. Or, perhaps I should’ve read the original tags, because Dakin’s name for this particular model was actually Tammy the Turtle*, although I wouldn’t learn that information until forty years after the fact. Perhaps I would’ve named the turtles something snappier had I known the phenomenon that Baby Turtle would one day become. I also owned the larger Dakin turtle, and that one I appropriately named Mama Turtle. The name comes from the fact that Dakin (once the leader in the plush animal biz) produced a large and small version of this stuffed turtle, and my favorite of the two was the smaller one, which measured just over seven inches long and was filled with bean shells. Rather, I portrayed him to be about my age. The character of Baby Turtle was not, in fact, a baby. Many of my artistic projects featured this character as a sort of figurehead. This character began as a plush toy and essentially became my personal cartoon character and mascot throughout much of my childhood. It would be difficult to explain many of my childhood endeavors without first establishing the identity of a certain character I called Baby Turtle.
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