After decades of collecting stuff, you just start to run out of room to store everything. While I had been buying all the TMNT 1987 animated series DVDs as they came out, the whole 10-season collection took up quite a bit of shelf space. So I re-bought the entire series in a single-release box set, and sold my original-release DVDs. You can see below how much LESS space buying the whole series in one whack took up:
However, there was one problem with the single-release box. It had 23 discs comprising nearly 200 episodes, and NO EPISODE GUIDE! If I wanted to watch a specific episode, I’d have to insert each disc individually, wait for the entirely too-long Lionsgate Entertainment title to load, wait for the animated menus to load, and then go into the episode selection to see what episodes were on that disc. And if it was the wrong disc? I’d have to start that process over again, disc-by-disc.
While it isn’t my favorite way to do so, the box sets for shows like Thundercats (1985), Batman: The Animated Series (1992), and Animaniacs (1993) all have little bookets with episode guides, so you can find which episode you want quickly. It’s pretty inexcusable of Lionsgate to put out these TMNT episodes with no way to know what episode was where.
So I tried to figure out what I could do to solve this problem. I could make my own booklet, but 23 discs in that one box is already pretty stuffed. Additionally, I don’t really like how multiple discs are on each spindle in that box, and really it should just be… better.
I decided to buy this slim DVD double-disc case 100-pack on Amazon, and design my own inserts. While 12 slim DVD cases would take up more space than the single box, it’s still about a quarter of the amount of space the 14 original releases took up. And I could do whatever *I* wanted, with no need for sales copy or copyrights or barcodes or anything. Just clean, easy-to-navigate DVD inserts.
I searched the Internet for a few days to figure out what to do for box design, when I managed to come across a lot of clean, logo-free versions of the old TMNT VHS box art. Perfect! All I was doing was essentially updating those old home video releases.
Below is what I came up with.
Well, that’s 12 of the 100 slim DVD cases used. So what else could I do? Hey, aren’t there 4 TMNT movies? Well if I double those up, two per case, then they only take up about the same amount of space as a single regular DVD case, and that would ALSO cut down on the amount of space taken up on my DVD shelf.
So hey, here’s those, using the cleanest versions of the movie posters that I could find:
Aaaand, in case you didn’t notice while scrolling through, each image above is a link to a full-sized JPG that you can download yourself, print out, and put in 7mm slim cases. There’s an extra eighth of an inch on all 4 sides, so you don’t have to be 100% precise when cutting these.
Enjoy!
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and all related characters and media are owned by Nickelodeon.