Remember what we said about despite some people thinking April is an old fashioned name, it is still being used in fiction and on film. Well here we have April O`Neill, who when she made her first appearance in a comic book, in 1984, was just a computer programmer . However she ended up being the first human to really understand the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after they saved her life when she was being attacked by robots. And then she left her job, and opened an antique shop, which the Turtles would eventually cause to be destroyed. But she still brought them pizza. After that her life got pretty complex, she fell in love with a guy who turned out to be a vigilante, and eventually they would get married and she would help him raise his late wife`s daughter, though she would also do a bit of vigilante-ism and in 1994 she was turned into a turtle. She also got a new career as a newsreader, and she changed her hair colour from a really interesting coppery red to an even more interesting magenta-purple, then went back to just a brownish brown.
The original big screen film seems to have amalgamated all of this, though she is always a news reporter and she still gets an antique shop which the Turtles manage to get destroyed. The cards show her as a news reporter from the start.
In fact there was more than one film, six in all, starting in 1990, and more than one trading card set.
TheTradingCardDatabase/TMNT lists twenty-five different sets, by issuers Diamond, Fleer, Hostess, McCains, O-Pee-Chee, Regina and Topps. Our set was the first and shows her in cartoon form. There were eighty-eight cards and eleven stickers, but there were also four packet designs in yellow or red, showing each of the turtles, Donatello, Leonardo, Michaelangelo, and Raphael. There was also a second series, in which the numbers carried on to make a total of 176 cards. Most people seem to consider the first set is just half the set.
The early items are easy to tell because the British versions call the foursome Teenage Mutant HERO Turtles whereas in America they kept the original comic book title of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.