Teenage Mutant Ninja Tottles: Heroes in a Half-Tube Half-Bottle

Any child of the late ˜80s and early ˜90s remembers waking up on Saturday mornings and eating overly sugared cereal in front of the TV. Those were the days¦ Saturday morning cartoons may be gone, but we can still reminisce about one of my favorite shows from those days: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Those Heroes in a Half Shell (TURTLE POWER!), who lived in the sewers of New York City and fought crime with the help of their overgrown rat sensei, Splinter. They will always hold a special place in my childhood memories.

The four mutant turtles are named after famous Renaissance artists. Leonardo (Leo) wears a blue mask and wields two katana. Donatello (Don, my personal favorite) wears purple and fights with a bo staff. Raphael (Raph) wears a red mask and is a master with a pair of sai. And Michelangelo (Mikey), the party boy of the bunch, wears orange and fights with a tottle.

What is a Tottle?

Wait a second. You don't remember the tottle from your sugar-fueled Saturday cartoon binges? And you don't even know what a tottle is? Is it just a weird, funny, made up word? Honestly, it probably is.

A tottle, also called a Malibu tube, is a cross between a bottle and a tube. Someone probably got clever with the name and mashed the two words together, and thus tottle was born. Some tottles have small cutouts at the top. This is useful for hanging the container, whether from a display rack, or from a carabiner attached to a purse.

Tottles are great because they are squeezable like a tube, but are closed on the bottom like a bottle. Ordinary tubes, like this 4 ounce tube, are filled from an open bottom, then sealed with a special machine. Tottles are filled like bottles are, through the neck opening. This might seem like a trick to get these filled with your favorite lotion, sunscreen, or makeup, but there are ways to do it. One way to easily fill tottles is to prop them orifice-side up in a muffin tin. Then use a pastry bag and tip to pipe your product into these handy-dandy little containers.

So what do tottles have to do with ninjas? First off, they are extremely handy for moms and dads. They are small enough to fit in diaper bags or purses, and when parents need to pull their ninja moves while applying sunscreen to their squirmy toddlers, the tottle is right there. And second, just like the ultra-popular pizza-munching turtles, these bottles are hybrids, which in my book is pretty similar to mutants (at least on the cartoon and container scale).

Check out this month's wallpaper, Teenage Mutant Ninja Tottles, based on the highly popular comics, series, and movies Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If you're interested in more parody container calendar wallpapers, you can find the whole collection here. What movie would you like to see parodied in the container format? Leave your suggestion in the comment section below!