20 Vintage 1980s Ninja Clip Charms 🥷 NOS Vending Machine Prizes Assorted Lot For Sale

Size: 3" long with chain and 1 1/2" in diameter ~ They vary a little one to the next.

This is twenty charms, not one — a random mix of the designs and clip colours, because that is how they came to me. I was actually shipped these by mistake, which is the only reason I have them at all.

Vintage plastic ninja clip charms out of the 1980s ninja craze: a flat round disc with the art on a sticker under the surface, a metal jump ring, and a snap-hook clip with a five-point star at its base. Menahem Golan, who directed Enter the Ninja, put it in cinemas in 1981 and set the whole thing going. By the middle of the decade kids were clipping charms exactly like these onto belt loops, house keys and plastic chain-link necklaces.

And 1984 is the year it crossed over to kids properly: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 came out of Mirage Studios in Dover, New Hampshire that May, all 3,000 copies of it, and sold out in a few weeks. It was a very ninja decade.

Look closely and there is real writing on these. One disc pairs NINJA with the kanji 忍 (nin), which is built from the character for a blade sitting over the character for a heart and means to bear or endure. Another sets NINJA over a kusarigama — a sickle on a chain with an iron weight at the end, used to tangle up an opponent's sword. The cleverest one spells NINJA with its first and last letters drawn as the two kanji of 忍者 itself, with a shuriken beside it. Shuriken literally means "hand-hidden blade", and a 1985 advertisement in Black Belt magazine sold an eight-point one as a "Chinese Star".

No maker's name, no date and no country is printed anywhere on them — which is exactly what you would expect from a quarter-machine 20 charms, assorted designs and clip colours