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Official TMNT Speculation Thread
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1,211 posts in this topic

47 minutes ago, tvindy said:
57 minutes ago, valiantman said:

Unfortunately, Google is inconsistent when there's a dash/hyphen involved.  To be sure you get exactly what you're looking for, you have to put double-quotes around search terms.

Using Google to search for:    Spider-Man      results in 726million results, but if you put the quotes on it and search for:    "Spider-Man"     you only get 218million results.

What happened?  There are 519million results for Spider.  Those are being included.

TMNT has 61million, "Ninja turtles" (with the double-quotes) has 45million, but some of those pages have both.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has 78million results, but if you add the double-quotes, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" results in 39million.

 

In other words, Google isn't as useful for properties and characters which include common words (spider, turtles) as it might appear.

Okay, so that means TMNT is between one fifth and one sixth as popular as Spider-Man. :bigsmile:

(I guess it also means that when I google "Mister Mxyzptlk" and get 61,300 results, that is probably very accurate.)

Well, not exactly.  People are dumb.  Google knows this, but it still has to serve those people.  There are 171million results for "Spiderman" because people didn't put the dash/hyphen in there.  You can remove any results that include both "Spiderman" and "Spider-Man" by searching for:   "Spiderman" -"Spider-Man"   and you'll get 142million results.  Combining those with "Spider-Man" 213million results, and you're at 355million for Spiderman/Spider-Man... and your TMNT comparison is somewhere around one-tenth as popular* as Spider-Man.

* but we're using Google for a purpose that isn't exactly scientific and nearly doubling the popularity of a character that people don't even know how to spell.  Science... it ain't. lol

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3 minutes ago, valiantman said:

Well, not exactly.  People are dumb.  Google knows this, but it still has to serve those people.  There are 171million results for "Spiderman" because people didn't put the dash/hyphen in there.  You can remove any results that include both "Spiderman" and "Spider-Man" by searching for:   "Spiderman" -"Spider-Man"   and you'll get 142million results.  Combining those with "Spider-Man" 213million results, and you're at 355million for Spiderman/Spider-Man... and your TMNT comparison is somewhere around one-tenth as popular* as Spider-Man.

* but we're using Google for a purpose that isn't exactly scientific and nearly doubling the popularity of a character that people don't even know how to spell.  Science... it ain't. lol

Yes, it's very inexact, but even with a huge margin for error, it's interesting to look at those figures. One way around the misspellings would be to use Google's Ngram Viewer. Since those results are from, we can assume that most of them are spelled correctly. The Ngram Viewer has more accurate data, but it probably doesn't reflect popular culture as well as a Google search. Still, I found this graph interesting: 

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Teenage+Mutant+Ninja+Turtles%2C+Spider-Man&corpus=26&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CSpider - Man%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2CTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CSpider - Man%3B%2Cc0

According to the chart, TMNT currently (2019) comes up in books about a tenth as often as Spider-Man, buts it's interesting that in the late 80s to early 90s, it actually surpassed Spider-Man. (Just some more interesting data to ponder.)

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28 minutes ago, tvindy said:

Yes, it's very inexact, but even with a huge margin for error, it's interesting to look at those figures. One way around the misspellings would be to use Google's Ngram Viewer. Since those results are from, we can assume that most of them are spelled correctly. The Ngram Viewer has more accurate data, but it probably doesn't reflect popular culture as well as a Google search. Still, I found this graph interesting: 

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Teenage+Mutant+Ninja+Turtles%2C+Spider-Man&corpus=26&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CSpider - Man%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2CTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CSpider - Man%3B%2Cc0

According to the chart, TMNT currently (2019) comes up in books about a tenth as often as Spider-Man, buts it's interesting that in the late 80s to early 90s, it actually surpassed Spider-Man. (Just some more interesting data to ponder.)

Crazy results just for Spider-Man alone. :grin: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Spider-Man%2CSpiderman%2CSpider-man&corpus=26&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&smoothing=3

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12 minutes ago, valiantman said:

Well, you can make the search case-insensitive. That makes the results one third less crazy. :)

(Even with all the crazy variability, I still find these results interesting.)

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10 minutes ago, tvindy said:
25 minutes ago, valiantman said:

Well, you can make the search case-insensitive. That makes the results one third less crazy. :)

(Even with all the crazy variability, I still find these results interesting.)

Any idea why "Batman" was more popular in 1579 than he was in 1994? :kidaround:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&year_end=2019&content=Batman%2CSpider-Man&year_start=1500&case_insensitive=on

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14 minutes ago, valiantman said:

Fun!  Any guesses on what caused Spider-Man to pop up briefly in 1901 and peak in 1907? hm

That's a lot harder. I did find these entries published toward the end on the 19th century:
https://www.google.com/search?biw=1440&bih=761&tbs=sbd%3A1%2Ccdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1800%2Ccd_max%3A1899&tbm=bks&sxsrf=ALeKk01-hlI0WikFYvNTOi9wY0TsvUsIrQ%3A1600204298013&ei=Ci5hX74j7qzk5Q-ho6b4CA&q="spider-man"&oq="spider-man"&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l10.52110.54844.0.56803.2.2.0.0.0.0.304.597.2-1j1.2.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.2.595....0.nEGIZpymjFw

But unfortunately, Google doesn't provide enough granularity to easily see what was being published at the beginning of the 20th century, which is probably when whatever it was that mentioned "spider-man" was published.

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1 minute ago, tvindy said:
20 minutes ago, valiantman said:

Fun!  Any guesses on what caused Spider-Man to pop up briefly in 1901 and peak in 1907? hm

That's a lot harder. I did find these entries published toward the end on the 19th century:
https://www.google.com/search?biw=1440&bih=761&tbs=sbd%3A1%2Ccdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1800%2Ccd_max%3A1899&tbm=bks&sxsrf=ALeKk01-hlI0WikFYvNTOi9wY0TsvUsIrQ%3A1600204298013&ei=Ci5hX74j7qzk5Q-ho6b4CA&q="spider-man"&oq="spider-man"&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l10.52110.54844.0.56803.2.2.0.0.0.0.304.597.2-1j1.2.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.2.595....0.nEGIZpymjFw

But unfortunately, Google doesn't provide enough granularity to easily see what was being published at the beginning of the 20th century, which is probably when whatever it was that mentioned "spider-man" was published.

I tweaked the URL (even though Google doesn't specifically say you can do this) and I think I found our early-1900s "spider-man"  https://www.google.com/search?q="spider-man"&tbs=sbd:1,cdr:1,cd_min:1900,cd_max:1907&tbm=bks&source=lnt&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiB6fHdi-zrAhUCTawKHc1TCksQpwUIIg&biw=1920&bih=937&dpr=1

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1 minute ago, valiantman said:

I tweaked the URL (even though Google doesn't specifically say you can do this) and I think I found our early-1900s "spider-man"  https://www.google.com/search?q="spider-man"&tbs=sbd:1,cdr:1,cd_min:1900,cd_max:1907&tbm=bks&source=lnt&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiB6fHdi-zrAhUCTawKHc1TCksQpwUIIg&biw=1920&bih=937&dpr=1

Wow! Great job! That was genius. It didn't even occur to me that anything in the URL would be understandable, let alone tweakable.

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9 minutes ago, tvindy said:
13 minutes ago, valiantman said:

I tweaked the URL (even though Google doesn't specifically say you can do this) and I think I found our early-1900s "spider-man"  https://www.google.com/search?q="spider-man"&tbs=sbd:1,cdr:1,cd_min:1900,cd_max:1907&tbm=bks&source=lnt&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiB6fHdi-zrAhUCTawKHc1TCksQpwUIIg&biw=1920&bih=937&dpr=1

Wow! Great job! That was genius. It didn't even occur to me that anything in the URL would be understandable, let alone tweakable.

I'm a bit of a nerd, but it comes in handy once in a while.  Here's the CGC Census for every CGC graded book with the word "turtle" in the title, alphabetical, all on one page... same basic URL scenario: http://www.cgcdata.com/cgc/search/title/:turtle:/label/all/orderby/alphabetical/variants/yes/

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19 minutes ago, valiantman said:

I'm a bit of a nerd, but it comes in handy once in a while.  Here's the CGC Census for every CGC graded book with the word "turtle" in the title, alphabetical, all on one page... same basic URL scenario: http://www.cgcdata.com/cgc/search/title/:turtle:/label/all/orderby/alphabetical/variants/yes/

Impressive. And almost all of them are TMNT. I wonder what the general correlation is between the number of total comics published focussing on and character or team and the dollar value of the issue that introduces that team or character. (Not that I'm expecting anyone to work that out. It's just an interesting stat to ponder.)

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On 9/13/2020 at 11:28 PM, valiantman said:
On 9/12/2020 at 8:08 PM, I am not Glenda said:

I almost forgot I think the # 3 NY print variation is way undervalued when you consider there were only 500 examples

Definitely.  The CGC 8.0 TMNT #3 NYCC Variant that just ended at $1,375 somehow set a new price record and still looks like a bargain.

I didn't see this $2,050 sale for CGC 8.0 TMNT #3 NYCC Variant from August 2020 on Comiclink, since it wasn't reported to GPA. 

https://www.comiclink.com/auctions/item.asp?id=1411112&itemType=0

That $1,375 price last week already looks like a bargain.

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36 minutes ago, valiantman said:

I didn't see this $2,050 sale for CGC 8.0 TMNT #3 NYCC Variant from August 2020 on Comiclink, since it wasn't reported to GPA. 

https://www.comiclink.com/auctions/item.asp?id=1411112&itemType=0

That $1,375 price last week already looks like a bargain.

Or was the $2,050 sale an over aggressive buyer and the $1,375 more spot on 🤷‍♂️.

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