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Actress Judith Hoag, during a panel appearance Saturday at Tulsa Comic Expo, recalled getting a script and advice from her agent: Don’t let this movie title — “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” — scare you away.

Hoag read the script and loved it. At the time, she was wrapping up a movie called “Cadillac Man” with Robin Williams.

She said she was embarrassed to tell folks that “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” was her next project because nobody had ever heard of TMNT at that point.

“And so I said what the title was and Robin went out of his skin,” Hoag said. “He had the very first comic book and he was an avid collector and avid fan and he was so excited, so he kind of gave me my street cred that it was OK. Which I knew it was fine, but it sounded so odd.”

Hoag played April O’Neil in the first TMNT film in 1990 and, because of the enduring popularity of the pizza-loving heroes in a half shell, she secured her place in pop culture history.