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Batman, Barbie and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are tied for first place on the Thermos team.

On the Aladdin team, Nintendo and Mickey Mouse lead the pack.

Those are the leading sellers this back-to-school season for the two largest manufacturers of lunchboxes, Thermos and Aladdin.

Manufacturers say lunchbox sales have risen with increasing school enrollment since hitting a low point in 1980. And the variety of choices is such that there seems to be a box with matching thermos for every taste.

Batman fends off an attack by the Joker on a lunch kit reported by at least one discount department store to be leading the field.

The Super Mario brothers hop around on the Nintendo lunch kit, while Cool Times Barbie, her hair fanning behind her, rides a skateboard across her lunchbox.

Alf pigs out, The Real Ghostbusters are at the ready with their powerful guns, and GI Joe charges ahead in a fearsome speedboat.

The Peanuts characters parade back to school under the title Peanuts University, while the Sesame Street crew boards a bus as Big Bird waits his turn, sitting on a lunch box and reading "ABC's Made Easy."

There is also the zany Pee Wee's Playhouse and the more dignified Wizard of Oz characters walking down the yellow brick road.

Lunchboxes were $5.99 at one drug store. At a discount department store where regular prices were $6.99 to $9.99, they were on sale for $4.99 to $7.99.

Thermos, of Freeport, Ill., and Aladdin, of Nashville, Tenn., make most of the lunch boxes for an industry that this year shipped more than 7 million kits.

But other companies have their entries also. Fun Designs of Pleasantville, N.J., offers Lunch 'N Tunes for $9.49. These lunchbox radios with a speaker and adjustable headphones feature brightly colored animal designs such as a bear wearing sunglasses at the beach. For simpler tastes, LaTique of New York makes lightweight, insulated lunch totes with a vinyl lining. They come unadorned in a variety of colors or with lettering that says things like Snack Sack.

Michael Schimmel, director of marketing for Aladdin, says the lunch box market is 3-to 8-year-olds, and the best customers are probably about 5. Cathy Gill, marketing planner for Thermos Inc., notes that the market has been getting a little younger each year as more children enter preschool at younger ages and as older kids start favoring brown bags a little earlier than in the past.

Lunchboxes come in colorful plastic that somewhat limits designers' creativity. Schimmel explains that while the old metal boxes were decorated on the front and back and around the sides and bottom, the plastic variety, because of the way molds are shaped, can hold a decal only on the front.

The last full-metal box was the 1987 Rambo. Such boxes were phased out for the obvious reasons, Schimmel says. Kids often used them for whacking each other on the head. In addition, the metal boxes tended to rust.

Each year's crop includes old favorites like Barbie and newcomers based on popular movies, television series and toys. Old lunchboxes costing as much as $700 each have become collectors' items for their ability to reflect the times: Western and space adventurers characterized the 1950s and early '60s. The late '60s saw sitcom boxes such as The Munsters and psychedelia such as The Beatles' Yellow Submarine. Disco fever came in the '70s, when the Bee Gees' Maurice, Robin and Barry Gibb each had their own box.

"Somewhere between the baby bottle and the brown bag, you were what you carried," said Scott Bruce, author of "The Official Price Guide to Lunchbox Collectibles." Collecting them is "collecting your childhood," he told the Associated Press. "It takes the sting out of getting old."

Young historians-to-be should take notice and hold on to those Batmans, Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

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