The pleasure of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could be easily epitomized by any number of lines of dialogue, visual details, or questionable pieces of logic, but I’ll be lazy and go with the one that comes in the very first few minutes of the first episode in this collection. The Turtles (Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo; all named for Italian renaissance artists) are talking to crack reporter April O’Neal, who informs them that a gang of car thieves are hiding in the ‘old warehouse across the street’. She then points to the warehouse, which has a large sign at the front with simply the word ‘warehouse’ across it. I spent several moments wondering why that would ever be necessary, but by that point I had already missed all sorts of crap about Dimension X, and had to rewind.
The premise of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is fairly simple: several turtles come into contact with a radioactive substance, and are thus mutated into humanoid creatures with martial arts abilities (learned under the tutelage of giant rat Splinter) and a desire to stamp out crime and wicked enemies such as metal masked Shredder, effeminate pink blob Krang, and the evil organization H.A.V.O.C. (which is such a shameless rip-off of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants that you can’t help but be awed by it). They are helped in their quest to fight crime by aforementioned ace reporter April O’Neal in one of the strangest pseudo-sexual relationships in all of 80s animated children’s programming. That’s not even the weirdest thing about the show, though, even if I’m hard pressed to decide exactly what that would be, given the wealth of eccentricity that this show has revealed itself to be in retrospect. Have you watched this show lately? Say, since you first tried drugs, or were exposed to the work of writers like Burroughs, Crumb, or Hunter S. Thompson? If not, you should really try.
Late 80s animation is notorious for making little to no sense to those who weren’t born between the years 1980 and 1987 (this is made brilliantly evident by the Watchmen cartoon parody that was released on youtube about the same time that the movie came out). And weren’t six. And weren’t all gassed up on Ecto Cooler at the time. If you don’t believe me, try watching Thundercats. Don’t hurt yourself, but try. Turtles doesn’t really make any more sense than any of its compatriots, but it has a freewheeling energy and a willingness to efface itself that makes it infinitely more entertaining. Do you know how the original Star Trek used to come up with all sorts of ridiculous rules to squeeze out of a logical trap that they accidentally wrote themselves into or simply to create conflict? You can count on Turtles having at least five of those before the next commercial break, and I could be wrong, but I almost got the feeling that they were doing it on purpose.
Every time a team of creative people work together to put something out, it’s hard not to have a little stamp of their collective personality on it, and in the case of this show, it’s really easy to imagine woefully underpaid writers saying things like ‘I dare you to put in a device called the Flux transmitter’ and ‘I dare you to make a big pink blob that sounds like Truman Capote one of the central villains’. And the stakes would just get higher until they finally produced the last draft, only for it to get past network executives because six-year-olds wouldn’t know the difference between this and a can of Lysol upside the head as long as there are fighting turtles involved. But you also get the sense that these imaginary writers had a great deal of fun with each other, and that levity comes across in the way that the characters (especially the turtles) interact with each other and the inherent weirdness of the universe around them. When the lead characters turn aside and give wisecracks, they feel more natural than anything in Transformers ever did, and give the sense that the creators of the show weren’t taking their jobs very seriously, but that they weren’t completely writing it off either.
Perhaps the best compliment I can give this show is that I can look back at it as an adult and not feel embarrassed that I thought it was really cool. I can be amazed at what I swallowed hook, line, and sinker, but I don’t regret the time I spent watching this in the way that I regret Power Rangers. And I can also say it seems like a pretty awesome writer’s room.
DVD Bonus Features
The disc has a couple of trailers on it.
"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Complete Season 8" is on sale September 1, 2009 and is rated NR. Television. Directed by Bill Hutten, Ed Love, Kent Butterworth. Written by David Wise. Starring Barry Gordon, Bill Martin, Cam Clarke, Pat Fraley, Renae Jacobs, Townsend Coleman.
