Category: TMNT

A couple weeks ago, I finished watching seasons nine and ten of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. I probably should have been keeping notes on my thoughts, because I knew I’d want to write about them. But I figured I’d get around to doing this sooner, while said thoughts were still in my brain. Alas, now we have some cobbled-together half-memories instead of… you know what, that’s probably about the usual quality level of my writing anyway. It’s fine.

• Season nine begins where eight left off: with the Technodrome destroyed forever, and Shredder and Krang trapped in Dimension X. Ostensibly, they are stuck there for good. I don’t know how this time is any different from the last time they were stuck there. The Technodrome isn’t host to the only interdimensional portal in existence.
• So a new recurring villain is introduced: Dregg. He is a spaceman from far off in space and I don’t really recall his origin. The same as Krang, I think; some sort of displaced warlord. It doesn’t matter. He’s dumb-looking and sounds like someone doing a bad Tim Curry impression.
• The twist for season nine is that Dregg appeals to the people of Earth as a saviour come from space to grant them fantastical technology and rocket them into a glorious future. Only the Turtles know that he’s a no-goodnik, so of course he tells the dumb-dumb humans that the Turtles are the bad guys, and we’ve got that whole X-Men thing from season eight happening again.

Continue reading Final Thoughts on TMNT 1987

My journey through the entire series of the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon continues. Last time I made a big wall of text about it, I had just finished up the fifth season: the halfway point of the series. Let’s go over some stray observations I have about seasons six through eight.

• The turtle colour/voice flubs are still out in full force. I would have thought that this was a problem that would have been ironed out by this point, but I think it might actually be getting worse as we move on. At least I’ve been noticing more instances of it. You never see such egregious errors in other cartoons, so I can only imagine that it’s the result of having four characters that look exactly the same.
• Season six was basically just your normal average season. Though a run of 16 episodes is positively quaint after the massive number of episodes in seasons three and four.
• The first half of season seven was produced for season four, but held back for whatever reason. So that means that you’re rolling back a couple years worth of animation improvements, and it’s visibly uglier than the latter half of the season.
• Also, it goes back to using the original intro sequence, which IMO is the better of the two.
• By this point, Michaelangelo has permanently traded in his nunchaku for a grappling hook. Which I suppose is more useful, but way less cool. And it’s all thanks to those super-lame Europeans who thought nunchucks were too violent.
• But swords and laser blasters were okay? Get bent, Europe.
• The first half of season seven also happens to be a hole “TMNT visit Europe” series, which makes for a nice change of pace and allows for a little cultural edutainment, but the stories go to pot. It made sense that when Krang and Shredder were constantly attacking New York, the Turtles would always be there to stop them. But then somehow they always manage to be attacking exactly the European location that the Turtles just happen to be in at the time. Why not attack New York when you know that the Turtles are away in Europe and won’t be there to stop you? Or vice versa? You guys have a teleporter that can take you anywhere. Steal something from anywhere else in the world.
• It would make way more sense if the Turtles simply faced other villains while on their vacation.
• The other half of season seven not only goes back to being more visually appealing, but the storylines also get a hack of a lot better than ever before. Well, some of them. The episode where they travel back in time to an ancient Japan where everyone speaks perfect English was a little silly. Overall, though, much better stories.
• The episode “Invasion of the Krangazoids” shows us a glimpse of what Krang’s true form looks like, when he creates clones of himself that evolve into giant reptilian monsters. But it also made me consider that it doesn’t make any sense that Krang’s brain was removed from his body as a punishment for his war crimes. It’s more than I want to type out, but just think about it a bit for yourself. No wonder that’s never mentioned in any other incarnation of the TMNT.
• Tokka and Rahzar show up in season seven. That’s cool. Except that Rahzar got a significant intelligence boost while Tokka remains kind of a stupid baby.
• Everything goes way off the rails in season eight. The intro and theme song change. The visual quality improves considerably, but the visual style goes to poop. April gets a new costume. TMNT now wants to be X-Men. It’s crazy. Complete insanity.
• Let’s start with the intro. The theme song has gone from awesome to some kind of gross 90’s rock abomination. It also seems really long. Or maybe it just feels that way because it’s awful. Oh and also it intercuts footage from the cartoon with footage from the live-action movies. It makes zero sense.
• And on a separate point, all the cartoon footage is pried out of the episodes, rather than being completely unique animation like the other intros. It’s so lame. I just can’t get over how lame it is.
• It’s kind of fun that the season is a single long storyline, rather than Shredder’s capers mixed with random other one-off villains.
• Oh right, X-Men. Channel 6 is now calling the TMNT (all mutants, really) an evil scourge and the people of New York are terrified of them, even though they’re obviously out to do good. Also there is an organization of mutants that are trying to take over and establish mutants as the dominant species. Sound familiar at all?
• The art is way darker and more detailed, but not as good. I hate the change to the Turtles’ bandannas, specifically. Their more angular appearance isn’t too bad, and makes them look a little more in line with the 2003 TMNT. I mostly just dislike that the New York sky is now constantly reds and purples, and that even the water is rarely ever blue any more. The attitude shift is not selling me, especially since the scripts are still pretty hammy, so there’s a very noticeable mood dissonance.
• I like April’s new jacket and shoes. So much less garish than the yellow jumpsuit and white boots.
• I was actually really shocked when Shredder asploded the Channel 6 building. Like, this is a Saturday Morning Cartoon. It’s not supposed to have major events that don’t get magically wiped away at the end of the episode. But it does, and it influences the entire rest of the season. Like I said before, there’s a much higher level of continuity in season eight, to the point where it could almost be a stand-alone mini-series, much like the first season.

I am already aware that things take another sharp turn in season nine, but I don’t know all of the specifics. I guess we’ll just have to start watching and see!

You all remember the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon from the late 80’s, yeah? Of course you do. Everyone does. Though a few years ago it seemed like it was very en vogue to hate on it because… they used 80’s slang? Man, that’s such a lame complaint, and completely wrong, to boot. The only character who uses excessive slang is Michaelangeo, and it’s surfer slang specifically, because he was characterized as a surfer.

In conclusion, people are stupid.

Anyway, I’ve been watching through each season of classic TMNT lately. Of course, by watching, I mean I have it on in the background while I play Picross or Hyrule Warriors. It’s become something of a pre-bedtime ritual, in fact. My night feels incomplete without an episode or two. While slang isn’t one of them, the show definitely does have its share of problems and other general weirdness. And because I don’t have any more interesting things to write about, here is a list of things that have stood out to me.

• Starting off with a fairly well-known one, there seem to be a lot of situations where one or more of the voice actors are temporarily replaced. And almost never well. This seems to be most prominent in season three (which has roughly seventeen million episodes), but it does still happen on occasion. I don’t know what the show’s production was like, but I suppose that James Avery (Shredder) and Rob Paulsen (Raphael) were probably in pretty high demand back in the day, and I can understand that maybe they had scheduling conflicts here and there that left them unable to fulfil their TMNT duties in favour of something more lucrative. But were Barry Gordon (Donatello) and Pat Fraley (Krang) really that busy? Even I had to Google them to remember their names.
• Michaelangelo may be known mostly for his surfer talk, but that’s never bothered me. What does sort of bug me though, is the way he always puts so much emphasis on the word “pizza.” And the way he enunciates both syllables so strongly. It’s not “PEET-ZAH,” it’s “pizza.” It may be a small thing to pick at, but when every second punch line out of Mikey’s mouth relates to pizza, it starts to grate pretty quickly.
• What is the deal with the Turtles just being “buds” and Splinter nothing more than their sensei? I am not really up on how the relationships were handled in the Mirage comics, but I’ve always appreciated that in subsequent incarnations, Splinter and the Turtles were straight up father and sons, and that their familial bonds were an important part of their characters. It feels so very wrong whenever Splinter calls them “my students” instead of “my sons.”
• Speaking of Splinter, he is… not so great in this show. In all other TMNT continuities, Splinter is basically the ultimate badass, capable of defeating any and all opponents. Here, I suppose he does still carry a bit of martial arts clout, but he comes off as a lot more old and feeble, and I just don’t care about him as much as I do the more modern Splinters. Even crazy extendo-tail Splinter from the current movie franchise.
• April’s scream (which I believe they recorded exactly once and then just used forever) is very annoying.
• Since it’s a current hot topic: the show is definitely on a misogyny see-saw, but leans more on the side of male dominance. April is independent, ambitious, and hard-working. A female character that young girls could really look up to. However, she is constantly getting captured and is basically helpless whenever a villain is around. Irma is exactly the opposite of a good female role model. Kala the Neutrino is probably a fairly capable lady, what with being a rebel fighting against Krang’s forces, but she shows up so seldom (and never on her own) that we don’t know a lot about her other than that she is a hip teenager. That’s basically it for female characters. Very rarely is there is a one-off girl mutant/villain, and usually they are easily manipulated by the men that surround them.
• The show is very clearly set in New York City, yet no character ever utters the name. It’s always “the city” this and “the city” that. We know that the show is supposed to exist in the real world, as other real locations are mentioned by name, and there are a number of jabs at New Jersey. So it really stands out as strange that they refuse to acknowledge the city’s name.
• I blame the 80’s entirely for this one, but any music that is not the main theme or a variant of the main theme is so bad. And there is a pool of maybe five or six themes, so you’re constantly hearing the same awful music. Plus one or two commercial break stings that they use in every single episode.
• Lastly, I found it more than a little grating that every single episode of season 2 and 3 focused on Krang and Shredder trying to find a power source to get the Technodrome out of Dimension X/the Earth’s core. All of them. Many episodes of later seasons use that scheme as well, but they also move away from it to give some screen time to other villains or monsters of the week. Quite frankly, the lack of variety in plots just makes season 3 feel that much longer, and it’s a welcome change when we start going for entire episodes without a Shredder in sight.
• Actually, it was also annoying that every second episode of season 4 on started with one of the Turtles complaining that “life is so boring without Krang and Shredder around.” Alright, maybe not quite every second episode, but my point stands that they lean on that setup far too often.
• Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles! Shellbacks! Wretched reptiles!
• Seriously, bad guys… get some new pejoratives.

And that’s about it. To be fair, I’m only just starting season 6, so maybe things will get mixed up a little as we go? Probably not. All I know for sure is that there is a major shift in seasons 8 to 10, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what those are all about. I’m sure I’d seen episodes here and there as a kid, and I know there’s a new main villain, but I honestly don’t remember anything else about late TMNT. It’s gonna be exciting!