I was once described as “the kind of guy who looks like he reads comic books.” (The source was mad that I was dating a girl he liked. Bahahaha!). This may be true. However, I'm a total comic book civilian. What random scattered titles I know though, I love with the enthusiasm and intensity that I love favorite movies, books, and albums. My favorite series, dating from the time my uncle picked up an issue when the name caught his eye and then regifted it to me for my 9th birthday, is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Started in the early 80s exactly the way you expected—two nerds sitting around their apartment, one nerd says to the other “Hey . . . let's do a comic called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” to which the other nerd replied, “That's awesome,” followed by a frantic grab for pencils—TMNT started life as a black and white independent comic, fairly dark in tone and very violent. The turtle protagonists, famously, were named for Renaissance artists. Over the first couple years, the—sporadically published—title took the turtles all over space and time and even teamed up with Dave Sim's legendary Cerebus.
This was around the point my uncle introduced me to the series, though he wisely started me at the beginning. He, my dad, and their younger brother the painter were all very pleased that I was starting off with indie comix at a young and impressionable age. This was around the same time they were nervously nudging me toward the Velvet Underground to make sure I grew up with hip musical taste (I, being wise to their game, trolled the fuck out of them by singing Bobby Brown songs at every opportunity).
But then something weird happened. Some smart, commercially-minded person looked at the phrase “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and went, hey, let's make a cartoon aimed at little kids. This, of course, meant that certain of my favorite things about the original comic—the cursing (which was only “damn” and “hell”), the beer drinking, the cutting people to bloody shreds with swords—had to be chucked, in favor of a junkie-like fixation on pizza, kid-friendly catchphrases like “cowabunga” (another great opportunity to troll my dad; he was so pissed off that I didn't care “cowabunga” was ganked from Howdy Doody that he used to turn purple) and a general lowering of the dramatic stakes. The turtles' first and most memorable nemesis, The Shredder, was turned from a vengeance-seeking younger brother of a guy the turtles' master killed into a bumbling fucko with an alien brain sidekick (himself inspired by these weird aliens in the original comic who accidentally beamed the turtles across the universe, who were good guys). Master Splinter wasn't changed much, but he was cuted up a bit. Most disappointingly, the turtles' human friend, April O'Neil, was forced to abandon her decorative cleavage tops for this nasty-ass yellow jumpsuit that she apparently never took off.
Don't get me wrong. I watched the cartoon. I was young enough that being a little kid won out over being an indie comix purist. I was, however, just enough of a douchebag to haughtily tell my classmates “Yeah, the show's cool and all, but you should read the original comics, they're much better.” And as much as the absence of bad language, violence, and cleavage was disappointing, I rather liked the cartoon, but not so much that when they announced that a movie was being made that I didn't go, “Man, I hope they base it on the original comic, not the cartoon . . .”
To my pleasant surprise, the movie splits the difference fairly elegantly. The introduction blends the origin story from the comic with the pilot episode of the TV show, as the turtles become friends with TV reporter April by rescuing her from marauding ninjas a couple times. They introduce her to Splinter, who tells her how a rat and four turtles mutated into anthropomorphic form in an almost direct quote from the debut issue of the comic. Later on, other plot elements are taken directly from the original comic. The tone, for a kids' movie, is quite dark in places, and the violence doesn't fuck around, though stopping short of spouting blood and severed limbs and shit, because I mean, come on, it is a kids' movie.
The movie begins with a crime wave sweeping “New York” (it's clearly shot somewhere else; just cuz you put a cat in the oven, that don't make it a biscuit), which intrepid TV reporter April O'Neil hears may have something to do with something called “The Foot Clan.” The pigs are pissed off that she's running at the mouth on TV about the crime wave, because it makes them look bad, but she kind of has a point, to wit: take the fuckin donut outta your mouth and get to work, fucknugget.
One night some creeps mug April, but before anybody knows what the hell happened, the lights go out, and when the fuzz turns up, the muggers are subdued, disarmed, and tied up. The only clue as to what the fuck happened is a sai, dropped by Raphael, ninja turtle, which April grabs and puts in her bag.
Introducing Leonardo, Donatello, and Michelangelo celebrating their triumphant victory over the muggers. Their cranky brother brings up the rear, pissed off at having lost his sai. Splinter, their rat teacher/father figure, tries to calm Raphael down, but the hijinks of the other three piss Raphael off to the point where he says fuck it, grabs a trench coat and hat and goes out to the movies. (The fact that all their “going incognito” outfit consists of is a trench coat and hat, when their skin is green and they have gigantic fucking shells on their backs, is a wonderful joke on New York in the 80s, and it's accurate, too—I wouldn't look twice at someone with green legs, bare feet, and three toes south of 14th St.)
On his travels, Raphael meets a guy who looks even stranger than he does, some Canadian guy in a hockey mask who carries around a golf bag full of sporting goods (baseball bats, golf clubs, even a cricket bat). They have philosophical differences and beat the shit out of each other, with the Canadian winning the battle, further pissing Raphael off.
April runs afoul of the Foot Clan, and they set upon her in a train station (which, surprisingly, looks like it was shot in New York, on the unused platform at Hoyt-Schermerhorn that's been every subway station in the city at some point or other), whereupon April shows moxie by whipping out the sai. The Foot Clan, however, scoff at such feeble gestures of bravery, and show them how real men treat a lady: in parties of thirty, masked, and heavily armed.
But the turtles are there to kick ass and rescue the fair maiden, who is initially a little freaked out by them and Splinter, but eventually conquers her racism and they become friends. The turtles accompany April home, where they quickly have to hide because her boss and his fuckup petty criminal son drop by for some weird reason, and the kid rips off $20 from April. This whole scene makes no sense in a kids' movie, because in a grownup movie, they'd have dropped by because April was fucking her boss and the kid was a junkie, but stripped of those necessary bits of context it's like, huh?
After eating all April's pizza, the turtles head back home, only to find their lair trashed and Splinter gone (presumed dead). So they go back to April's to hide out. April's boss' kid gets arrested for boosting a car stereo (again, what the fuck? WHAT MOTIVATION DO PEOPLE WHO AREN'T ON DRUGS HAVE TO DO THIS?) and he has a talk with his asshole dad (oh wait, right, some people's dads aren't agreeably trollable like mine, some people's dads eat cock) which leads to him running out in traffic and running away to this massive den of criminality which I guess is supposed to be on Randall's Island or something (so hard to keep NYC geography straight when we're not in NYC) whereupon we're introduced to the Shredder, who is a pretty bad motherfucker like he's supposed to be, and his army of juvenile delinquents (They smoke cigarettes! They ride skateboards! They play the video games!) with whom he terrorizes New York to no apparent end other than the sheer fuck of it. The baddies are holding a bedraggled—but alive—Splinter hostage.
And, because they're bad, they lure Raphael away from the strength of the pack and ambush the sweet green Jesus out of him, throwing him through the skylight of April's place. A massive battle ensues, wherein the turtles fight the Foot basically to a stalemate, until the Shredder decides to torch the junk store downstairs, at which point our heroes, joined by the Canadian weirdo (who just happened to see the Foot fucking up his “friend,” and boy are you weird if some green motherfucker with a shell you smacked with a cricket bat in Central Park one night qualifies as a friend) beat a hasty retreat.
In a sequence lifted straight from one of the best issues of the original comic, they head to the Canadian's mom's place in Massachussetts (hmm . . . maybe the character isn't supposed to be Canadian . . . Elias Koteas, you're lucky you're awesome, dude, your accent is thick as a fuck) and the turtles all do a bit of soul-searching as they nurse Raphael back to health. The humans flirt, in an amusingly chaste we-pretend-to-hate-each-other-even-though-we're-crushing-like-mad way that the older kids will recognize and their parents will find hilarious.
Eventually, the turtles find their strength again and have a vision of the still-alive Splinter, and it's back to New York, to take the fight to the enemy. April's boss' kid, having had a crisis of conscience (aided and abetted by a couple conversations with Splinter where the sneaky little fucker guilt trips the kid into being good) inadvertently leads the Foot to try and ambush the turtles at their pad, but the turtles fuck shit up to the point where they end up in a rooftop Final Boss Battle with the Shredder, who is each turtle's clear superior in one-on-one combat, but they start getting to him as a team, though it does take Splinter to save their ass. The Shredder ends up hanging off the roof, and falls into a garbage truck. The Canadian throws the lever “by accident” (a rather callous maneuver, and not very sporting, I say) and adios Shredder. Fin de pelicula.
What I find impressive about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is that it manages to be a faithful adaptation of both the original comic and the TV show. The fact that a lot of the dialogue is stupid and a lot of the acting sucks is an element of this fidelity to the original subject matter. Certain kinds of movie are supposed to have stupid dialogue and shitty acting, and in the days when only DC comics got made into movies with movie stars in them, comic book movies certainly fit the bill (though there's plenty of stupid dialogue and shitty acting in Richard Donner's Superman and Tim Burton's Batman). In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the pace is brisk, the tone agreeable, the protagonists compelling, the bad guys bad (and for borderline Goldfinger-esque evil for evil's sake raised to the level of an aesthetic principle motivations; if you can parse that sentence, I'll give you a cookie) and really what the fuck more do you want from a movie?
So that's the cake. This is the icing:
(1) Golden Harvest produced this movie. Golden Fucking Harvest! RAYMOND CHOW IS AN EXECUTIVE PRODUCER. This fucking rules. For further explication, see this.
(2) Corey Feldman did the voice of Donatello, which is funny because Michelangelo was the one who sounded stoned in the cartoon, and because in this day and age, the name Corey Feldman itself is tantamount to a punchline (see the episode of Greg The Bunny where he takes Greg hostage or some fucking thing mid-nervous breakdown). Even then, in 1990, he had already kind of gotten to that point.
(3) When Johnny Law and the Blue Revue show up to bust the remaining Foot Clan and juvenile delinquent associates, one of the juvenile delinquents turns snitch and tells the coppers that all the evidence they're looking for is in “The East warehouse on Lairdman island.” Because Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird created the comic.
(4) Elias Koteas provides a timely reminder, like Tony Hendra in Spinal Tap, that a cricket bat is one of the best things in the universe to fuck someone up with.
(5) A number of not-half-bad pop culture jokes, a few years before every single fucking movie devolved into a bunch of dickheads making cracks about the Partridge Family to each other.
(6) The sequence where Michelangelo haggles with the Dominos guy over the price of delivering a pizza to an address that doesn't exist is both funny and kind of existentially poignant . . . . not that I would have ever watched this movie high enough to have that insight . . . ahem . . .
(7) The fight scenes, especially the ones involving the turtles, are pretty impressive, and while I am grading on the curve because some poor bastard had to do the whole fucking thing in a giant, heavy rubber suit, they're still well-filmed and edited, especially for such a low-budget picture.
Overall, would I recommend Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to someone without a nostalgic attachment to the comics or the cartoon? Hell no. One's ability to appreciate the finer points of the adaptation process are entirely contingent on one's patience for the material, and the kids these days who know this weird, newfangled TMNT are gonna look back on this old pre-CGI bullshit and say “lol wut iz dis sh!t” or however those warped, jaded, ADHD-addled cockmongers talk to each other. However, those of us with a little gray in our hair and a little light in our souls can look back fondly on what really is a hell of an entertaining movie.
Stay tuned in a few days for my Lost postmortem!
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