Bear with me here, gentlemen: I’ve finally been approved to post on these forums, and I’ve got lots I want to say.
I’m probably too old to be here. As a child of the seventies, my obsessions were
Star Trek, Battlestar: Galactica, Star Blazers, The Black Hole and
Star Wars… If it wasn’t space opera, it didn’t interest me. Certainly, nothing involving bad-ass martial arts on the gritty streets of New York would’ve caught my fancy then.
However, by 1986,
Transformers: The Movie had turned a children’s cartoon into something gritty and bad-ass, and James Cameron had proven that space opera could be gritty and bad-ass with
Aliens. It was the right time for me to discover Eastman and Laird’s gritty and bad-ass
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I still treasure those original issues today.
By 1987, it had to be gritty and bad-ass to interest me at all, and
Predator and
RoboCop were exactly that. I remember reading the editorial in Mirage comics that TMNT was being produced as an animated series, and expectations were high; a gritty and bad-ass cartoon? This could be cooler than
Galaxy Rangers!
See where I’m going with this?
Suffice it to say, I was appalled by TMNT ’87. The Turtles were cute, not cool. The humor was childish, the characters were shallow, the action was moronic, and Krang took the Utrom concept from the comics and shat all over it. I was disgusted. The merchandising, the toys, and the Jim Henson movies only made it worse, and I washed my hands of the whole franchise.
I hated the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
So, for the last thirty years, I’ve ignored TMNT entirely. I never saw
The Next Mutation, the 4Kids TV cartoon, the 2007 CGI movie, or the new live-action films, and I’d never even heard about the Nickelodeon series… not until a junior high student of mine showed me a clip on his iPad last month.
“When I was your age, the Turtles were cool,” I started to tell him, like any cranky middle-aged man would talk to a teenager. “They ARE cool,” he insisted. “Just watch.”
TMNT cartoons never felt right to me — and live-action TMNT never worked, either — but CGI is uniquely suited to the concept. The lighting is moody and evocative, the movement is dynamic and exciting, and the production design is simple but impeccably detailed at the same time. The quality of the animation amazed me — even surpassing
Star Wars: Rebels — and the character designs are perfect. Finally, the Turtles are cute AND cool! I was hooked immediately.
Still, I wasn’t prepared for the depth of characterization, the quality of the writing, the talents of the cast, or the spectacular action sequences. And the humor! This show has me laughing out loud every episode, something a TV series rarely ever manages to do. This show is so much fun to watch!
So, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve shown it to any student, friend or colleague I can, and reactions have been enormously positive across the board. I’ve prepared class presentations about the evolution of the franchise, and solicited opinions from adults totally unfamiliar with TMNT. I’ve compared other film and TV adaptations, and found them all lacking (although the CGI film from 2007 was pretty good).
I’ve also bought over two dozen action figures, and boy, are they a mixed bag…!
Anyway, this show has made me a TMNT fan again, and I can’t wait to see more of the series. It disappoints me to know it’s already over — and even more disappointing to see what’s replaced it — but for now, I’m looking forward to enjoying the remaining hundred episodes or so. Honestly, I haven’t seen a cartoon this good since
The Maxx.
For those of you who enjoy it as much as I do, does anything else on American TV compare?