Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles

TEENAGE MUTANT HERO TURTLES
Made by: Mirage
Shown on: BBC
Years shown: 1987-96

Theme tune: “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles/ Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles/Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles/Heroes in a half-shell, Turtle Power!/They’re the world’s most fiercesome fighting team/They’re heroes in a half-shell and they’re green/When the evil Shredder attacks/Those Turtle boys don’t cut him no slack/Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles…Leonardo leads, Donatello does machines/Raphael is cool, but crude/Michaelangelo is a party-dude!/Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles/Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles/Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles/Heroes in a half-shell, Turtle Power!”

Cowabunga! The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the comic-book creations of Americans Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird back in 1984, but it was a few years before this diluted cartoon version reached our screens. But once the Turtles landed, they were everywhere: lunch-boxes, pencil-cases, T-shirts, bum-bags, trainers, action figures, trading cards, and even their own line in frozen pizzas (including the surprisingly good apple and cheese flavour.) Their name had to be altered to Hero Turtles in the UK, although as the cartoon itself wasn’t altered, it is unlikely this would have done much to deter playground violence - it just made them seem more harmless to concerned parents.

So, what was the back-story to this mean, green fighting machine? Set in New York, Hamato Yoshi is cheated out of the leadership of his martial arts school by a treacherous student, and is forced to flee and live in poverty in the sewers. Why he didn’t settle for the YMCA is not made clear. Anyway, he is all alone until, one day, a young boy stumbles on the street and his pet turtles fall from their tank and into the sewers. Somehow, the tiny turtles land in the spilt radioactive contents of an old canister, and were metamorphosed into humanoid turtles. At the same time, Yoshi was transformed into a humanoid sewer-rat, and took on the name Splinter. He trained the turtles as his students, teaching them to be a Ninja force for good, and also introduced them to their staple food of pizza. Leonardo, in the blue bandanna, was the natural leader; he was the strong, silent type, was serious about his studies, and fought with a katana sword. Equally studious was Donatello, a science enthusiast, who wore a purple bandanna, and was responsible for inventing most of the Turtles machines and weaponry. Then there was Raphael, who was undoubtedly the coolest; he fought with jitte knives, wore red, and had a quick-witted and sardonic reply for everyone. Finally, there was the youngest of the bunch, Michaelangelo (Eastman and Laird misspelled his name, but it was never altered), who wore the orange bandanna, spoke like a Californian surfer, and liked nothing better than a par-tay.

The Turtles seemed to have two purposes in life, which usually coincided in some way: to protect April O’Neil, and to defeat Shredder. April was a jump-suited reporter for Channel 6 News, who first encountered the amphibian teenagers when she climbed into the sewer to escape some of Shredder’s henchmen. Shredder is also known as Oruku Saki, Splinter’s wayward student, and having turned the martial arts school against their old master, and renaming them The Foot, he plans to take over the world. But he in turn was doing someone else’s dirty-work, namely Krang, a repulsive brain-like alien, who lived in a tank in the underground Techno Drome. In order to add muscle to his crusade, Shredder got hold of a couple of street hoodlums, Rocksteady and Bebop, and somehow combined them with a rhino and boar he happened to have around the place, creating a humanoid punk rhinoceros, and a humanoid New Wave boar. Needless to say, what they had in muscle, they lack in grey matter.

Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles also spawned a number of live-action films, critically panned but commercially fairly successful. I am loath to say it, because on paper the concept and content are less than mind-blowing, but the Turtles somehow surpassed the majority of shoddy action animations (Dungeons & Dragons, Defenders of the Earth etc.) because there was something likeable about them. Certainly superior to the vastly amusing-for-the-wrong-reasons Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, who came along during the twilight of the Turtles career.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 4/10

(Thanks to www.badfads.com for the borrowed pic)