Talking Simpsons - Bonus Holiday Podcast - What A Cartoon Movie - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Happy New Year! In case you didn't know, every month we release the premium podcast, What A Cartoon Movie. And, as we take a week off to rest and recharge, we're giving all of our listeners a chance to hear a free sample of this Patreon-exclusive series. So please, enjoy our ultra-long look at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)! And if you'd like to hear 70 more episodes of What A Cartoon Movie—with a new one to come every month—simply head on over to the Talking Simpsons Network and sign up at the $10 level. If you enjoy hearing us talk about cartoons, you'll be glad you did!

Cartoon's were present in the past Every week will be an animated bash What a cartoon, what a cartoon Maybe you're short for mostly shows We'll talk while analyze exploring as we go What a cartoon, what a cartoon What a cartoon, what a cartoon What I can't do What I can't do What I can't do Hello everybody and welcome to What A Cartoon Movie where we love penicillin on our pizza.

I'm your host, the purse-grabbing puke Bob Mackie. This is an audio exploration of every animated movie ever. Who is here with me today as always? Hey, it's Henry Gilbert and I'm going to put a domino box right in the middle of this podcast for proper product placement in this month's subject is the 1990 live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film Major League butt-kicking is back in town And yes, it is live-action month What a Cartoon Movie, where you are the fool, but we appreciate your patronage, and that's why this month we're covering a

real crowd pleaser, the original Ninja Turtles film. Yes, yeah, and accidentally on the 29th, or sorry, 34th anniversary of the movie, yes. Hey, we're getting in early before all the thought pieces are written, or people are just republishing their 30th anniversary thought pieces. Or their 25th, a big part of my research was a 25th and a 30th anniversary oral history, both of which were very well done.

And I say it's a crowd pleaser, but really, it's a crowd pleaser for elder millennials, and we welcome anyone else who's interested, but this is firmly in our demographic, Henry and myself. Absolutely. And after we both tapped into such a fertile turtle material when we covered the original five episode season of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that it seemed like it was finally time for us to cover this one.

And also, I suppose it fits in an accidental niche I didn't realize until doing this research. Like, most, not all, but most of our live action ones involve the Henson Company or Henson employees in some way. Well, for the longest time, if you wanted to make any sort of live action, cartoony thing, you needed puppets. And that's where our old friend Jim Henson comes in, or his company.

Yes, yes. And this is no different. But yeah, I really loved this movie when I was 10 years old, or at nine when I saw it in theaters. And I'm sure it touched you deeply as well, Bob. Actually, I hate to be contrarian here, Henry, but also we were seven, I believe, when this movie came out. Shit, you're right. To do some millennial math here. And I don't want to think that I'm older than I actually am, by the way. I'm not 44. I'm going to be 42 soon, sir. But not to be a contrarian, I was kind of lukewarm on this movie because I was a future podcaster.

When I sat down to watch this movie, number one one I made the mistake of having bought the Dell paperback from my book fair in grade school So I knew what was going to happen I learned that lesson for that movie and I never repeated it again. Don't read the book before the movie But also it was a special day because you know money was tight at this time We were living with my grandma. My mom took me to see this for my birthday in May of 1990 we waited a bit and when I walked away my main impression was oh I mean I guess I had fun because I got to go to a movie but in my head during the movie I just kept thinking well that's not like the cartoon and that's not like the cartoon

and why is the channel of the news different than on the cartoon I just kept thinking of how it didn't align with the version of the show that I actually like, the version of the characters and the story. And then, you know, leaving the theater, I see the poster that says, hey dude, this ain't no cartoon. And I thought, no, why are you trying to diss the cartoon? I like it. Over time, I grew to enjoy this film.

For whatever reason, I had it on VHS as well. But yeah, I didn't really come to appreciate it until my 20s and my 30s. But at the time I was just a pedant about how it was so different than the cartoon that I loved. Oh man, well I, did I also feel, and yes, I was seven when I saw this. But did I miss bebop, rockste rocksteady Krang and a lot of the

other like cart more colorful stuff of the cartoon sure I also missed those guys but I loved this movie when I first saw it I thought I was watching magic on screen when I first saw it I I pulled up the like original trailer on YouTube just to remind myself the first time I saw a trailer for this movie, I was like, what? What, like I had never been more excited for a movie when I saw that trailer. I mean, I really did enjoy how they looked on the screen.

I wasn't even thinking of puppets or how they functioned, even though I think around the time there were a lot of behind the scenes features on TV to promote the film showing like here are the robot heads and here are the people inside of them. But once that all began, the movie began rather, I completely forgot about the fact that these are men in suits that are killing them actively on the screen.

And then later in life when DVD and Blu-ray releases come out, you get the freeze frames of their horrifying faces in the mouths, which I hope at some point they edit out, they digitally erased those faces. They have somewhat, and the director of this movie notices those things too, and it drives him crazy, and he wanted to fix them, and I have all the stories about that. But no, it was a magical time when I got to see it in theaters. I'm going to guess it was spring break of the first week of April.

I don't think it would have been like literally March 30th of the first day I was in theaters, but it was definitely as early as I get my mom to take us. I loved it so much, my brother loved it so much, and then we got the VHS tape that fall, watched it eight trillion times, so much so that the pizza commercial at the start of it has also been forever etched into my memory. What that baseball team the Little League

baseball team? I'm playing right field it's important I know this. Did Randy Newman write that? It was a wannabe Randy Newman. It was a great it was a real great fake charity thing too because it's like Pizza Hut has always supported the Little League Baseball of America or whatever it's like so it's like Pizza Hut has always supported the Little League Baseball of America or whatever. It's like, so it's not just a pizza commercial, it's like a pretend charity commercial. I like that you mentioned Spring Break because it literally was Spring Break,

but you were also in first grade. So you were thinking, God, I can't wait to get away from these shapes and colors. Thank you. I only just- You finally relax. I only just learned what a Spring Break was. But no, I love this movie now. If you'd asked me when I was 10, I would say I like Secret of the Ooze more because it was more fun and silly and more like

the cartoons. But as I got older and cooler though, I realized that the greediness in the the first movie with more of its violence, that's a lot more fun than the second movie. Yeah, and then as you get older and you learn more about filmmaking and indie filmmaking, you walk away from this film with the idea like, oh, this is just an indie movie that rented puppets. That's essentially all this is. Yes, yeah, and that has a real great feel to it. They filmed it well, it had a great director,

and yeah, it's this amazing perfect storm that easily could have led to just a gigantic failure but it's able to come together into a actual good film. Now look I'm not saying it's it's not Citizen Kane, I'm not saying that. I'd even say like you know Tim Burns Batman is a better movie than this, but it's a good It's so much better than it deserves to be it could have been very very bad I think the last time I watched this I gave it a three stars on letterboxer. I think is more than fair Oh, yeah

No, and meanwhile, you know in the sequels they they toned down the violence, but we kids loved the violence They the it's funny to go back and watch all the interviews where they go like, you know, the turtles teach his kids confidence. It doesn't make them violence. But we, as kids, were like, yeah, I like the one with the swords. I like the one with the size. I want to hit people with nunchucks. The violence was the appeal. Well, you know, now I'm thinking more about it. And I was a huge Raphael fan, you know, going into this movie as a seven year old about to turn eight eight. And I just thought, well, Rafael is wrong too. He should be fun loving, wisecracking, sarcastic,

not this guy with all this malaise. Yeah, he is very angry, and he's the main turtle of the movie. The other turtles kinda have to take a back seat. I mean, I get it, Raf is, he's got the red bandana, which makes him the lead turtle, because that's what all their turtle colors were and him as a grumpy Gus is it feels the most teen age to me. Well we'll get into it but like I do enjoy the film but just how it

is so misaligned with how things are in the cartoon I find very funny where in this movie Michelangelo and Donatello are the same character and they're always like huffing paint in the corner of every scene. I think the closest to doing machines is working on a truck with Casey Jones. Yes. That's all Donnie does. Don't make Corey Feldman your brainy character.

That's my casting advice. I think the Feldman was maybe their biggest mistake in the movie, but yeah. I mean, lines in this movie have lived in my head for a million years like a special Rathlines, especially like I don't want to fight you What lives in my head is for baby turtles Yes Or also like the exchange of like I lost a sigh then it is gone. I can get it back

I think when we were talking about this movie. I just went splinter Yes, yeah, I do that. I go up to my roof every night, and I do that to the moon. I'm crazy. Okay I'm a loony okay. I got we're gonna be doing this for the next five hours people lock in We're gonna be doing this for the next five hours people lock in It's funny to me cuz that actor John pice like he stars in real things is like cops and stuff He's been in a lot of actual like real real movies and TV shows So it's just funny that he like one of outside of the mask He's one he's most famous for an incredibly broad New York accent as a turtle You know if they made this film a year or two later,

the turtles could have been Michael Ian Black and Robert Ben Grant, at least two of them. They would have been cheaper. But all right, so the history of how this happened, it is very well documented all over the internet because it's a beloved film by many. And also there's a lot of great, very dedicated Ninja Turtles fan pages and wikis out there that I

appreciate for their stuff. But also in our you know, news sourcing era, want to say one, the German DVD director's commentary, but the 2015 Hollywood Reporter oral history and the 2020 oral history that was published on the ringer by Alan Siegel Who is a nice guy and he did a very good history that had some facts Many places even the Hollywood Reporter missed out on but I guess since we already did the pure History of the turtles and how they got to be toys in a cartoon show I think it's best to start with the director because I do think he is the key. If one person should get credit for why this movie is as good as it is, it's

the director. He had a lot of great decisions that made it this. I still don't really know who this guy is. Ah, well you'll learn now, Bob. He's the Irish-British-Nepo baby director, Steve Barron. I stay out because his father was an actor, his mother was a director. He had an early in in the world of filmmaking in England. But yeah he's unforgettable to 90s kids and 80s kids for many reasons. Mainly he, at least in the United Kingdom, was arguably the top music video director of the 1980s. Like if you were directing a video in England, you wanted this guy.

Yeah, I'm looking at the list of music videos right now and there's some very iconic ones. And actually, my wife and I have been watching her collection of those DVD collections that are organized by directors. Each director has their own DVD full of all of their videos with commentary and just realizing how so many filmmakers just came from this world at this point in time. I don't think that pipeline exists anymore. No, yeah. I was thinking about this when Blank Check did their David Fincher series because they did an episode where they just did commentary over all of his major music videos or maybe all of his music videos. And he was like, yeah, he was one of the best music video directors of his day

and he translated it into great, great films. Some can and some couldn't, but that doesn't make, like, Mark Romanek, I don't think, or Romanek, I don't think he did any great movies, but his music videos are still unforgettable to me. Hey, One Hour Photo is really good. Oh that is good, okay I take that back. I forgot that was him.

It is fun, like I will say the Weezer videos on those DVDs, it's at a point in time where Rivers Cuomo is the most up his own ass. So every interview with him is just hilarious. He's just this little wispy nerd boy who's like, I didn't like what he wanted to do but I guess people liked it. Oh man, that's, you know, there's a little bit of that spirit that comes up in other

parts of this history that I'm like, yeah, the music, the guys who started the music videos, they're either totally on the same wavelength as the director or they have lead singer syndrome and they don't like a director being the boss on a set and don't like listening to them. But so some of his first big hits, he did Toto's Africa video, speaking of Weezer, the better version, Toto's Africa. Oh yeah, the video where they play on top of a giant book. Yes, yeah, I love that video.

Like it's so, it's very corny, but also it's like, I believe it's a 1982 or 83 music video. It's setting the tone for what's music videos. It seems corny now. Even in the nineties, it seemed corny, but it's, it's a fun music video for Toto's Africa. And then, uh, if there wasn't thriller, I think this would be the most famous Michael Jackson video, Billie Jean of like him dancing down the light up streets. Dun, dun, dun, dun. Yeah. That, dun. Yeah, that's Steve Barron as well. And he also did a ton of British ones.

This was also why New Wave got so big in America with British bands because they were making more music videos. I'm also seeing here, he did the video for Take On Me, which is legendary. It's like, could be the best music video of all time. Yes, yeah. Or at least in the top three. So 83, so 83 is that Billy G music video. He does a bunch of other ones.

84, he gets to make his first movie, which is the what if a nerd had a computer that told him to date Virginia Manson? Well that would be Electric Dreams. Da da da da da da. It has a great trailer. I remember the actual movie's not that great. Yeah, this is a corny classic that I hear a lot of people

say is fun but not great. It's about an evil computer that ruins your dating life, I think. Played by Bud Court, yeah. Harold Amod? The Harold Amod, yes. Harold himself from Harold Amod. He's the computer who is first going

to help him start dating and then decides he doesn't like it and it causes problems. But yeah, it was a big box office flop and Steve Barron feared he'd never get to, he'd be put into directors jail forever after that. So he goes back to music videos. That's when he does Take On Me,

which yeah, one of the best music videos ever, but also in 85, he does the Money For Nothing, Dire Straits music video also. Hey Hey that brings us to Simpsons because David Silverman designed the characters in that video. And this connects it to when we covered Reboot because the people who made that are the you know the seeds for what grows into Reboot. Steve Barron wasn't that involved in Reboot but this is the reason he is an executive producer on the Reboot series as well. Oh really? Wow.

But then Steve Barron, he's a quality director and he seemingly is good at working with lots of different people. 1986 brings him to a very important moment in his life. He is going to get to work with David Bowie on a music video for the song Underground as featured in Jim Henson's Labyrinth. Which song is that? Underground, underground, get me, get me, get me out of here. That's the one. Okay, got it. The credit song I think is one. Oh no wonder I don't remember it because it's not a performance, right? Yes. It's not performed in the movie? Okay. By the way, I love

Labyrinth. I have seen it in its original print of it that played in San Francisco one time. It's great. Look, it's kind of quirky, but I like it more than Dark Crystal. I think Dark Crystal, too, up its own ass in lore. Labyrinth, more fun. But so David Bowie, the music video is actually not him playing his character from Labyrinth. It's actually him playing David Bowie who basically in take on me style he sort of becomes a sketchy cartoon character that gets teleported into the world of Labyrinth and so it's all of the puppet characters from Labyrinth including Hoggle are chasing after him. You know, I'm surprised I've never seen this but I guess guess in its day, Labyrinth wasn't a big hit.

No, no, it was. It also, like, I never saw it until you talk about those music video collections. When I worked at a video store in 2007, I put on the David Bowie music video collection just as, you know, easy background. You get to listen to David Bowie all day, and that one would come up, the first couple of times I was like, right, I guess they did make music videos outside of the film for this, I like that. Now apparently David Bowie himself thought it was kind of mid. He didn't particularly like the music video. But you know who did? Jim Henson, he thought this guy is great.

I love Steve Barron's style. He can work with these puppets really good. And Jim Henson is trying to pitch a brand new TV series. In 1986, he wants somebody to help him with the pilot. Steve Barron is tapped to be the director of the pilot for The Storyteller. Oh, wow. Okay. So that's him.

Yes. He directs the pilot for The Storyt the Emmy winning nightmare fuel Hans my hedgehog Which I watched the one everyone remembers. Sorry to interrupt you That's the one everyone remembers for being the most nightmarish and it really really is I just I just rewatched it yesterday I think I started like having to like control my emotions because I was like Oh, yeah, this is reminding me of how scared it made me as a kid And I think I started like having to like control my emotions because I was like, Oh yeah, this is reminding me of how scared it made me as a kid. It's like, it starts with a woman having a hedgehog, a human hybrid baby, and it gets

worse from there that his father, and it's just horrible abuse the entire episode. And it's, it's a dark European. That's what Henson wanted. He wanted dark European sensibilities of a, of a, of Grimm's what Henson wanted. He wanted dark European sensibilities of Grimm's fairy tale type stuff. Yeah, and if I recall correctly, it was made for British television. Mm-hmm, that he hoped, they were the key financer.

It's all British actors and writers and director, in Baron's case. And Henson used it as, Barron directed the pilot. It is so heavily edited, and maybe that's because they have the storyteller as an easy device. You just cut to John Hurt, and he's like, well, then 20 years later,

sometimes the story doesn't flow that well, and you wonder if it's bad editing or just intentional. Or not having the budget to depict certain things, I guess. I, Steve Barron, I think was used to having the deep pockets of record labels to pay for his music videos. And I do think he faced budget problems on his movies a lot, as we'll see in the Ninja Turtles as well. So after the storyteller's pilot gets sold, it gets two more episodes

directed by Barron of its like eight episodes, Fear Not and Sap Sorrow, which are also very creepy. Two of those, including the Hedgehog one, are written by the future Oscar-winning director of the English patient, Anthony Minghella, as well, who is an important part of this story too. So that takes us up to 1987 with Steve Barron.

Now it's 1988. Turtles, the cartoon, really starting to take off. It launched in 87. 88 is when it gets big. 89 it's getting even bigger and the Konami video games are coming out too. So it's getting big with kids but it can't be. It's the movie future not looking so good. Yeah, if I recall the timeline, it's 87, late 87 you have the five part mini series, 88 you get 13 weekly episodes, 89 is the full syndication push of 65. So that's the year, you know,

there's a big push for TV daily episodes. That's the year the video games come out. It's a peak year for Turtles, except the movie is the following year. Yeah, that's why these fads usually, if they can stay big three years in a row, then you know it was a giant fad toy. Like if you get one Christmas, lots of fad toys have one Christmas. Two, you're doing pretty good. Three, then you're an unprecedented hit like the Ninja Turtles. Yeah, 89 gave us full turtle saturation

So we'd be prepared for a movie in 1990 And a quick rundown of the key players in this who aren't Eastman and Lair the creators of turtles You've got Mark Friedman Who is the savvy toy vet who hooked them up with playmates and Fred Wolf to make the show and the toys and Mark Friedman was their like entryway into Hollywood because he was and honestly like I think Mark Friedman I said it before I've seen him in videos call himself the fifth turtle I'm like you were a lucky guy who landed them and got them in meetings and you collected a third of the pay and

then they you stopped working with them in the early 90s and you haven't had anything since and we all know the fifth turtle is actually Venus de Milo. Boo. In The Toys That Made Us, that is what causes Eastman and Laird to break up apparently. Laird hated Venus de Milo. We gotta put breasts on these things now? Great.

But yeah, so Mark Friedman is having meetings with people all over town. This is where we bring in the now passed away Professional surfer turned Hollywood agent Gary proper now Gary proper He is his big claim to fame at that point was Gallagher's manager and agent so he was working with the big time hit maker slash future very sad man, uh, Gallagher. Yeah, I mean that may be a funny fact now, but in 87 you wanted to be on the Gallagher train. For sure, for sure. Like, uh, and this is why Gallagher late in life when he was mad at everybody, one of the things he was mad about was saying like, and I almost had a piece of the turtles,

you know, and they kept me out of that. But I think that's wishful thinking on Gallagher's part. I think he just happened to be by Gary Proper as Gary was working on all of the turtle deals. You know, I'll confess, as a kid, I loved Gallagher. I rented every Gallagher special at the video store. If I saw it was playing on Comedy Central, I'd watch it all the way to the end.

I loved it every time, yeah. Oh, he's gonna sit on the giant couch. If I saw it was playing on Comedy Central, I'd watch it all the way to the end. I loved it every time, yeah. Oh, he's gonna sit on the giant couch, I can't wait. Now comes out the guy from just the 10 of us to pretend to be a typewriter. But so Gary Proppers is manager, and if you wanna read some funny articles, you can read about his later war with Gallagher

as Gallagher and him are kind of suing each other or sniping each other in the press for who owes people what. But so Gary sees the turtles comic. He early on like I believe 86 or 87 he sees this turtle comic and thinks this could really be something. I think this could be a big movie. Apparently the timeline is a little spongy here but my impression is he seems to notice it before the toys, like just as a somewhat big in the indie comic space hit that most people have never heard of.

Yeah, and one factor that led to me appreciating the film is realizing that it's actually based on the comic book, which as we covered in our What a Cartoon episode, that comic book was not available to children. No. You had a much softer, more colorful comic book on the shelves of your grocery store comic book rack. But the Eastman and Laird one, you have to have found

a comic book shop, which was not, you know, that's not on the map for me as a seven year old or eight year old. You had to hope an older brother would let you read his copy, or some friend's older brother would. But yeah, so proper though, he was, he thought it could really be something. And so he had a friend named Cameron Kim Dawson, who was a one time Disney exec. And both of them were like, this could really be something we want to sell this to Hollywood. So propering Dawson, then talk to Hollywood. So propering Dawson, then talk to, uh, Friedman. Friedman says to the Eastman and Laird,

Hey, we have a deal outside of the toy and cartoon deal I'm trying to make. I have these Hollywood guys who say they think they can make it into a movie. And again, these guys are the middlemen and things don't happen without middlemen who get you into meetings. So I don't want to say they did nothing. But if Eastman and Laird didn't learn from guys like Jack Kirby who got ripped off, these fucking assholes would be the ones who stole the turtles from Eastman and Laird. So I also don't want to be too nice to them. But yeah, so when Friedman brings proper and Dawson in, Eastman and Laird are like, all right, they can try selling this movie, but we get final say on the script and we get

actual real creative involvement. No stealing and the executives just tore off their hats and stomped on them. D'oh! Fine, we'll only take a third of the money instead of 80%. So Eastman especially makes the point of like you you know, everybody thinks, oh, comic book movies how they are today or even 30 years ago. But it's like, if you think of the mid eighties, you've got Superman four, swap thing, Howard the duck, huge failures. And you have as far as toys, the comics that failed. You have Masters of the Universe that almost basically does kill Gollum Globus in 87. And Garbage Pail Kids, a massive failure.

Yeah, even as a child I knew it was beneath me, that film. Oh, I never, I still haven't watched any Garbage Pail Kids. I've seen clips in reviews. I think I read it just to see what could this possibly be and I watched it just like, oh, you think I would like this? I may what could this possibly be and I watched it just like oh you think I would like this I may be nine sir, but I have taste Well, yeah, just a little viewer or listeners know that I did have a teeny tiny amount of taste as a kid I saw Masters of the Universe in 87 at five years old in theaters. I did not like it. It did bore me

I've TMNT was so much better than it. I was having this chat with my husband and he was saying, why would somebody say no to making a Turtles movie when it's the biggest toy around? And I told him, he manned before that was the biggest toy around and did terrible as a movie. So for that reason, the two guys who got the rights to shop around to the studios a Ninja Turtles movie said they were getting nothing. Every studio said every studio looked at them like they had lobsters coming out of their ears was how it was described. They all turned it down even as the cartoon started to gain traction they're just like a turtle movie? What?

So if everybody in Hollywood's saying no, what about in Hong Kong? Bum-bum-bum. Here's some quick Hong Kong movie history for folks out there. At one time the Shaw Brothers was the biggest studio of motion pictures made in specifically the Hong Kong region of China, which at that time was I believe a sorta British colony. Definitely the Brits still had an interest in it and mainland China wouldn't get ownership of it until 97. So, but this isn't a history of Hong Kong. But from the Shaw brothers, two guys of their top producers quit that and wanted to start a competing company.

They call that company Golden Harvest and they pay their stars better. They give them a lot more free rein. They are known as the better place to work at than Shaw Brothers, though Golden Harvest is full of like terrible treatment of its stunt men and all that, it's hardly that good. But Golden Harvest, they are the first believers in the Bruce, in Bruce Lee. They make Bruce Lee a star.

They even start working on American films. They're like, oh, well, they make that Enter the Dragon film, which does very well. Unfortunately, Bruce Lee doesn't live to see its release. So that really kind of fucks up Golden Harvest's plans. And then they start even working with Jackie Chan, and he gets big, and they try to sell him overseas. That's why Golden Harvest makes those cannonball run films, partially to try to launch Jackie Chan. You know, I'm only watching these Hong Kong movies

from the 80s for the first time in my life, and from the 70s too, and I can't help but think, why did you keep these for me? I think they were just jealous where we can't do action this crazy let's hide these only weirdos with catalogs can watch these films. I am very lucky I had a friend who introduced me to Ron Moen half and then many of these classic 70s and 80s and 90s Hong Kong action films as we refer to them back then. And so I fortunately do know them, but yeah, they were incredibly hard. And that was only because my friend knew to go to a certain store that sold bootlegs in Florida,

in a Chinatown in Northern Florida. But so Golden Harvest, they were trying, they kept trying to really become an international film company. They didn't just want to be about Hong Kong and Jackie Chan also wanted to be a Hollywood movie star. He made that movie, The Big Brawl or also it's called like Battle Creek City, I believe is an alternate title for it. But, uh, it's crazy to think that Jackie had all these attempts, but it was only thanks to the Weinstein brothers marketing of him that

he finally became a thing in America. And hey, future splinter Jackie Chan. That's true and man it's all connected. Yeah so so but partially to distribute films overseas and to try to make Dent in America, Golden Harvest does have a arm in North America, in Los Angeles. And so they're trying to work on some films. And the boss of Golden Harvest at that time is a man named Thomas Gray. And he knows just the thing that's going to make Golden Harvest popular in America. He loves the BBC sitcom, Are You Being Served? And he's gonna make it work for America. Oh boy, I mean, maybe I could appreciate that now as an adult, but the second Red Dwarf ended,

that theme song started up, and I was just scrambling for the remote, much like when MASH would come on late at night, like, no, no, no, get away from MASH. Just the sound of the registers going off. Yes. It's like that, yeah. Like Pavlovian response after a certain amount of time. Yeah, I wonder how non-American listeners,

especially in British areas, like, do they, what do they reflect on are you being served as? Because to us it really was just like packaged with the fancier, nerdier stuff like Monty Python and Red Dwarf as equal on PBS in America. It was basically Pardon My Zinger. So they're working on making it into a movie called Department Store. How exciting.

And so working on that script is a 70s comedian turned sitcom writer Bobby Herbeck. And Bobby Herbeck worked on different strokes, The Jefferson, Small Wonder. I would bet he was friends with or knew Mike Scully. I would bet him and Mike Scully were buddies. Based on which sitcom? Small Wonder. Oh, no.

Mike Scully was Out of This World. Oh, God. My bad. All right. It's about the space girl not the robot girl. Oh how can I get those confused? I watched a ton of out of this world I have never seen one second of small wonder that was kept for me and I'm grateful. So Herbeck says he's hating working on Department Store and he's more than happy to talk about his involvement in the Turtles film. Well, honestly, I think he overrates it.

But so Herbeck, he knows Gary Propper and Kim Dawson and also Gallagher because he's from the same class of comedian. And so Herbeck is working at Golden Harvest. He's the guy who says, pitch this to Golden Harvest with me. I'll write it and I'm sick of working on this are you being served thing so help me pitch it. And I'm sure Gallagher is around in these meetings too but Gallagher before he died he seemed to think he was part of those meetings and had a piece of it. That's right his

many complaints laid in life about how he could have gotten that sweet sweet turtles money. That was one of the most shocking parts of his famous Mark Maron interview. Him saying the turtle's like, what, turtles, huh? That's the second most famous part. The first most famous part is, come on Gallagher, get back here Gallagher, oh, he's gone. That's his legacy, that's that old asshole's legacy, man. Okay, so, Herbeck's getting in meetings with Golden Harvest,

but Thomas Gray still thinks it's stupid. This is 1988, coincidentally, as the toys are starting to take off. And as the story goes, they tell, after a couple more meetings with Thomas Gray, who keeps turning him down, they tell Gray, ask your kids if you should make a Ninja Turtles movie. And Gray said he did, and his kids told him you have to make a Turtles movie. They were

that excited about it. And that's when Thomas Gray finally goes like, oh, all right. Okay. Okay. The kids have spoken. So he is able to get a green light from his big boss Raymond Chao. Hollywood Reporter even gets a date for it. They say they have a June 13th, 1988 memo of Raymond Chao approving a three million dollar pre-production investment and gets them to start selling it to distributors. Though Gray also has a very, just to let you know the level he thought this movie was going to be at. Here's a quote from Gray on how he imagined it, from the Hollywood Reporter.

Wait a minute, this is nothing more than four of our Chinese stuntmen in rubber suits. We can make this movie for peanuts in Hong Kong. So imagine that originally this was just going to be four guys in a mobile rubber suits kicking people and that would be a pretty bad movie. With no robot heads. None of those emoting robot heads yeah and Herbeck is very funny because as he remembers it he's like Eastman and Laird were a little too precious they didn't like any of my ideas they kept looking at their shoes and I was talking to him and from Eastman and Laird's side they're like yeah his script sucked he didn't get what's special about the turtles. Like he

was a sick cop guy who wrote bad jokes. Yeah, I mean credit to them for having dignity and not willing to just take whatever paycheck came their way. Yeah, they actually cared about having a good movie. Like they were sick of seeing bad movies and they also, thank God, they kept all of their rights to this stuff and could do that. Like again, if East Middler didn't do that, this would just been a shitty movie that would have been made as fast as possible by Golden Harvest, like all the other horrible comic book adaptations.

So Herbeck gets written out of it, but he still gets to have co-writing credit and the money so he can't complain too much In all the versions of the script by the way This is a quick aside in all the versions of the script This is something to say about how that the oh they took it from the comics Well the love of pizza April working as a news reporter their colored bandanas saying cowabunga And more of their personalities that is much more from the cartoon than the comic book. Yeah you know what you are correct now

that I think about it when I walked away from the movie upon my last viewing I thought you know I think the 10% of this that's like the cartoon made me wonder why the other 90% wasn't like the cartoon. It seemed like they took the spongy things that they're like well Mattel, playmates and Fred Wolf can't sue us over this. They can't sue us over the word cowabunga, but they could sue us if we put bebop and rocksteady in this who never appeared in the comics. All of this stuff that is clearly from the cartoons and the late David Wise who listeners from that What a Cartoon will remember was the showrunner of the original turtles cartoons

There's this one classic interview where he's like, I'm not bitter. I'm not bitter, but and This it's funny you mentioned that poster Bob because this is actually what he complained about When describing the original poster he said David Wise said quote it shows them coming out of the sewer and it says hey, dude This is no cartoon. Well dude, you wouldn't be saying dude, if I hadn't started saying that in the cartoon, that really pissed me off.

You know, he was right. Yeah, no, all of the surfer guy personality, that is not on the comic page. Honestly, I think the tagline is obviously a way to let people know, this is not the thing you're getting on TV for free. This is something different. It's their way of saying in case,

because the poster is not in motion, and you might think, you know, the poster in case you don't know is them peeking out from under the sewer grate so you don't really see them, because you're supposed to pay money to see them. You don't want to give it away on the poster, but then when they show that little, then I guess they do have to go like,

hey guys, this isn't a cartoon by the way. This isn't like the Heathcliff compilation movies that decrypt you off with. Yeah, I guess animated movies were coming out of their bad reputation at the time. Coming out of their shell, no. Why not? So okay, this is where Anthony Minghella comes back

into the story in a very surprising way. And again, this is the late director of the English patient and of many classic films. But at the time he was a screenwriter first and he was working at Golden Harvest, trying to do punch-up on a script that I've seen called A Night in Bangkok, which I have no clue what it is. I wondered if it was like an adaptation of the concept album One Night in Bangkok that

has the classic corny song, but whatever he was working on called A Night in Bangkok, he's in the Golden Harvest office. He hears about their turtles plan and he's like, oh this is like a puppety live-action thing. I know just the guy who I just work with on the storyteller, Steve Barron. Wow, so Anthony Mengella is the the connection there. Yes, if Anthony Mengella wasn't working in Hollywood on a Golden Harvest thing, then Steve Barron would not have been even gotten a call to be brought in. And it totally makes sense.

His music videos, like that's very impressive, like internationally. You can see why the Golden Harvest team would have seen on either coast would have been like, wow, these famous music videos that everybody's heard of and he'll direct our movie. That's awesome. Also, the understanding was probably, Oh, kids love those damn things. Yes. Yeah. And we want teenage cool guys and this guy makes things for cool teens.

And on top of that, Baron was really wanting to get back into making a full theatrical film and I think he knew to get another shot he was gonna have to do this like he needed to take on a Golden Harvest kids film if he wanted to get back into the movies. So Baron signs on to do it he agrees to do it. Sounds like it wasn't much of a convert like it didn't take a lot of time and once he signs on this is where Baron identifies that and this is why I think out of anybody who could have taken that job then Baron was probably the best because unlike I think everybody else who made comic book movies back then He actually read the comic books and liked them. He he was like I want to make this comic book We're taking from the comic books. Let's

read the comic books. And so if you read the original 12 Turtles comics, you can pick out 40 pages that are this movie. Now that's across a lot of weird shit, but there are 40 pages that are this movie. Yeah, it does seem like he loved the comics and not in the way people have to pretend to love the comics when they're on press junkets. For sure. Like, oh yeah, I love, what's that say? Madam Webb, favorite character of mine. You know, by the way, I just heard Bobby Moynihan

say this story that he's a real comic nerd. He said that despite what some may assume about her, that Megan Fox was a real comic nerd fan and when she hosted SNL one year, years before she was April O'Neil in the movie, that she said to him, oh you like comics? You like Eastman and Laird? My dream is to be April O'Neil. And it came true twice.

And it turned into a nightmare. But so yeah, Steve Barron actually read the comics and gave a shit. He was not saying, oh, this is like, you know, a dumb kid's cartoon about stupid turtles. Who gives a shit? Like when he met with Eastman and Laird, they loved him because he came in with noted versions, copies of their comics where he's like, okay, so this page will be this scene and then this page is that scene. And also they really respected him because he hired a British comic artist, Brendan McCarthy, who was doing some really good stuff with Peter Milligan on 2000 AD, and he worked with Baron on the storyteller.

He's the storyboarder for it. He'd go on to, McCarthy would be a major storyboarder on Reboot, and also co-writer, storyboarder of Mad Max Fury Road. Oh wow. A lot of major people worked on this that I was not keeping track of, or I didn't was not aware of, but Baron had the funny story of meeting with McCarthy and saying, hey, do you want to help me with making the boards for this movie? Have you heard of the turtles? And McCarthy, being a comic professional, knew exactly who they were and was very excited. So yes, he comes in

with all these things scenes from the Mirage comics where he got say a rooftop battle, a battle in April's apartment, a trip to the countryside to reach to charge, Splinter being kidnapped, Raph versus Casey Jones. All these big moments that you mix and match in the the movie didn't it works to be a real movie that of course though meant her back script went down the toilet and Steve Barron's like thank you very much flush and instead they needed to tap a new screenwriter real fast and they got a guy who was fresh off of the Wonder Years, Todd Langan. So if you think this movie feels like it was written

by two 80s sitcom guys, that's why it is. Hey, at that point, a very acclaimed sitcom. No, this was a trade up from Different Strokes. No offense to Different Strokes, but Wonder Years is a better show. I don't think it ever wasn't acclaimed because it was only around for six years and just won a boatload of Emmys. No I remember loving

it as a kid too when I didn't know any of the references. But yeah so Langan works with him over a feverish few weeks at a fancy LA hotel. They have funny stories of him. Langan says like he was poolside acting out how Splinter defeats Shredder because like Barron apparently couldn't conceive. Like, all right, how does the rat beat Shredder anyway? And Langan apparently acts it out by the poolside. Barron's big vision, though, he said he wanted a kids film that was more grounded.

He didn't want all the blood and dismemberment that was in the comics. But he wanted it to be PG. But he didn't want violence. He didn't want it to be just a Cartoon we still want to crush a man on screen. Oops As long as they oops, it's PG that makes it into a joke He cited two major tonal sources for two one

He grew up watching three musketeers films a ton as a kid and he's like, yeah, it's sort of guys having adventures It's a these are just ninjas instead of musketeers. Well, that makes sense. I mean, they're fighting enemies and making little quips while they do it. Exactly. So, yeah. What if there were four musketeers? And the other thing he wrenched into? Who's four guys who have adventures with weird things in New York City in a kind of grounded, gritty way in the 80s? The Ghostbusters! So he was looking at both of those things. I bet every kid in 1990 wanted them to crossover. And I assume, just going to assume, there's at least three comic books where they do. And toys! And toys. Oh yeah, they're toys! There are toys of the Ghostbusters crossover.

The Ninja Turtles will crossover with anybody for the right money. Like they, my, my husband actually bought, uh, I think almost the full collection of the Power Rangers meet Ninja Turtles toys that they'd put out a few years ago. I just saw the other day that they announced, like it's, it's basically the turtle van that is a transformer. And the real trick of it is it comes with four different interchangeable heads, so basically the van turns into a turtle, and you put the turtle head and weapons on them, but if you're a real crazy collector

who wants to have all four turtles, well, they gotta buy it four times. Jesus, you know, I wanna tell our listeners that when I said there was probably a crossover, I assumed there was just one thing that happened once. Just upon a cursory search, I'm seeing frankly too much Ninja Turtle Ghostbuster crossover to the point

where I'm gonna say enough. But if you make a seventh film after Frozen Empire, throw the turtles in, who cares? It gets Sony to deal with Paramount to make it happen. Oh and also Baron said, "'The tone of it was similar to the storyteller. They were darker myths, but still for families. And yeah, I think some of that upsetting tone is a little there in TMNT. But okay, so what Golden Harvest has in mind is stunt men in

crappy suits and you film it cheap. How does Jim Henson's not cheap company get in there? Well, of course, that's almost all Steve Barron's doing. Jim Henson loves Steve Barron. That's what every many people say this in the history is like, yeah, Jim Henson loves Steve Barron. He loved working with him. He trusted him. That's why an unprecedented thing happened of making the deal to have the turtle costumes be in the made by Jim Henson's creature workshop to be extremely pedantic about it. Some people will say this is the first time it ever was on a non Henson movie, but technically the French production of the film the bear from

1987 has animatronic bears in it built by Jim Henson. If you didn't point that out, someone else would have, so you're right to do so. Also I got to tell some writers of Incorrect Wikis who say that Return to Oz was a Creature Shop related production. No, they hired many Henson Company vets who had left Creature Shop and did build puppets for it, but it was not the Creature creature shop just like how little shop of horrors hired a bunch of Henson people But did not work with the creature shop to make its puppets

So distinct we're tasking all of our $10 patrons to go out and correct those wikis for please I dug deep into this I still I never watched that movie the bear as a kid It looked too scary like big bears yelling at each other in a movie I don't even recall what this was it's one of those fake nature movies that were all the rage in the 80s were like they you know exactly yeah it's sort of like that except about bears in in apparently the British Columbian countryside so it's French people in BC filming bears and calling it a movie. Well whenever I record I'm looking at the mountains of British Columbia, one of

many mountains. I'm just wondering how many big feats and bears are just out there in the woods and I just can't see them. But other than the bear Jim Hansen Creature Workshop had never worked on a non-Hensen production before this movie. And when Steve Baron comes to him in I believe late 88, he's presenting to Jim Henson the comic pages and his storyboards. And Henson isn't a fan of how bloody the comics were. He doesn't like the violence. I could never find a real actual like quote of Jim Henson said this was too violent. That's one of those bullshit lies you see on the internet of like they actually toned it down because Jim Henson didn't like the violence

in the first movie. Jim Henson was fucking dead a month after the movie came out. Yeah, yeah, I actually recall, I saw this for my birthday in May and probably a week later was his passing in mid-May. Yeah, exactly, it was six weeks after the movie came out. And then the turtles were his pallbearers if you watched that funeral video. But yeah, so this is late 88. Barron shows him this stuff, but he tells him,

trust me, this won't be too bad. It's not going to be smirched the name Henson. And Henson did trust him. Though there's, I I think two bits that are not talked about in all these things about how Baron landed Jim Henson. It wasn't just like a handshake deal. First off, as you know, Bob, you've read the Henson biography or gone through a ton of it. The late 80s are not great for Henson money-wise. He would take on a job like this. Yeah, just trying everything. We talked about Labyrinth, we talked about the Dark Crystal. Those were not bombs in the way we view a bomb today,

but they really underperformed. He wanted to get away from the Muppets, but they just kept pulling him back because people wanted him to do the thing they liked the most. They didn't want all this new adult stuff from Jim Henson. So of course, wouldn't he want a cash infusion of like $3 million to make these turtle puppets on a thing on a thing he trusted. And another part of it that I don't think is talked

about enough and how Baron landed it is that Brian Henson was a big believer in the project and wanted to work on it. So I think he was also telling his dad, no, dad, let's, let's do this. I think this can work. It's not going to be too violent. Like Brian Henson, his second unit director on this movie, though Bob did a whole great biography on him on our Muppet Christmas Carol. That's right. That was the first film he ever directed at age 27. But he was getting practice on this movie in 89. To be fair, he was working on movies as a child. That's true. On his dad's movie. So he was getting practice on this movie in 89. To be fair, he was working on movies as a child. That's true.

On his dad's movie, so he was just living in the world of filmmaking. So by most accounts, Steve Barron does think he got Henson friend prices, though it was still three million dollars. They are the movie stars in this movie, is their puppet suits. Golden Harvest series, he was like, we cannot afford Jim Henson.

And Baron was able to convince him like, if Jim Henson wants to do this, you pay what he can do because this makes this a real movie. Like the Garbage Pail Kids movies, or say Gwildor in Master's Universe, look like shit, because they didn't have Jim Henson's company building them. Yeah, and I know you're going to get to this Henry, but just based on what I was reading about Jim Henson and the Muppets and doing my research for the Muppet Christmas Carol

podcast, they had really been experimenting with radio controlled puppets since the maybe second Muppet movie. So this is the result of 10 years of experimentation. And then the next year we'd have dinosaurs, which is basically what if what we did here was a TV show? Yeah, this was a real creature shop R&D thing for them. Like they got to build upon what they've been doing. So yeah, you can see radio control full bodied suits, like full body suits are as old as Big Bird or no bit older than Big Bird. I think that Chinese dragon for the commercials they've done is actually an older full body suit. But this would be their first where you don't have a hand

and one arm that doesn't move. Both arms can move because the face is radio controlled by a hand puppet off screen. And it is a highly choreographed, multi-synced character act out. And you stick a man in there who doesn't mind dying inside of a little prison. Yes. Like you can see earlier examples of this like the the poor little person who has to play Hoggle in Labyrinth is in one of those things or everybody who

played the Giants in Fraggle Rock, those type of suits. Or the Bears in the later, in Muppets Take Man In, suits like that. Oh wait, let me go back and correct myself. They were working on radio controlled puppets as far back as Emmett Otter, Jugman Christmas. I just rewatched that last Christmas, and I watched the extras,

and that was really the first time they were doing it. And you can see their efforts when the Muppets are going down the water and they're being controlled by radio controls not a person's hand. Right right right yes yeah the same and with the Doozers had the same stuff in in Fraggle Rock also yeah yeah but yeah so what the Henson company is gonna build they have to build four distinct turtle suits. Then they have to build a complex though more traditional splinter puppet. Then they're going to build four baby turtle puppets and a rat puppet for the flashbacks and they have to build a turtle. Sorry. And they have to build

machine free suits that stunt men can wear in fight scenes. And the puppets were using what was called the Super Waldo tech, which was called the same for the CGI puppet you saw in the Jim Henson hour or the Muppet Vision 3D. Right, right. It was the CGI guy, right? Yes. Yeah. So Super Waldo, they also came up with a really clever thing in the design. Thanks to the turtle shells, their backpack is the costume. You can hide all of their stuff in their turtle shells. So, like you were saying Bob, if you're a performer, think of it this way. You're basically wearing a helmet that's a 1989 computer and the rest of it is on

your backpack. Then that's covered in foam and plastic that covers every inch of your body, except for tiny holes right below the mask line for the eyes and a little bit in the mouth for your face to come out. Now you have to do that acting in middle of North Carolina summer in crazy humidity. That's right, this was the weird North Carolina film boom, which is why this and like I think

The Wizard and Super Mario Bros. are all filmed around that area. Yep. It's thanks to tax problems of a certain other filmmaker. But yeah, honestly it sounds like the people who got to play the dinosaurs a year later in 91 had it a lot easier in a controlled LA set than the turtles did. Air-conditioned sets, was there air conditioning or some kind of cooling system in the suits at this point? Apparently they didn't get installed until like midway through the filming. Like there are stories from a couple of the actors saying that like the first day of filming they

did 36 takes of one scene and by the middle of the scenes, like Rafael's actor in particular was saying, get his fucking head off of me right now. Right. Like he is going crazy. I think you're going to point this out, Henry. But now I'm remembering there are some shots where you can see like sweat flying out of the costumes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. They were apparently they said they lost like they were five to 10 pounds lighter at the end of every day. They sweat it all out every day. It was it's the turtle diet. If you want to lose 20 pounds fast star in a Ninja Turtles movie. So they basically are the price of big famous actors. That's why there aren't actual famous actors in this movie. I mean, no, I think it's a really good cast, but it's not famous actors. And this thing that they thought would

be a $3 million movie is getting bigger and bigger. But that's okay, because they signed a deal with 20 Century Fox to be the distributor, and they're putting up $6 million. So everything's going to be fine. Oh, and also they also they already signed a deal with Domino's for both product placement, and apparently Domino's sent them free pizza all the time at the set, so. Wow. Yeah.

Conflicting with what the video games told us was their brand of pizza. Yes, yeah, Pizza Hut usurped them. It's a very interesting story, I'd love to hear some too, but so. You know what, there were no Domino's in my area, so I could not eat the turtle's choice of pizza in this movie.

We loved Pizza Hut growing up, and I just assumed, this is the true turtle's pizza. This is the first one they talked about. I also barely ever had, I had Domino's if I went to a friend's house, and they were at Domino's house, but we were at Pizza Hut house, probably thanks to the advertising for Lamb Before Time and Book It. That's probably

what they brainwashed us good. Book It warped our brain chemicals to prefer Pizza Hut and it made us literate, slightly more literate I guess. That personal pan pizza, it feels like heaven even though it's like, it's as greasy as hell. I guess if we should explain Book It to people if you don't know what it is, if you're not American and 40, it was basically this program where

if you read four books a month, you got a free personal pan pizza at Pizza Hut. And boy howdy did I take advantage of that. And you had to prove to your teacher you did. You couldn't just say, oh yeah teacher, I read four books. You had to fill out a survey about what the book was about or something. Just to prove, yeah, it's just like a program the Democrats would run. It's all these hoops you have to jump through to get your goddamn free pizza.

And of course, if you're going, I mean, it pays off for Pizza Hut because nobody gets their mommy and daddy to take them to the Pizza Hut for one free pizza and don't buy anything else. Well, I surely felt like a special boy eating my personal pan pizza. I earned. And you get your sticker too, I think. Yeah, those were good times. See, this is how well advertised too we were.

So the actors they did get though, the guys in the suits who aren't stunt men, or some were mixed stunt men, but mostly were real actors. Real, sorry, stunt man, you've garbage people. You're not real actors. Try a little harder stunt man. We're calling you out.

But it was John Pais, Leif Tilden, and Mitchell and Sissy, who were all New York based actors. And then a UK actor stunt man named Brian Foreman. Now, all of the actors, when they were filming, did their lines and said their lines out loud, all with the expectation that we are the voices and the bodies of these turtles. We're going to be all of that. But only Pais got to stay as the voice of Raph.

Everybody else got recast. You know, and it really shocked me to think that the cartoon voices were not even on the table for these guys, given that they were all dubbed. I mean, it would make them more expensive, but also the closest to stunt casting the movie has is the voice actors or well, one voice actor. One of them. Yeah. Is there a story behind that? I'm always curious. He's the one known person in the film known to cinema goers of 1990 and he you don't see him. He's a lesser character. You don't remember Robbie risk cousin Oliver. He don't think he's famous. Oh he's one of the guys. He's Mikey. Yes. Yeah, that's Mikey. They have they also say Pais went a bit method playing Raph

because, oh, yeah, Raph's in a pretty bad mood this movie, probably because he's going insane inside of his costume. And all four actors do in suit actors do cameos in the movie out of costume, and we'll name them as it comes in the movie. But but yes, after the movie is done that's when they start stunt casting for the voice actors like Baron said he didn't mean to like trick the guys they it was the idea they would be the voices too like they weren't told that ahead of time but then afterwards like no we're gonna recast everybody for wrath and so

yes they get Corey Feldman as Donnie, and he was the most famous. Apparently he was a real douche to everybody. Like he was a dick. He also apparently had recently been like arrested for cocaine possession when they were promoting the movie. He was like just off of being at the height of his powers with I think license to drive in that era,

the era of the two Corys, which is referenced on The Simpsons a couple years later. It was pretty sad that he could barely even promote the film because he was in a very bad place. He's had a lot of problems. It's hard, but nobody who worked on the film seems to have happy memories about Corey Feldman. Mm.

But yes, then Robbie Wriste, who was Cousin Oliver in the final season of The Brady Bunch, who we talked a bit about him. He also was a voice in the Baby Doll episode of Batman. Right, they were getting a bunch of old sitcom people. Robbie Wriste hated by TV viewers as a child. No, he's a fun guy. He takes it pretty well for being such a hated actor,

child actor. And then Leonardo is voiced by Brian Tocchi, an actual Japanese-American actor who is most famous for the surely unproblematic roles of Takashi in Revenge of the Nerds and Nogata in Belize Academy. Oh my lord, that's him? Yup, that's him. Okay. in Belize Academy. Oh my lord, that's him? Yup, that's him. Okay, hey, probably the first Japanese person I ever saw in my life is this guy.

If it wasn't a role taken by Getty Watanabe, he was the other guy. You know what, I have not seen those films in, I don't know, let's say 30 years or longer. I think in my head I just assumed it was Getty Watanabe. I saw it still on his IMDB, and all the scenes came flooding back to me from, I believe he is introduced in the third police academy, and of course he is shocked

and confused by the strong sexuality of Kim Katral. He doesn't know what to do with this sexy American woman. I mean, honestly, I'd be in the same seat as him. Well, I would bet you didn't have gongs playing behind you as you said these lines. No, there'd be some sort of, I don't know, Irish-Hungarian instrument. I don't know what I am.

But I did like learning, like, oh wow, they actually did have one Asian-American voice actor among the group. That's kind of cool. But then in the major live action roles we've got Elias Coteus as Casey Jones. He was fresh out of Montreal working his way up in the US film industry. He is a very established actor. Now this guy who is Casey Jones has worked with Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Steve Soderbergh, Terrence Malick, and a hundred episodes of that Dick Wolf Chicago PD show.

Yeah, whenever he pops up and I see his name, I think, oh, it's Casey Jones. Sorry, that's who you are to me. But congrats on the very, very long film career you've had. He's a very successful guy and a great character actor. When I watched Zodiac, it was only in the credits. When it came up, I was like, oh shit, that was, that was Casey Jones. Damn. And yes, again, it's we're damning him forever to be his character. It's like Roger Ivan and Casey Jones, both in Zodiac. And going back to the cartoon, Casey Jones, a character seldomly shown in the cartoon because they thought too violent. I mean, he is the joke of Casey Jones is they took

the Punisher but made him a guy who loves sports instead of guns. But he is an insanely violent freak. If it wasn't for Coteus being such a charming guy, he would be an insane, scary person in this movie. You wouldn't like Casey Jones if it wasn't for his great acting. Yeah, as a kid I thought, oh, he's showing up in this movie?

And then I just looked it up now. He was only in five episodes of the original TMNT series, which is what, like 200 episodes total or something? Wow, that is so few. I feel like Usagi Ojinbo's in more episodes than him. Or the duck pilot guy, I can't remember his name now. The neutrinos, I think you're thinking of Ace Duck. Ace Duck, thank you, Bob, yeah.

But the neutrinos showed up in more episodes. Sorry Ace Duck. Ace Duck, thank you, Bob, yeah. But the Neutrinos showed up in more episodes. Sorry, yeah, almost 200 episodes, he's only in five. Dang, wow, that's shocking. That's because Casey Jones makes such an impact in this, but Casey Jones is so cool in the comic. You could see why Steve Barron, when he sees him on the comic page,

is like, oh, this guy's great. Him and Raph have this fight in the comic that is what's put into the movie. Named after the famous poem? I think so, the Casey at the Bat. Yeah, though also there is a Grateful Dead song by that name too, which maybe they're pulling from. I see. Then we've got April O'Neill played by Judith Hoag.

She has the funny story that she was encouraged to take the role. She thought it was dumb and looked down upon it like a turtle's thing or whatever. But when she first took it, but she is filming the movie Cadillac Man and she's having to leave the set to go straight to North Carolina to film this movie and her co-star and Cadillac Man Robin Williams ask what she's doing. She's like some Ninja Turtle movie, and Robin Williams instantly knows what she's talking about. He's like, oh my God, are you April O'Neil? And she's like, oh, okay, now I care about this. And Robin Williams thinks it's cool.

Hey, Robin Williams secretly a nerd, names his daughter after a video game character. And then if you watch one hour photo, Henry, you can see him, you know, inaccurately show you Evangelion figures and saying these are the bad guy, or these are the good guys, and it's the mass-produced Evangelions

that Oscar fights. Unit 13 is hardly a good guy one hour photo man. Hey, he was crazy. If you watch the movie, you'll find out. That's true. Yeah, Judith has funny stories about like she got Robin Williams like on the set and him and his kids like got to take photos with like

the guys in the costume and was really really cool like she though some reports say that Judith didn't love filming on the set. She she found the hours and the working situation uncomfortable and had the nerve to complain about it and so if you wonder why she's not in the sequel that might be why. I assume there was money involved. I also met that. Yeah so yeah going back to Cadillac Man I need to watch that movie and use cars because I confuse them all the time I have not seen either I don't want to embarrass myself publicly while talking about either film. I just think of both being advertised on Comedy

Central and not watching them. Me too, me too. And then as Splinter, both as the voice and the lead puppeteer, you got Kevin Clash who was Elmo and you know he's gone away since 2013. I thought he made a comeback of sorts. Of sorts. His public image has recovered at this point in the past decade. I mean, he will do lightly credited things. He still does his star and stuff.

He will do some puppet work. Like, he worked on the Dark Crystal movies, but, or sorry, the Netflix Dark Crystal show. Like, he will do some jobs from time to time, but he is not back to like, he'll never be Elmo again. Well, I mean also to when I, when I read the Wiki page and I didn't want to learn more, but it's like, oh yeah, what happened with those lawsuits? And it's from the look of it, it seemed like most of them were only dismissed because of statute of limitations, which like, no, then

you're still guilt. I gotta say you're still guilty in my eyes then, sorry. It just shows you how powerful Elmo is if he could survive his puppeteer being canceled like this. By canceled, I mean, he suffered no repercussions in terms of jail time, but he's no longer allowed to be a public figure or play a very popular character. Yeah, Elmo as the inheritor of Elmo and Elmo the character is bigger than ever

thanks to quote tweets of him on Twitter. The Elmo Twitter stuff is some of the weirdest Twitter things to me. Yeah, adults getting a little too emotional about Elmo saying Elmo cares about you and Elmo wants to know you're okay. Elmo says drink water. I mean, we're all pretty fucked up right now.

We all, people slightly older than us, Elmo was the new character to us listeners. Oh, that's true. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to make fun of these people. I guess it just shows what a state we're in when Steve from Blue's Clues can post a TikTok and everyone just weeps and wails and rinses their garments. Finally, somebody told me he's proud of me.

So yes, Kevin Clash's Splendor also probably wouldn't be cast in the role now because sometimes I feel weird with his voice he does in the movie. I mean, you can show this clip to anyone but when I say four baby turtles it brings me joy. It does. And I think it's hurting no one because I guess the accent could have been worse.

Oh, absolutely, yeah. And then also as Shredder, you have Japanese-American actor James Saito as the body, though British white guy David McCharran is the voice. So it's like, you know, I feel like if you're gonna hire James Saito, how about you have him actually like say the lines instead of having a white guy speak

for your Japanese character? Yeah, I think he was capable of doing that. Though hey, at the very least, the body of a Japanese actor played a Rokusaki. Yeah. And then of course, famously as Head Thug, you've got Sam Rockwell, future Oscar winner. He's the guy showing the kids around

and offers them cigarettes in the cool home base. Refresh my memory, what did he win an Oscar for? I honestly had forgotten too until this year's Oscars. I had to look it up. It was that three billboards movie, remember that? Oh yeah, it has a very long title. When he showed up on the Oscar stage of like, you know Because it was the the theme of the Oscars this year was five previous winners

Present the nominees and so when Rockwell was on stage and I believe he was the one presenting Robert Downey, Jr And Rockwell was talking I was like wait He won an Oscar and I I love Sam Rockwell, but I was like, I don't remember what he run an Oscar for I had to Google it. And apparently if you squint in this movie, you can also spot Skeet Ulrich and Scott Wolfe into some early young actor roles too. I guess hanging out in the teen zone.

Yes, yeah, they're not as famous as the actor playing Denny. This is secretly also a QAnon movie about abducting children. You're probably crap you're right. Back then we feared the Japanese would do I mean this should also be to give extra context to this was of course written during a big 80s Japan bubble yellow peril fears that's why I'd say the most like racist joke in the movie is when she says what am I behind on my Sony payments? To the ninja. That's a pretty bad one

Also, it's full of stunt performers who were flown in from Hong Kong Steve Barron on the commentary goes like yeah They worked really hard and some of them actually got a bit hurt on this movie and they were real troopers I was like, could you tell me their names these people who got hurt? I feel like when he says they got hurt, I was like, did insurance cover them at all in this movie? Cause I don't think so. We don't know their names. They're all buried in poppers graves. So they're under the dealer at the studio foundation. The one stunt performer, uh, the Harvest folks took a real shine to, who mainly played Donatello

in fight scenes, that was one, Ernie Reyes Jr. You can see him on the set in the turtle costume in some photos, and so they liked him so much, they make up a new role for him in the sequel. And he is great, I like, as Keno, he's a lot of fun. So that's how you end up with, you've got got Jim Hansen puppets, along with stunt performers who worked on Jackie Chan films in the 80s, working with a British music video director of take on me, all in North Carolina. It is a crazy mashup. And of course, they're filming in North Carolina because it is cheap. And technically technically the state at that time owned the production house because do you know De Laurentiis' company defaulted on loans from the state so they owned it before they sold it off.

Okay. Was one movie in particular the culprit of that? I cannot, you know, I'm sure it was but I forget which one here. Well we did talk about how De Laurentiis released that Transformers the movie in 86 and that did very poorly for them, but it wasn't even their biggest money loser. But yeah, they have like built city streets. That was one positive of it in this giant warehouse they were filming in. They already had a lot of fake New York streets built for other movies that they could just like rebuild

to fake New York in this movie. You know what, I just watched Manhunter for the first time and I welcomed the appearance of the credit, Dino De Laurentiis at the beginning. Isn't it like a lion or something, the De Laurentiis logo? I think something like that, yeah. Yeah. But so everything seems to be going logo or it's I think something like that yeah yeah but

so everything seems to be going well as its cast they got the suits they're all ready to get going July 1st 1989 is when the filming is about to begin and they should also be known for people who go like oh yeah it was a reaction to the Batman Michael Keaton movie they're starting to film when that movie comes out the movie's already gonna be made. This drafts off the success of Michael Keaton, Batman, but is not made in reaction to it. Yeah, maybe some choices were made

during filming that reflected, oh, I guess people like this dark thing, or they don't mind this kind of depiction, but yeah, we can't say that it was directly influenced by the Batman film. I'm sure the marketing took some of it into account, I bet, but yeah. But so it's July 1st, 1989,

and this is when things go bad thanks to Barry Diller, who we've talked about before, is like the real Mr. Burns, perhaps. Yes. Turtles, eh? So he has taken over Fox films, and he's wiping the board of projects, and that includes distributing this Turtles movie,

which this is insane. Fox is like, nah, we went out of the Turtles in 1989. We don't wanna work on this. Crazy, right? That is nuts. The impression seems to be that it was that they just wanted, the Diller and Diller's cronies wanted to get rid of stuff

the old regime did, which happens all of the time, still happens all the time today. Yeah, it's the oldest, most boring story as to why something is not released. So when 20th pulls out, that is apparently like $6 million most of their budget going away. The producer, Tom Gray Gray is saying like Jim Henson is about to fly in and if he shows up and we are gonna tell him oh

by the way we actually can't pay you he's going to sue us and we are fucked like this film will never happen and we're sued by everybody involved. So Tom Gray is in a bad situation he is making some 11th hour calls, calls Golden Harvest, and he's like, can we please get more money? And Golden Harvest is like, I can get you three million more dollars, but I think this is going to fail. And then meanwhile, they're meeting with New Line Cinema, and Tom Gray definitely remembers it as like, yeah, New Line Cinema knew they had us over a barrel.

They knew they could get a good deal out of us. Though, when executives who worked on it at New Line at the time talked about it, they reflect on it like, it's funny how every Hollywood executive you talk to is like, oh, I thought it was a great idea, but everybody else hated it. It's every story. It's a weird coincidence. But they say that the boss of New Line Cinema, Bob Shay, hated the idea, said it would lose money but he's like, fine, I'll let you fail, but you know, this is, you can give it a shot, but this is gonna fail. It's funny because the studio, I think at this point in time, was known as the house

that Freddie built. And they made all of their bones by producing the Nightmare on Elm Street films, and Bob Shay was a huge part of that. Exactly, yeah they were it's it's easy to forget to the like New Line in 94 they got bought by Turner and technically it is still a label within the bigger Warner Company but it was an independent studio then and not a big one. To put perspective on it I looked it up what were their big 1989 releases? Nightmare 5, The Dream Child, Garbage.

I hate, that's one of the worst Freddy's, I think. Oh, absolutely, yeah. And one of the worst movies ever, Hulk Hogan's No Holds Barred. Oh, yeah, rented that as a kid. I, by the way, this is more my bad taste. I loved that movie as a kid. Hey, and also I wanna say New Line, great logo.

That and Touchstone, I think, are some of the finest logos of that era. I think part of the reason I instantly loved the Mortal Kombat movie is because it had the New Line logo at the start of it that I knew from the turtles. And I was like, all right, quality is ahead. Though also I do think a good thing that helped them going to New Line

instead of Fox is, at Fox they'd have been a small fish or they'd have been a big fish in a big pond or even a medium-sized fish in a big pond. Here New Line had to make them a priority. It was their biggest release of 1990. They get the New Line money, they're able to avoid stopping production, so they get to work in North Carolina. It was a lot of hot days, a lot of tough filming days. One funny story they tell is that they were in a direct flight path of the nearby airport, which is already a terrible place to film movies. But one thing that airplanes have is radio waves, which also are trying to talk to your turtle heads.

The turtles are all freaking out as planes are flying overhead. That's great, I want those outtakes. They said on some filmings that like, all of a sudden, like Donatello's face would just like stop, like it would just like die, and they'd have to restart the scene all over again. So they're filming in this and while Barron said

the heat sucked, he would have loved to film in New York City for the whole movie and it was obviously a cheap shitty place to be in Wilmington, North Carolina. He did have to admit it was pretty awesome to be far away from studio executives who could barely come in and give him notes. He called it a hick production in a good way.

Yeah, we have learned that the further you make your movie away from Hollywood, the more you get to make it according to your own vision, because they just don't want to get on a plane. This is before video meetings and stuff, by the way. I don't think this is true anymore. That's what's wrong now. They can just have a video conference

all of the time so easily. It sucks. But yeah, they so he is making this movie the way he is wanting to do it. He's kind of and and he says that sometimes he has a couple stories where while filming Golden Harvest executives showed up and they're like, this is too dark. This is too dark. And he'd be like, no, we're making it this way. And they also meant like, visually, this needs more light. This is too dark. He said he caught an executive trying to talk behind his back to the director of photography and say like, could you just brighten the scene up? Don't tell him. And that kind of pissed Baron off stuff like that. But also Steve Baron, here's another great hire he had on that movie.

The primary editor of the movie, Sally Menke, who would go on to be Quentin Tarantino's editor on all his movies up until 2010. That is incredible. It's crazy how they had one of the best film editors of her generation in an early job on this. He jokes on the commentary that he's like, I would have worked with her on all my future movies, but that darn Tarantino kept taking her away.

Some people think editors are the true directors of the film, and I halfway agree with them. At the very least, when the director's in the meeting with the editor or in the editing bay with the editor, that's how the movie becomes the movie. Like, yeah. And so he's got Sally Manke on it. I was also reminded how sad, like, this is a learn from her sad passing. If you go hiking and it feels really hot, don't keep walking by yourself with no water. Oh no, okay.

I think that happened in Berkeley when we still lived there, like right before we left. There was a family. It's very sad. It's like, we've all had like, you know, you go on a hike and you're like, well, yeah, I'm sweating a lot. It's a hike, but you know, be careful. Like it was such a sad story.

I read that like basically her friend left her on the hike because she's like, it's too hot. I'm going home. She's like, okay I'll see you later and then She's walking her dog and when the they find her body the dog is sitting right next to her though when they find her It's yeah Yeah, I guess we just mentioned the family that had passed away because of overheating or whatever son sun exposure Whatever the the official terminology for that is don Don't go hiking alone, number one. No, no.

I mean, there's that James Franco movie, come on. Right, yes, fully charged cell phone too, water, battery, flare gun. But back to happier times, yeah, so Sally Menke is his editor on it, and he loved working with her, they're working on it, it's coming together in this sweltering filming in a cheap studio

this is so Maybe Steve Barron just lost track of his budget Maybe he overshot his budget and didn't film enough stuff Perhaps it was just a troubled production with a lot of tech issues that were constantly Making him lose time in the seven week filming. But for whatever reason, he felt they had 10 to 12 pages left unfilmed by the time the money stopped. And so he's told, you can't film anymore.

He's like, I wanna do reshoots, please. We gotta film these. We're cutting together the movie. Me and Manky are cutting together the movie and it's coming together, but we do really feel like we need these extra scenes to make it work. And he's told, you've already gone over budget. This $3 million movie is a $13 million movie.

We're not giving you more money. This is when Steve Barron is a little bit of a naughty boy. So, and it also is, believe it or not, Bob, time for what a cartoon movie super villain to come into the story here. No, he can't be here. It's impossible. Jeffrey Katzenberg is here. It's true.

I couldn't believe it. Okay. Dun, dun, dun. I especially appreciate Alan Siegel's 2020 oral history because nobody else had this. This is mentioned on the commentary by Steve Barron, but I couldn't see anybody else telling this story. So what happens is Steve Barron is complaining about how he's out of money. He does say that the final version that they were cutting to Erp, what you saw in theaters is pretty close to the version him and Sally Menke were editing together. And that's why when we watch it closely, I'm sure

we'll notice like, oh, that voiceover is the bridge that covers a lost scene or whatever. Yeah and in certain turtles are dubbed over with different voices the thing I was making fun of where it's like splinter that is Raphael's voice but it's actually Michelangelo or one of the other ones on the roof. Oh yeah it's Mikey they they cut a whole thing for that's that's why you don't see Michelangelo's training in April talking about them on the farm. April omitted that for time reasons. In her turtle's diary.

And also, you know, this sounds like I'm talking about in a modern movie for digital effects, but Steve Barron, like I said with Reboot, he was on the ground floor of digital effects. He knew that you could do early digital effects to black out the visual of seeing the faces come through the puppet masks in the movie. He did want to do that, but it would be expensive. He needs more money.

He's not going to get it. So Steve Barron, much like he did before to get friend prices with Jim Henson, he's telling Jim Henson, I believe this is either late 89 or early 1990, he's telling Jim Henson his money problems. Now, what's Jim Henson doing in late 1989? He's about to sell the Muppets to Disney. I can see what's going to happen next year. Jim Henson tells Steve Barron, I can get you a meeting with Jeffrey Katzenberg.

You can screen him this film and then tell him we need more money to finish this film. Would Disney give us some money and become a partial distributor of this movie to finish this movie how I want it? And Henson gets him in the room. Now Steve Barrett admits, I didn't tell my executives about this. I took a cut of the movie to a competitor, showed it to them, and did not tell my bosses. Now you can't do that without problems basically. Yeah I assume when you're making a movie

there's some sort of NDA involved where you can't show the the work prints to a competitor And especially not Disney and but but then again, I mean Golden Harvest were jerking him around They didn't seem like they were a great people to work for and it sounded like a lot of other stuff is informal there And he probably was slightly informally getting Jim Henson So maybe he was thinking well, I can formally got got Jim Henson. I'll just ask for permission later. Oh, and they'll be so happy with me that I got Jeffrey Katzenberg. So he shows Jeffrey Katzenberg a cut of the movie. Katzenberg apparently said, show me in a make these changes. I think it'd be better though. Technically, you could say this is just him giving free consulting on it. I'm thinking like as a lawyer

here. So Barron shows him a second cut where they make some of those changes. He's like, you know what? I think you got something here. I think Jim Henson, this is me after the fact. I think Jim Henson was just being a nice guy who was like, I can get you a meeting.

He's not trying to steal the film. I do think Jeffrey Katzenberg is trying to steal the film though. Oh, absolutely, yes. Yeah. Because Steve Barron wants $750,000 to finish the movie in his way. That doesn't come for free from Jeffrey Katzenberg. Like they're going to take the movie from New Line is what's going to happen. So this all happens. They have the meeting. Steve Barron takes the film back and this is when Jeffrey Katzenberg calls Tom Gray at Golden Harvest. And I'll just read what the

other producer Kim Dawson has to say about it. I was in Tom Gray's office the next day and he gets a call from Jeffrey Katzenberg and he says, hey Tom I saw the picture last night. You know I turned it down before but would you consider letting us release it because we think it'll be a success? And Tom goes, and I remember his exact words, you know, I think we have a home run so we're gonna stick with New Line.

Thanks very much. Click. And guess what? Tom Gray doesn't like learning that his director showed a movie, showed the movie to Disney and tried to make a deal behind his back. Hey, that's fair. Also, like New Line literally could sue them over this. Like it could, they could

be in court from this. Like I, it's easy to be like, oh, you know, the director, I always want to say I have a director in this, but this seriously is like, you can be sued for millions of dollars for doing what he did here. He's jeopardizing his personal life and entire career. So Baron basically gets kicked off the project in the last month or two. It's why he doesn't do much promotion of the movie afterwards. He's not on board for the sequels either. So yeah, he gets cut off.

He doesn't get to do final cut, though Manky finishes it. She didn't get fired, I believe, but they finish it. But there's still a lot of stuff left on film that we'll get into the deleted scenes later But they finished the movie they get it in a workable place Internal reaction to the first screening is not good among the producers playmates especially hates it. They say this is too violent I'm glad we're not making toys out of this and We're still worried that you're gonna kill all popularity of this toy line because this

movie will be so unpopular. They either need to say damn a lot more or a lot less. Work on it. That's why it took a whole year for them to make toys out of the second movie, the the rubbery toys. Did you have those rubbery toys Bob? I had a total of two toys from the Ninja Turtles in my entire lifetime no no three none from any of the movies. The the rubbery guys they made for the second movie my brother and I split them both we each like I he got Mikey and Raph I got Donnie and Leo and we split them as our two two sets of toys. I can name all three of the toys I had by the way I had vanilla Raphael vanilla rocksteady and then much later I got

Whatever line of toys or action figures had the shells that opened up you could put all the weapons inside right? I had the Leonardo of that one of my favorites was I I bet they did make one of Raph in the trench coat back then but I had it was Donatello in the trench coat I love that trench coat look I didn't only later did I realize they were inspired by the thing in Marvel Comics and Jack Kirby wearing the trench coat. That's why they did it. And I don't know, as of maybe five or six years ago, there's an entire line of very expensive versions of these turtles that you could buy. NECA finally made the toys and they look, they look perfect. I saw, I didn't buy it, $90 on Amazon two pack of Casey

and Raph in his overcoat for their big fight. I think they're the size of toddlers, aren't they? They're pretty big. Oh, you can buy a 1-8 scale. Yeah. Yes, yeah, but they also have, you know, seven inch versions that look pretty great too. So playmates thinks it sucks. It's going to kill the thing. But the producers also recall their first test screening with kids. Kids loved it. Loved

it. They were like, Oh shit, I think we got something here. They said they ordered double the prints they were going to originally do. and they pick late March for the release because they figure last week of March into Easter then you get the Easter break kids you got two good weeks but they didn't realize just how good those weeks were gonna be. They actually opened up against the hunt for red October and they slaughtered the hunt for red October. Oh really this this defeated the hunt for Red October. Oh really? This defeated the hunt for Red October. Yes, yeah really. Hunt for Red October did fine, but it was a $25 million opening.

It was, and to give you an idea, the only things that had bigger openings than that at that time were Batman, Temple of Doom, Back to the Future 2, and pretty much that's it. So nothing had a big opening weekend like that back then, and The Turtles was doing that at a, you know, tenth of the budget of those big, big movies. And it was technically the first independent film to break a hundred million dollars at the box office. Again, it's like, is New Line really independent?

Is Golden Harvest really independent? But, you know, it's a spongy definition. Yeah, they're upstarts, let's say, at this time. It would make 350 million worldwide. It'd hold the record as the highest grossing independent film until the Blair Witch Project at the end of the 90s. Truly independent, let's say.

Just a bunch of students. And I think the hit of The Turtles is what fattened up New Line to be purchased by Ted Turner by 1994. And I assume that they would release the next two films. Yes, they kept the sequel option going. They did say that a bunch of other people contacted them to be like, oh, can we get the sequel rights?

Can we work with you guys again, Golden Harvest? But they stuck with New Line, though Fox did get some marketing rights for the sequel. And then there's also a lot of international distributors. Apparently, ownership of this movie is very complicated. It's why there's never been a truly good Blu-ray release or DVD release of this movie is very complicated. Like it's why there's never been a truly good Blu-ray release or DVD release of this movie. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm seeing that Fox has

international rights to the sequels. Yeah, and this movie was put out on VHS by FHE with one of the worst logos ever designed by man, or child in this case. They were extremely lucky to have gotten the music video, sorry, the video rights. I believe they were the, the turtles cartoon show distributors. So they got the video rights too, which was incredible that they, yes, I remember seeing that FHE logo in front of many at VHS tape I got and thought this looks

dumb and yeah, also by the time it came out on VHS on October 4th 1990 which by the way that is seven months no six months basically after there wasn't that kind of turnaround then for a VHS movie that was unnatural yeah normally you'd wait a year or 18 months until you could purchase it yourself they would they would sell the very expensive versions of these VHS tapes to video stores for like $200 just for rentals, but then the direct to consumer version would be much, much later. When I close my eyes, I can see that green and black VHS cover with the four turtles on it right now.

And like Donatello in a truck on the side? Yes, yeah. Him on the back. God, all those great production stills. And of course, it also came with a coupon book for Pizza Hut because Pizza Hut usurped Domino's, even though Domino's is still in the movie, it's Pizza Hut all over the ads for it. Too much brand confusion, but hey, I was a Pizza Hut boy. One of the, there's like a Pizza Hut somewhere in Vancouver

I always see and I tell my wife, we gotta go there. I know it's gonna be bad, but I wanna check in on Pizza Hut. It's been about 15 years. Let's see what's going on there. Only if they still give you drinks in those big red cups. Only that. That era's over, but I can tell them how many books I read. They won't care.

But I read four books this month. Yeah, sir, that'll be $30. Pizza Hut invested heavy. I did find a old press release they put out in late 1990 saying they have a $20 million ad campaign for Pizza Hut branded with the turtles, which included the VHS, also the coupon that was in the NES version of the arcade game, and the coming out of our shells tour Pizza Hut invested heavy in turtles. You know people were eating pizza before Ninja Turtles obviously I really want to know I want a study done to show what this IP did for pizza because maybe pizza would be like getting paella or something in 2024 if the turtles weren't around maybe it would be this like oh

let's get that. We haven't gotten that in a while. Instead of just kind of like one of the default things you get for food when you're just, you lack imagination. I think Pizza Hut knows that the turtle endorsement was worth its weight in gold because every kid would eat like, oh, this is the pizza the turtles eat. Well, I'm having that pizza then.

Which makes it even stranger that in Secret of the Ooze they don't have a branded pizza in it. When they get their pizza in the star of the movie it's just like it basically has the waving Italian man on the box. It's such a brand-free pizza. They couldn't nail the licensing in time. Also speaking of the international release like you said Bob kids love the hero turtles in the UK. Parents don't like nunchucks and you can find on Moviesensorship.com a crazy list of all the ways they had to edit out Michael Angel's nunchucks from this movie including darkening scenes, taking out cuts when he turns his back. It's nuts. That's what happens to your country when there are no guns. You just you fear

nunchucks and meanwhile in America kids I knew were just bringing their nunchucks to school and hitting themselves with them because they're really hard to use you sorry I took the words out of your mouth there That's why Mikey Stopped using his nunchucks in season 2 of the cartoon or season 3 of the cartoon and stopped using them in that in the he Didn't use them much in secret of the Ooze either. Though then again, Leo basically only used, I mean, Leo doesn't stab anybody with his swords in this movie, but he really doesn't use his swords

in the second movie. Yeah, a friend of mine had nunchucks in like 1991 or whatever, and he could do basically two things before he started hitting himself with the nunchucks. And really, when he would hand them over to me, I would just spin them, you know, just easily spin it away from my body. It's like, that feels kinda cool.

That's what happens if you press the B button with Michelangelo in the Turtles games. It looks cool. And yeah, I tried skateboarding once and I realized this is never gonna happen. So the eating pizza element of turtle lifestyle I could do. And hey, we could all pick up a broomstick and pretend to be Donatello.

Oh, ease like super achievable turtle, you know, play acting. Yeah, the Pizza Hut and turtle stuff has continued to this day. They just, for that new movie, they're eating Pizza Hut pizza in that new movie, even though again, they live in New York City. And we didn't talk about that new movie. Thinking about it, I might've liked it more than the Spider-Verse film.

And I think it is the first true success of a Ninja Turtles film. I feel like, and successful in terms of showing me a CGI movie that I've never seen before. A style. Going beyond Spider-Verse's interesting take and pushing it even further and more experimental. I love that everybody looks like the weird toys that they were back in the 80s. Like yeah, I like how they're weird and ugly and I love how, unlike in this movie, it actually does feel like teens are legitimately playing the characters in it. I was on a Discord, it might have been RetroNauts, I'm not trying to call anyone out, but someone said, oh I watched the new Turtles movie,

and it's okay if you can stand kids saying mid and things like that. And I just, I replied saying, oh, mid is just the bogus of 2023. Yeah. They're updating. Exactly. Yeah. They're saying Riz and mid and Lizzie

instead of Cowabunga and Radical. Radical, Radical, Radical. See that? But no, I think that's the best Turtles movie for sure. Though I didn't see it when I was a child, so obviously I like this one more. And also for whatever reason, Facebook, it will just show me AI generated stuff

to suggest like, hey follow this page. And recently I've been getting a lot me AI generated stuff and to suggest like, hey, follow this page. And recently I've been getting a lot of AI generated turtle stuff and I find it funny that the AI will often generate a fifth turtle. And I'm like, who is this? Facebook definitely is the worst social media platform I check in on because it seriously is, every other suggested post is an AI thing.

Yeah, like a fake AI poster. And although I say it, like Facebook will go through different phases with me, like it'll be pushing this thing, it'll be pushing that thing. Recently, it's been showing me a lot of Calvin and Hobbes comics, and I'm cool with that. It's moved on past the Ghostbusters and Ninja Turtle AI stuff, and now it's just showing me

scanned Calvin and Hobbes comics. And I'm like, this is fun. I enjoy this. See, you don't follow, Facebook doesn't think you like pro wrestling like it does with me. This is where I also fall into the thirst trap zone of the AI things where it's like,

it's a female pro wrestler who's popular now, except if you look at it for more than two seconds, you're like, oh, her boobs are twice as big as they are in real life. Like that's what the AI is doing for those pictures. It sucks. It's bad out there. But okay, but back to the happier 1990. If it wasn't for, I think the VHS release of the Little Mermaid, it would probably have been the highest selling VHS of 1990, the turtles movie. And what a Christmas that was. You're getting your Turtles VHS for Christmas. You're

then going out to see Home Alone in theaters. It's a beautiful time to be a child. It's great to be eight. Also that FHE versus New Line thing. This led me to a teenage argument with a friend that basically almost stopped being friends with him. Oh, geez. Because he said that TMNT was released by FHE, and I was saying, that's who put out the video. It's a new line movie.

And we almost came to blows before. This is before you could just look it up on a Wikipedia. Yeah, those arguments almost ended friendships for me. And I guess I will recommend people check out our What a Cartoon on the original series. We did an episode of RetroNauts about the Ninja Turtles in 1989, the phenomenon, and also an episode about the Cowabunga collection with Chris Kohler who worked on it. And that's a great collection of almost all the Turtles games lovingly represented as they were intended to be. It's a

perfect thing to play while listening to this podcast and perhaps it's yeah No, I've there's been a lot of turtle content lately, which has been very nice And okay, so the movie comes out huge huge hit what happens for Steve Barron? He does say he had right of refusal to do the sequel But he obviously wasn't very happy with the new line or golden harvest and also he didn't want to do a sequel He wanted to do something new. So he stepped away. And also as any ooze viewer knows, Barron's style wasn't going to work with what they wanted in the lighter sequel anyway. So what would Steve Barron do? Well if you look at IMDB, his next project is Coneheads in 1993. That's the next movie he directs that's

released. A film I did not see in theaters I saw the VHS and I thought like oh, this is pretty fun but then I found out later always a huge bomb and everyone hated it and He's also the executive producer on their reboot and he tells a very funny story on the commentary that After the movie came out he had a meeting with Steven Spielberg and Steven Spielberg said me and my son Love this Ninja Turtles movie. I want to work with you. You know, I'm executive producing the Casper, the friendly ghost movie. Would you like to make that? And Steve Baron on the commentary is kicking himself for turning that down

and not working with Steven Spielberg. He's, he's had a fine career since, but he, that's a big regret for him, he says. I forgot that was a Spielberg produced film. It's the fifth movie, or the third movie, where Dan Aykroyd puts on the Ghostbusters uniform. And instead they got, the guy who directed this movie is Peter Silberling, and that's his first movie. Wow, I didn't know that.

I do remember it's one of the writers, his slappy squirreler self, Sherry Stoner. Mm-hmm. And hey, also Ariel, going back to Little Mermaid. Oh, right. So Baron leaves the turtles behind, though he definitely has appreciated in the years since hearing what a success it is

and how many children of 1990 have grown up to become very intense fans. He really appreciates them. Eastman has done multiple interviews saying like, oh yeah, this is the best movie. They truly captured it. He's still very proud of it. It's barely available. It's not on Paramount Plus right now, which is also crazy. I don't know what the deal is. Is it streamable anywhere right now in the US? I mean, you can pay for a streaming rental or purchase, but not on any of the major streaming services, no.

And I have like a $9 Blu-ray iPod of it that is just the movie with no deleted scenes or nothing, even though they're out there, because ownership of this is very confused, and so they can't, that's how I had a fun post of on the back of the DVD or the Blu-ray. It's still the old approved credit, so that's why it says read the Dell paperback.

And I say, hey, don't read that paperback until you see the movie. If you're eight, it's gonna ruin the movie for you. It might go towards a free pizza, but at what cost? But yeah, I think it still has a pretty good legacy to this day, but does it hold up? Well, I guess we'll have to watch it again with a fine-tooth comb, won't we?

Oh, by the way, the commentary is very funny to listen to that's on YouTube because he did it for the German DVD, Steve Barron did, and so when the audio of the movie bleeds in, it's the German audio. And so you're just hearing German Raphael. Oskar Lieber, Splinter. Now I will say before we close up here,

the history section, until the new movie that came out last year, this had the best reputation for a Ninja Turtles movie, right? Oh yeah, I think so. Cause I mean, the other ones were like, you have the less good sequels to this, including the third one where they cheaped out

and didn't pay for Jim Henson. Then you have the okay TMNT CGI movie. Then you've got the hated Michael Bay movies. And now you've got the mutant mayhem, which is, yes, very good. And only happened because Spider-Verse was so successful. So they got to run with that ball and be creative. And also Seth Rogen's like the one rich comedy man

who can make a good cartoon or facilitate a good cartoon. And now it's getting a sequel and a two season Paramount Plus series. It leaves them in a good place at the end of that movie for a TV show. Not to spoil the movie, but I was like, oh, this would be a cool TV show if they do that. I'm not gonna spoil the movie,

but did you notice that their main villain isn't in the first one? Well, guess what the teaser is, folks. They're doing what the Batman film did recently. It does what every superhero movie does at the end of like, well, hey, you know, next time. And what Nolan did in Batman Begins. Or all of the Marvel movies lately have just been like,

well, you know, this Marvel's, the Marvels might have bored you, but what about B-Stuff? Wait, do you like him? Sure, sure. I know Henry likes certain incarnations of him. Or there's also the fourth Thor movie that ended that was not that great.

But then it ends with like, hey, we got a Hercules. That'll be fun if we make another one of these. Hercules? Yeah, Hercules. Marvel's Hercules is one of Thor's greatest frenemies. OK, well, now you're just making things up. I don't believe you. It's fun.

Thor and Hercules are both public domain heroes that Marvel has their own versions of. I actually didn't know about the Hercules thing. I thought, like, what? Are they just making a Hercules movie, but not the Hercules comic character? It's sort of like how Dracula is a Marvel character as well. Where is the Dracula movie?

They haven't actually put a Dracula in the MCU. Maybe that'll be in the Blade MCU movie if that ever actually happens. I hope. Sorry last thing actually talk about that compared to now. Marvel movies now they basically film their movies twice now like they they're refilming like everything of the new Captain America movie and that Thunderbolts movie to know that this movie was like can we refilm a little bit and they're like no no reshoots-shoots. Like, every movie is re-shoots now. Every movie is $200 million now.

Yeah, you got to make every movie twice. Yeah, $13 million would not pay for, like, one of the stars of a Marvel movie. You're getting 70% of Chris Evans. You're getting all of the digital effects of Spider-Man for two minutes. That's $13 dollars right there. So why don't we take a trip back to the quaint year of 1990 and we talk about Teenage Mutant

Ninja Turtles when we get back. Let it spin, for real, legit, you feel it I'm talkin' bout the real deal, I'ma make you feel Yo DJ, spin that wheel Half-word, any way is okay When the record starts to play, legit, you feel it Yo DJ, spin that wheel Spin that wheel I'ma make you feel, yo, DJ! Get up and party!

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Get them while they're hot. I'm gonna be a good boy And we're back from the break. Hope everybody enjoys hearing the I would say fairly derivative opening music they play over it like oh yeah real one when I was rewatching this I thought oh you really were trying to fool people because it's like that I thought that that that that instead of that it's so it's so cheap it's like honestly the actual compositions of a new music in this movie feels pretty cheap to me at times. The music is kind of bad in the movie. When they're trying to play up the comedy with the music it's kind of cringey. Oh yeah, which is really crazy.

I don't think I said him on the history thing, but the composer for it is John DuPres. He is affiliated with major stuff, including like he is the composer on many of the Monty Python films and like Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones stuff too. It's crazy that he didn't take a long time on this one, I think. I can't hate him too much because the previous year he wrote the score for UHF. I feel like that could be a future What a Cartoon movie. Absolutely, man, that could be,

I'd be up for that next year. But yes, and also another interesting thing has happened since we last recorded, which is, Bob, did you see the news that there's another live action Ninja Turtles movie in the works? No, I totally missed this and I think that made me a happier person. It's, well guess what Bob, they're finally gonna break the R barrier with a live action Ninja Turtles movie. You've heard of the last rone in comic series they did, right?

Yes. So it's getting adapted into a movie which totally fits. It's their version of the Dark Knight Returns. It's the last turtle story. There's an unmasked singular turtle who has all four of the weapons and he's on a hunt for revenge for his three dead brothers. You don't know who he is and it's sort of a mystery thing it Yeah, currently Paramount has announced that they are working on it They only have a script but they're working on it as an actual movie I I never asked for this but I'm sure other people were asking for I'm just disappointed that We won't get the next mutant mayhem movie until

2026 October of 2026. That's the current until October of 2026. That's the current date that it's set for. So over two and a half years from now, we'll get a sequel to last summer's Mutant Mayhem, which I think we talked about it up front. By the way, we recorded the history section maybe like two weeks ago, I think. So apologies if we repeat anything from that section.

Man, by the time they finish that, the teens they got to record it are gonna be like 23 by the time it happens. Oh yeah yeah they're gonna be young adults. Also last time I meant to play this but to set the tone of what people thought when this came out I do have about a minute from the Siskel and Ebert clip which is really funny. I went to the funniest bit. I just know that Siskel did not like it and he was dumping on it. Ebert, though, he liked it a little bit more. Yeah. And why would a pizza company want to advertise that it's the pizza preferred by turtles who live in sewers? That's an interesting plug. I was also interested in the high level

of your criticism when you pointed out that these turtles only pay lip service to ninja teachings. I suppose you would have liked it better if it had been a more devout and religious film. Well, no. But if somehow, I'm looking for something there for kids. If the kid, you know, like the karate kid film, at least there's a suggestion of some kind of altruistic behavior. What you have here is marketing carried to the ultimate degree. Now you mentioned the Saturday morning TV show, you didn't mention the Nintendo game which is one of the top selling Nintendo games in the country and I played it for our Christmas gift guide last December until it drove me crazy, these little turtles running around

and doing their flip flops and actually the visuals in this movie look a lot like not only the TV show but also like the video game and so kids have already been brainwashed to the point where they've Got to see this movie. That's why it opened so strongly they had to be taken to see this movie and I guess they liked it I don't know. Maybe they're not that critical when they're five years old He had to bring up the Nintendo game I think we pointed out up front that he was obsessed with a Nintendo game and that's the one game He played a lot before he decided I can't play video games. They'll take over my life Yeah, it's so funny. That's the one that broke him the turtles one and yeah, just hearing it like

Cisco craps all over it, but even Ebert is just like, you know, well, yeah This is for five-year-olds who were advertised to very well. It was like, yeah, nope, he's right, he's right. I don't think I actually read Ebert's quote upfront about having played the Ninja Turtles game. I wanna read that now, I just pulled it up. Oh boy. Ebert says, quote, I got one of these NES sets at home and I started playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

After a week of this, I'd find that every time I had a spare moment and every time I came home, I was in front of the set playing with these mutant turtles. It got to the point where it was making me quite unhappy because I was so obsessed with it, and I finally unplugged the machine and said, that's it for Nintendo. Now, this is Bob speaking.

I wanna be a fly on the wall when Mr. Roger Ebert is playing the damn level of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES. I want to be there. He probably was screaming to the heavens about that. Man, oh, that's so... To think that that's the one that broke him in, that he was like, oh yeah, I would be completely obsessed with this and would be late on every review if I kept playing video games. I had to stop it. And on a related note, I am reading the newer book about

Siskel and Ebert called Opposable Thumbs and I'm really enjoying it because there has been very little information about Gene Siskel despite how famous he was. And this book says a lot about him that I've never seen before. And so much about their relationship. So I definitely recommend that. It's a nice follow up to Roger Ebert's autobiography, Life Itself, which I read about a decade ago or whenever it came out. That's really it. I'm going to give that a read Roger Ebert's autobiography, Life Itself, which I read about a decade ago or whenever it came out. That's really it. I'm gonna give that a read too. I watched the doc, Life Itself.

I should read that or pull that one up in the audible as well, Life Itself. But the documentary was amazing. Yes, the book is fantastic. The documentary is, I mean, the book, this is about Ebert, by the way, so forgive me. The book is Ebert's memoirs, basically. And the documentary is half that,

but also partially about how he's dying and doesn't wanna make a documentary for obvious reasons. And it's very, very touching and I love it so much. But they both are separate works, I think. But the Supposable Thumbs book, new, very good. If you love Siskel and Ebert, new info about them, especially Siskel It's also funny that the Ebert's replying to a good point Siskel makes which is like

he is Offended by the amount of product placement in this movie, which is totally fair the more on close watching I was like, oh, yeah, I guess that's an ad and that's a product. There's a product in like 50% of the shots in this movie, I think. Maybe I wasn't looking close enough, but there could have been more. I noticed, oh, at the teen hideout,

they're playing the real arcade games, and they're eating Burger King and things like that. But I didn't really see, I mean, there's nothing going on at that farmhouse where they can stick an ad on something. Unless they got a payment for turtle wax. Oh yeah, maybe. But the stuff just kind of falls into the back.

Well it's also like there's Pepsi cans everywhere. There's also like Archie Comics gets labels in the background on some boxes. And JVC, I always notice the JVC products that the Footcline are stealing. Because JVC makes such great products, the Footcline has to steal it. Well, I recently half watched part of Happy Gilmore, a movie I don't really like, in a hotel room. And there's a scene where they're just in Subway,

eating Subway. Yes. Oh wait, we had on Ian Boothby, tell us this tale of being in that commercial. Yes, of course, my wife and I watched for that scene. We were waiting for Ian Boothby to have the sub hit into his mouth by Happy Gilmore, but I forgot just how much Subway, the Subway Corporation had its shadow looming over that movie. No, he is a pioneer Adam Sandler of in-film advertising. He makes this look inept by comparison, which literally has a Domino's commercial

in the show, in the movie pretty much, of a turtle ordering Domino's and loving it. Watching this again with a very close eye, I still really like it though. Definitely you can see like flaws or like, boy, they're killing time here kind of stuff, or where they completely avoid showing any kind of fight scene of like, oh no, a bunch of fog appeared and the lights went out. I also noticed, and it's something I like, how grainy this movie is. This is a low budget indie movie.

It feels like it's filmed on 16 millimeter or something. Ah, there are a couple scenes that are intentionally filmed on a Super 8 camera. Okay, I guess you'll get to it, but I think I know which ones you're talking about. But yeah, I think you can tell when they went to New York City for some of the outdoor filming that they were able to rent better cameras in New York City than the ones they had

in North Carolina for that stuff. Oh yeah, for sure. And another thought I had upon watching this again is this does feel caught up in the idea of what are we to do with gangs of the early 90s? Where are our children, they're going to join these gangs and we have to stop it. And I'm sure that's still a concern,

but it's not something I hear about anymore, but it was every kind of media had messages about that in it around this time. I mean, we would have seen this within a month of then seeing the cartoon All Stars to the Rescue, which also is about how like, oh, little boys like Danny are gonna be turned into gang members who do drugs, except it's ninjas in this movie. Yeah, there's no drugs in the movie,

which is, I guess, something that they could've included as, you know, a cautionary tale, but they didn't. But yeah, I just thought of, you know, when we covered Bart the Murderer, which aired on TV like a year after this, the network was concerned that Bart was joining a gang when he was joining Fat Tony's mafia. That's right, yes. I think it's a clever thing they do in this movie that they're like, oh yeah,

well the fear, let's take the rampant fear of not just the increased crime rate in New York City, but also like teens joining gangs, except the Foot Clan does the things you hear that they do, like you're, you don't have a family, where are your family, I'm your father, all that stuff do like you're you don't have a family. Where are your family? I'm your father all that stuff except it is you know a Japanese immigrant ninja doing these things I was also thinking not to do too much preamble stuff But whenever they're fighting these ninjas and knocking them around and hitting them with bats are these all children You know we see the guys training that I would say, you know, that I would bet at least 17 at the youngest of those people.

But you know, the turtles are only 15, so this is like minor on minor violence here. Yeah, I guess that's less of a crime than what Casey Jones is doing to them. Yes, no, that's yeah, I'll get to that later, too. But yeah, it's like Elias Koteis is so, or however you pronounce it, he is so charming in this that they completely forget that he is written in this movie to be like a violent nutcase, but he plays him too nice and lovable. Yeah, yeah, he's very cuddly. I guess we never see his living situation or learn too much about him, So I guess knowing as little as we do, he is very charming.

So the opening of the film, when I learned that they had four days, that's what Steve Barron said, they had four days in New York City. To know that, they got a lot done in four days. Like all of this, a lot of this establishing stuff of the crime wave is what they filmed in New York City on one of those four days. Okay, I was guessing, I was trying to guess

what was North Carolina and what was New York as I was watching. There's a few key bits where like you can see North Carolina, or New York become North Carolina, but most of this is New York, the walking around, especially the newsstand stuff. Okay, because I don't know New York, the walking around, especially the new Stan stuff. Okay, because I don't know if the Super Mario Brothers film, the first one, had any time in NYC,

but a lot of that movie is doing North Carolina for Brooklyn. I believe you said it in the history, Bob, or you've definitely told me it before, but I was reminded again that Shredder's warehouse in this is also where they built Dino Hatton. Like, three years after this is where Dino Hatton was built. But yeah, the newsstand, this is where you get your first product placement, a ladies

drinking Burger King, just to give you the timeline, in 1989 when they were filming this, that's when they had the TMNT BK Kids meal of like the belt buckles and stuff I don't know if you had any of these Bob no I just recall the Pizza Hut tie-ins Pizza Hut got them the next year in 1990 but in 89 it was cartoon tie-ins of like there's like a wrath belt buckle and now like a door thing that you would open the door and shredders behind it and they they sold for like four bucks VHS is that had episodes open the door and shredders behind it. They sold for like four bucks VHSs that had episodes of the show on it. Oh speaking of merch and tie-ins, I was just looking through the IMDB gallery for this

film and after you get through some of the stills, you start seeing pictures of the premiere and one of the pictures is Pierce Brosnan holding his young son and his young son has a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles denim jacket and a red bandana across his eyes. Wow. They got so much free publicity because so many movie stars like Steve Barron had the story that Steven Spielberg contacted him because his kid made him watch the Turtles movie three times with him.

And so it's like, yeah, you have all these movie stars that they want to get cred with their kids by taking them to the Ninja Turtles movie premiere. But at the time he was Mr. Remington Steele, he was not James Bond yet. I'm not sure what films he was in, Pierce Brosnan. Oh, that's true. He probably wasn't in much then.

Yeah. Also speaking of British people, when we first see Danny in this whole pickpocketing handoff thing here, this is where you'll note he's wearing a Sid Vicious t-shirt, which he wears multiple ones into the movie. Okay, I was like, is this Jim Morrison or something?

This shows how little I know. Yeah, they're all Sid Vicious, and Steve Barron says that he did that on purpose. They you you can't characters can't just wear a t-shirt in a movie that's copywritten images so but he had been working with the Sex Pistols manager who owned the likeness rights to the late singer Sid Vicious. Singer's being very generous to what Sid Vicious could do. Lead Screamer. Yes. I guess the fact that his initial shirt says Sid, very large on it, was a big clue that I missed.

So Baron apparently at one point was trying to make some sort of biopic about the Sex Pistols, so that's how he could get the rights to it. But again, this was such a small time movie that it was all these favors. And a lot of them were Steve Barron favors, which is a real credit to what he did for this movie. And yeah, we see trucks getting emptied out,

which is a fun little like in-camera trick. I would guess they just had just a wall of the cardboard boxes and then they just took them out and then got back in the next shot. Yeah, I assume they're all empties. There's a lot of empty cardboard boxes flinging around here. Yeah, I assume they're all empties. There's a lot of empty cardboard boxes flinging around here. Yeah, actually, I was thinking,

but by the time we get to the Foot Clan's headquarters and Casey Jones battling Tatsu in there, I was thinking, this reminds me a lot of Future War. Yes, that's right. The empty cardboard box factory. They didn't put in crunching metal sounds when you hit the boxes. It's like, these are just empty boxes.

No one's crushed them yet. We're not pretending this has stuff in it. Uh, and the, the foot client guys, they, they run off. They, uh, it's one of the few scenes where you can see they actually did. Put something in the background to fake New York, because you can tell the skyline of when the kids are going under the fence to get to the warehouse. That is where they put a fake New York skyline behind this. One of the few times they spent the money out in effect like that.

And I know you mentioned it before the recording, but I don't know if you want to bring it up now. You said you saw the trailer with different voices and stuff in it. Yeah, so this is really interesting that the original trailer is even on Paramount Plus right now, at least in the US. When you go to the movie page, it says watch trailer, and sometimes they cut together new trailers. But this is them using the original teaser trailer for the film that is selling it to somebody in January of 1990. And the interesting thing is it has several

deleted scenes in it and talk about them trying to rip off the opening. Early in it they have a shot of a manhole cover popping off. I was like, oh, come on, that's cheap. That is so cheap. But yes, they also have original voices in it that were the temp tracks So yeah here I can play it real quick here. The only two big ones are this is original shredder and Original or at least temp track Michelangelo saying two of their their famous lines is a new enemy, freaks of nature. Together, we will punish these freaks. What the heck was that? Looked like sort of a big title in a trench coat.

Yeah! I love being a turtle! Not nearly as good, sorry. Is it Robbie Wriste? Is he Michelangelo? Robbie Wriste does a much better job in the final movie, yeah, than that voice. No, I mean, and that's the end of the trailer thing of like,

I love being a turtle. A mortal line in the movie, he's not selling it. No, yeah, you can see why they replaced him. My bet is, after hearing that, when they cut together that trailer, they're like, well, this will only be so big and then the trailer got such a great reaction that that's when they thought Okay, let's set aside $50,000 or whatever to hire some better voice. We need the star power of Robbie wrist. I

I saw an unsubstantiated thing that Corey Feldman said that he did it for just like I saw an unsubstantiated thing that Corey Feldman said that he did it for just like $1,500 because he thought it was an indie film and not a giant film. It's why he didn't come back for two. He was in too much of, let's say, a haze to understand the phenomenon of the turtles for the past couple of years.

He, you know, for those three years, he had other things on his mind, yeah. So, yes, we then go to the Foot Clan warehouse that would later be Dino Hatton. We get to see Tatsu played by Toshihiro Obata who had small roles in the Shadow and Demolition Man, but not much else to his credit. He's good in this.

He always scared me as a kid. I was like, oh man, he's so scary. Even in two, he scared me. He's kind of disp. He always scared me as a kid. I was like, oh man, he's so scary even in two He scared me. He's kind of dispatched Unceremoniously though when he's hit like a golf ball and he is in two you said I have memories of two. Okay I I remember they I feel like I liked it more Him into because the turtles actually directly fight him instead of they they save him for Casey Jones in this movie, but Elias Koteas could only do so much stunt work and so they couldn't actually do a real fight for his character. Also the kids who are the

the hoodlums, they're eating a Burger King Whopper. There's like an open Whopper container next to a Burger King drink there. I noticed the Burger King. That's like the first product placement I did pick up on. If I was Burger King, I'd be calling them after the movie comes out and say like, what, so the turtles eat Domino's and the bad guys eat our food? Why don't the turtles eat Burger King?

Hey, any publicity is good publicity, right? Though I guess this too shows you where they're at of like, you know, they've got Burger King B-level pizza, B-level burger place, Domino's B- level pizza place. They don't get the A level stuff till after the success of this. And this whole thing is a voiceover narration from April explaining what's going on. I thought to myself, oh yeah, she's a perfect mainstream journalist. Her only arguments with the police is they're not arresting enough people.

Yes, we need more funding for the police. And I watched this a few years ago, but I forgot all these elements of April that are in this that are not canon or just invented for this where she's an investigative reporter, which you know is part of all the turtle stuff, but she also owns an antique store. She's very good at life drawing. She's got a VW microbus. store. She's very good at life drawing. She's got a VW micro bus. Oh, and she also, her family owns a farmhouse too. Right, she's got all this property. What's going on April? I know it's like, oh so you're just a friggin rich kid playing around being a TV journalist. Good for you April. Unfortunately when I watch this I just think of all the things that have frustrated me about it when I was a kid and I brought this up in the first section but we get to the new station and it's WTRL 3 and I can just go back to nearly 8 year old me thinking no it's channel 6. Exactly. Well you're probably also thinking like where's her boss? Where's Irving?

Yeah, yeah. Vernon's the camera guy. Irving is the boss. Oh, that's right. Or in the end, her dorky friend, I forget her name too. Irma. Irma, that's it. Not Irving, Irma. I forget the boss's name.

He was in the cartoon that we covered on the What a Cartoon episode. But yeah, I guess Charles is kind of the mean boss, but he's not the like Perry White, J. Jonah, J. Jonah Jameson? Yeah, yeah, he's not the like Perry White's J Jonah J Jonah Jameson. Yeah Yeah, he's not enough. That's his problem. They give all the mean boss stuff to the the chief of police You know, yeah the boss here. It feels kind of like the dad from elf Now I also in this scene you get to see Danny

He opens up the walk man that he'll be using later in the movie to ignore his father. So I gotta say too, when I watched this, I was like, yeah, I remember why as a kid I completely erased Danny. Danny is the kind of kid they add to like, this is for kids to have a self-insert character. Like, we don't need Danny. No.

Yeah, I didn't like Danny, and as a kid, I like him now. Casey Jones is a character I like now. But as a kid, once the mask comes off, I'm like, this is just a guy hanging around. Yeah, Keno is way cooler in Secretly Used, though also unneeded, but. I'm surprised the Casey Jones mask never comes back.

It's so iconic. Was it just skirting copyright law by being parody? Oh, yeah, I mean, too, I bet they just, the Casey Jones is such a handsome guy that I think it also is them going like, well we didn't hire this guy to cover him in a mask the whole movie so that's why he gets knocked off in like eight seconds after his first appearance. I was just thinking he's kind of like Punisher Jason and maybe that was too much for the lawyers. Yeah I could could see that. Well, especially because New Line is in direct competition

with Freddie against Jason at that point. And now it's all owned by the same people. Great. But yeah, also the big change, again, we said it before, why David Wise, not the rare one, was mad about this because she was Baxter Stockman's lab assistant in the comics. She was not a news reporter.

Making her a news reporter is stealing the character from the cartoon while technically only licensing the comic rights. Oh yeah, I forgot about that element of her from the comic. Yeah, yeah, all of the stuff that happens with April in this movie is pretty close to what appears in the comic,

except that she is a news reporter here. And if they ever considered her being in the yellow jumpsuit, it never happened in the movie, but this yellow jacket is the most you could get. If only, yeah, I think I might've said this up front and I apologize if I'm repeating myself, but I think they use just enough cartoon elements to make me think, well, why is the rest of this

not like the cartoon? Yeah, and this is where they wanted to have more stuff. Like this was gonna be the big thing Steve Barron wanted in those reshoots with Katzenberg, which was he wanted to show during that crime wave, cuts to the turtles running through the back alleys of New York and everything and them stalking the Foot Clan. If you watch that original trailer, you see a shot that's not in the movie of the turtle

shells popping out of water, kind of like at the end of the second movie. That was supposed to be part of that opening sequence of seeing the turtles. Instead, this time, they just happen upon April being robbed as she has some bad luck. And Baron admits on the commentary, the lights go out because we had a deadline and we only had so many days to film. Yeah, there's a lot of deadline fights involving darkness and steam. But it also seems like they don't want to reveal

the turtles quite yet because when they're revealed it's when they're having fun, they're the more comical, fun, family-friendly versions of the characters. If they were introduced in an all-out brawl with these kids, I think some parents would be pulling their kids out of the theater because they're like, well, this is what you like? Well, no more turtles for you.

I think they wanna show the turtles having fun and partying and eating pizza before they actually hit people. That's true. The first punches don't happen until the Casey fight, I guess. That's the first time you actually see violence on screen. I also forgot, I always think that Sam Rockwell first appears when he offers the cigarettes,

but he's one of the thugs beaten up by the turtles here. And Sam Rockwell is very funny here because I had to look it up, I was like, okay, wait, was he a New York actor? No, he was born in California and had just moved to New York to start his young acting career. So his cartoonish New York accent is not real. It's a California doing a New York accent. But yes, the turtles, Raphael though, unlike his action figure, doesn't have a ninja star to throw at the thing. So he has to lose his side to take out the lights.

Yeah, they really need more accessories. If you're gonna be tossing around your side like this don't be so sad when you lose it. Even the original ones they had like they came with the ninja stars they came with like what tonfas or something or also like a glaive sort of thing like a pointy thing on the end of a handle. I mean him losing his side is kind of like when you're a kid and you lose a ball on the roof of your house and you're like well I knew what I was getting into when I threw it up there so. Maybe that's why we all the kids loved Raph in this movie because they're like oh man I'd be sad if I lost my favorite

toy too. Yeah like I said up front this is the Rafael movie and as a Rafael super fan I was you know on board I think that helped me get around all of the the lack of canon or what I felt was canon as a seven-year-old I you know Leo was my favorite I think Leo is the turtle with the most disservice done to him in this so the least screen time or story I think if you were a fan of Mikey or especially if you're a fan of Donatello you must have hated this movie or felt shortchanged because I said it up front, but they're like Beavis and Butthead in this movie. They're just doing bits and they don't really have their own characterizations.

I guess Michelangelo might be more sensitive because he's the one who's crying later in the film. And twice Donatello does something that reads to me as, this person is smarter than Michelangelo, but that's kind of it. But yeah, Raph, I love the shot of Raph peeking out from the manhole cover with his side poking it out. Like, that's so cool.

And as a kid, I was in shock hearing him say a swear. Damn, damn. Damn is like his catchphrase in this movie. Yeah, this time I counted the dams So we're gonna we're gonna go through the movie and count them all but I counted six and I think only half of them are Raphael dams there's there's a Donatello dam at the end of the movie. Wow. I forgot that one Wow Okay, I I caught the Mikey dam, but that's they soften it I think just those dams went such a long way in getting our generation

as we grow up thinking like, this is such a dark and gritty movie, like this has silly things in it. Yeah, they're fighting with props in an antique store. That's why April has an antique store, so they can have a bunch of fun props. Yeah, it's like, you need symbols to fight ninjas with? Well, I've got a store. Though, you know, Jackie Chan, he would comejas with? Well, I've got a store. Though, you know Jackie Chan, he would come up with a lot more cool, him and his stunt team, you put him in that antique store, he's gonna come up with more fun bits than they do in this movie. Absolutely.

Like, well actually I guess that basically is the fight scene in Rumble in the Bronx, filmed in your neighborhood, Bob. Right, it was a convenience store, right? filmed in your neighborhood, Bob. Right, it was a convenience store, right? And also they have a, the gang basically has a Foot Clan style warehouse they hang out in too in that movie. Also not my neighborhood, but I've been there and it is iconic.

The iconic rumble in the Bronx district. Nina had some great pics of her discovering filming locations from the movie movie I really like that but so yes after all of this we then get to see our Turtle Boys on screen in our first clip Huh? Bossa Nova? Chevy Nova? Oh, man. Excellent! Yeah! Come on, let's move it.

I'm starving. Ooh, work rocket. Major pizza attack. Pizza unneeded. Oh, baby. All right. All right. I'm gonna win, D.D.! Same to Rose. Woo! Oh baby Oh baby Alright I'm gonna win

Give me three You got it I like how up front the turtles are how adults saw them in 1990 Catchphrase goblins that like pizza That's right You're right, they're just all try out catchphrases It took many viewings before I realized that the Undercurrent of all of these catchphrase scenes that book in the movie is them trying to discover the word cowabunga like yeah

I always forget the movie is about the discovery of cowabunga That's fine. By the end of it. They'll finally have it like as a kid Chevy Nova bossa Nova My mom had to explain that one to me. I think she, she had a good chuckle at that. One oral history said that one of the first things they filmed in costume were this walk through the sewers and it apparently took 36 takes and drove the performers insane. They all were ready to like die. They're walking through these dark tunnels that have ankle deep water in them.

It looked difficult. I wanna know later how they did the Donatello skateboarding through the tubes fighting guys. Was that 60 takes? Man, yeah, it had to be, cause they had a specific skateboarding performer. When he does the skating a little later, you can bet that it's just wearing

turtle legs, like not the rest of the thing. Yeah, and by the way, damn number two comes when they're talking about their pizza rich future and he's just like, damn! So that's a shouted damn. So I believe his third damn is the establishing or the shot over the city at the end of the Casey Jones thing where he goes, damn!

That's a big damn. Yeah, no, Raph is not ready to celebrate with the other bros as they're so excited. Also, when he says Major League butt kicking is back in town and you see their shadows, it looks more like he's singing into his nunchuck like it's a microphone. It's really clever to set up. You show them as silhouettes first and then they come around the corner and you're like, these are the turtles. You've been waiting to see them.

Here they are. Yeah. I wonder, so you saw the trailer. How much of the turtles did you actually see in that trailer? They give it all away. They show multiple fight scene moments. They show Mikey do the head duck. That's the last shot of the movie,

is the God I love being a turtle with a head duck. So they give it all away, which is funny. I would bet that Steve Barron didn't want that, but he had no control over how New Line Cinema was gonna market that. As a kid not watching a lot of movies and theaters around this time, I'm sure I had not seen what they looked like

until they rounded that corner. And note too, these credits, three editors that stands by the thing of Sally Menke being fired for being part of the Steve Barron goes to Disney story. So too bad because she's an Oscar-winning editor and the other two people are fine. Too bad we can't see her cut. Yeah, no, it's sad. she's an Oscar-winning editor, the other two people are fine. Too bad we can't see her cut.

Yeah, no, it's sad, I am thankful to whatever German production company was able to work with Steve Barron and probably slightly illegally include some deleted scenes on the German Blu-ray, but I appreciate that. Thank you, thank you German Turtles Blu-ray releasers. Then in a very Leonardo move, he's the one who rushes in and be like,

teacher, teacher, we did a good job tonight. Now, I have been obsessed with doing the splinter voice around the house since I started watching this, mostly to my Ninja Turtle, which is my Parrot Louis. So I just go up to him and say, Parrot focused on peanut has troubled mind. And things like that. Yeah, I have a little clip here of him talking to the boys through their first fight.

We have had our first battle, Master Splinter. They were many, but we kicked. We fought well. Were you seen? In this, you must never lapse. Even those who would be our allies would not understand. Our domain is the Shadow. Stray from it reluctantly.

For when you do, you must strike hard and fade away Without a trace I Lost the side then it is gone. I can get it back. I can get it back Let it go I Love that then it isE-T's gone. That's another one. Very Buddhist.

At a certain point I get tired of his, this Confucius style lecturing of everyone. I just want him to give us direct information. It's, yeah, I mean, he's got a lot of Yoda to him, or, well, I mean, he's a ripoff of multiple trainers in movies. Like the Kung Fu, I mean, he's a ripoff of multiple trainers in movies. Like the Kung Fu, I mean, it all came from something, but the classic Kung Fu 60s TV show

had a guy like this in it. Well, like, get the coin out of my hand, Grasshopper. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, calling the guy Grasshopper. Yeah, but this does set up, you know, again, as a kid watching this, I knew every single thing about the Ninja Turtles So these set up lines were needless to me because I was like well. Yeah, they're the turtles I know everything but

Splinter needs to explain to some people who don't know the turtles that like this is why they stay so Secretive and why they have not they don't want anybody to know they exist Yeah, and I gotta say the Splinteret is the best puppet in this whole movie, mostly because a person doesn't have to be inside of it. So they can do a lot more with it, it doesn't really need to walk around. I will also say that the previous year, the Jim Henson Company put together the adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches, which I just rewatched, and it has some amazing mouse puppets, some of the most adorable mouse puppets.

So they had mastered the rodent by this point in history. Yeah, wow, you're right. I didn't connect it like, oh yeah, this is another great, they were doing a lot of strong mouse work at the time. And yeah, I mean, the acting on it too is just, Kevin Clash's hand is in the bed doing traditional puppeteering though It's got servo eyes and all of that like it's it's fancier than just you know Elmo

Yeah, but there's radio stuff, but splinter I almost call him Skinner splinter is either sitting or chained up There's one shot of him standing and honestly, it's not that convincing but no I think it took me a million watches as a kid to realize that he was, you know, a traditional Muppet that wasn't a guy in a suit. And also when you're when you're watching the movie with extremely close eyes in 4k, you definitely can see how turtle lips don't always work perfectly. And they're doing their best with the rerecorded dialogue to match lip sync that happened on the set.

This was a new detail I heard that sounded truly insane about how they filmed it, especially for the scenes with the human actor instead of this is just puppets talking to puppets. But to do the turtles, basically the guys in the suits were saying to sync up everybody, the guys in the suits are saying the line in the suits, but then off screen the guys controlling the rotors for the mouths. So they sync up. They're saying the lines too. So two people are saying lines at the same time. So when April says, Oh, do you guys, what do you guys like on your pizza? Two people are saying the line is Michelangelo back to her.

Wow. Wow. That must have been a challenge for the humans in this film. It sounds rather frustrating, so credit to any of the human actors who could, that's why I felt like later in the movie when April and Casey are acting with each other, I was like, wow, this has to be so freeing for these actors to just talk to a human instead of a puppet. It does feel like the most natural scene in the movie.

And you can see Mikey in the background making his Domino's order. It seems out of character that Mikey would want anchovies, because in the cartoon, the joke is they have ridiculous pizza. I always hated those jokes as a kid, like peanut butter and banana pizza dude or whatever. I mean, that actually sounds pretty good.

But it'd be like, I know, jelly bean and bacon or something like that. I think they had like ice cream on their pizza, a raisin brand in the episode we watched. Yeah, something gross like that. And this is all part of this industry-wide degradation or they really wanted to put down the anchovy. And I'm a late in life anchovy adopter.

You gotta go to good restaurants, get the good anchovies. But anchovies are great on pizza. My husband is a big anchovy fan who's gotten me to try them more. Oh good. So yeah. But all these jokes made me think it's bad. I mean the anchovy jokes were second only

to sushi jokes in the 80s. These jokes have been replaced with pineapple on pizza jokes. That's pizza jokes now. And you know what? Let's all calm down pizza jokes. That's pizza jokes now. Yeah, and you know what? Let's all calm down about that. That's also fine. Those pineapple on pizza jokes are as hacky as no anchovies dude jokes were in 1990.

Also this is where you can note that he has a missing ear or a half off ear. That was an invention for the movie, entirely to set up the ending, so Shredder can recognize him at the end. It's strange that he does recognize him at the end. You know, if a rat scarred me for life, and then later a giant rat missing an ear, but then again, he should have recognized that at any time, it was only when the talking rat calls him

by his name at the end of the movie. He sees him a lot. It's like, you know what? This Japanese rat I've been talking to for weeks, he finally, I know where he's from. He's the little rat that scarred my face. What are the odds? So Splinter telling everybody they gotta to hide and also he's setting up

the arc of the emotional journey all the boys are going to go through is learn to live without him. Yeah. I mean he's going to be in every movie so it's like one day I will die. Yeah. Well not for I mean ever really. It's like when you're a kid or it's like he's gonna leave them the you know his store and he's like I'm not gonna be around forever kids you know like ah dad and as the boys are celebrating we get a legit record scratch joke of Splinter meditating and then a record scratch wakes him up. And that's tequila right right? You know, as a kid, I love that joke because I loved Pee-wee, but it is,

it's a big ripoff to do that. They don't say Tequila, they say Bodacious or Zucchini. No, they say Ninjitsu. Ninjitsu, okay, thank you. I guess they could have said Tequila because it's the name of the song, but whatever. They put their own fun spin on it. It's the only way to not make it just a pure ripoff

of one of the most memorable scenes in Pee-wee's Big Adventure of like, when they do it, they say ninjitsu. And Raph is like, I'm gonna go see Critters. Yeah. I hate you. And then meanwhile, Leo's like, sure, get out. Like yeah, Leo's got nothing to do.

He doesn't even get to have the fun dancing. He just goes like the the walk like an Egyptian style He just sees seated Egyptian style dancing. No, it's fun that Mikey and Danny Donnie walk in the background Yeah, like dance through the back. It lets you know This is what they'll be doing for the whole movie if things get too serious They'll be like palling around watching cartoons dancing watching cartoons, dancing, playing trivia pursuit, you name it. When they start dancing together, that's your first indication that these are the same characters and will be doing the same thing in every scene. Uh, and, uh, but yeah, this is where he, uh, oh, and Mikey also says,

socket to me, this is like one of the many times in this movie where they want Mikey to sound like he's a current day teen, but he references things that would make him, you know, at least in his 30s in 1990. Yeah, he doesn't say 23 skidoo, but he comes close. Every 15 year old in 1990 was imitating Cagney. They all love to do it. Boy, yeah, I only knew that through Looney Tunes,

I think, at this time. And so Raph gets dressed up in his trench coat, which taken from the comics, it's entirely a thing that they love Jack Kirby. Like I completely forgot I was rereading the old Mirage books. They did an issue where Donatello teams up with literally Jack Kirby. They draw Jack Kirby in the page and he meets up with Donatello, and they fall into a comic book. It's crazy.

Well, they didn't put on those weird, weird, like, bald white men masks that they had in the cartoon. No, they didn't do that. I always thought, even as a kid, these are disgusting, and who is falling for this? No, I did hate those two. But the trench coat and fedora look,

that's how the thing Ben Grimm would dress up in old Fantastic Four comics when he was trying to be in disguise even though it's very obvious he knew who he is Then yes, we see in a very poochy way Donnie skateboards into the next scene And here's a quote from Donatella's actor explaining how hard this scene with Michelangelo was. The first scene I did with Michelangelo when we're waiting for the pizza in the sewer, that's all we did that day. It was just sitting there and putting together all of that choreography. Head movements, eye contact, taking a breath, one moving the mouth, and then you're timing everything

together. Six people trying to make this very subtle, delicate scene work and look believable. Hmm, yeah, sounds like a nightmare. Yes. In some ways CGI is a blessing as much as we like these costume characters. Yes, Baron on the commentary says like, we did the best we could at the time.

He was saying he wished he could do, he was saying if I could do this over again now and when he says now he means 10 years ago or over 10 years ago, but he's saying he wanted to do it like the where the wild things are movie where it's full body puppety suits running around, but then the faces are CGI for the talking. And yeah, this, this scene of Donnie and Mike, of them talking, this shows that Donatello is a little more in touch with his feelings than Michelangelo,

because he's like, whoa, you know, of not having him about Splinter, Michelangelo does not care, he's only thinking about pizza. Yeah, he's got a one-track mind. Yeah, I forgot that Donnie brings this up and it's immediately shot down. And I actually, I looked into this 30 minutes or it's free thing or 30 minutes or money or the prices reduced thing. It ended in 1993 because a woman's car was struck by a

Domino's driver. She sued the company successfully for 78 million dollars. This caused Domino's to discontinue the campaign because they were getting a lot of complaints about reckless driving from their drivers. And the offer used to be 30 minutes or it's free but over time that was winnowed down into 30 minutes or you get three dollars off. That yeah which is what Michelangelo is saying here that shows you that this had they had a Domino's consultant on the set who's just like three bucks off dude like he's following the letter of the law of the deal. Yeah, and he's not tipping this guy,

so I immediately loathe him. Boo. He's the worst turtle. No, yeah, I read about that too, Bob. I was like, okay, when did this end? Because I feel like as a kid, we didn't order Domino's all that much, because again, we were, as Ebert said, brainwashed to get Pizza Hut,

which was the dominant Ninja Turtles thing. But you'd always hear about like, oh, 30 minutes or it's free. And but I never experienced that. That was now to know the 93 date of the ending. Yeah, we had no nearby Domino's. I can only imagine what it tastes like. Who the Noid even was was a mystery to me. This Domino's thing to read about it of like, you know, it made Domino's famous when they started it in the mid 80s. But you have to know that like the drivers were driving very thing to read about it of like, you know, it made Domino's famous when they started

it in the mid 80s. But you have to know that like the drivers were driving very unsafe. There's probably, I would bet there are hundreds of them. There's only a few lawsuits. There was another lawsuit where the family of a woman killed in a delivery accident got like 2.8 million from them. And honestly, who is deliberating the time here? I imagine there was violence done to drivers who were insistent that it was not 30 minutes and someone pulled out a gun I mean delivery drivers delivery people are in more danger every day than police officers I mean most people are to be honest, but they have a very dangerous job They're always getting robbed and I mean they're always getting robbed and having violence done to them

dangerous job. They're always getting robbed and I mean they're always getting robbed and having violence done to them. And man you think of the Karen videos we have today or all of the videos of like look at this person being an asshole to an employee somewhere. That had to be a five times a night occurrence for some delivery drivers to they show up on time and they're like no I think you're three minutes late like no I'm not like you have an argument. Guns are probably pulled out. Yeah. I mean, consumers are going to abuse that level of power when the arbiter, they're the arbiter, I guess.

They're like, well, I say it's 30 minutes. Here's when I called. I don't know. I don't know how this was judged. You know? Yeah. It was, was the like time on the receipt of like, this is when your order came in and this is when it starts and like

Not only are people driving recklessly, but also as happens in here Unintentionally by Michelangelo, but I also read that like people would turn off their porch lights or try to not Make it hard to be found god. This is like uber eat scams where you pretend you didn't get the food or like Oh, there's something wrong with it But but it's delicious Yes, yeah, this thing is being on forever But yes the dominoes that ended at 93 so this gets out of date fast And then on top of that too like the the vision of the noid we see in this movie

I I looked that up the noid hostage incident happened the year they were filming this. So they put the Noid stuff in here as he's about to be discontinued. God, yeah. Not a great year for Domino's. But yeah, so this is when the Domino's pizza guy appears and this is the first of the four cameos in this film of the suit actors. So this is Michelangelo delivering to himself here of this is Michelin Sisti. Hey Mikey, did you ever think about what Splinter said tonight? I mean about what it would be like, you know, not having them. Hmm. Time's up.

Three bucks off. Here. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, one twenty-two. One twenty-two and an eight. One twenty-two and an eight.

122 and an eight. Terrific. Where the heck is 122 and an eight? You're standing on it, dude. Just slip it down here. Give me that. Hey, this is a ten. The tab's thirteen. You're two minutes late, dude.

Ah, come on. I couldn't find a place. Wise man say, forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza. I gotta get a new root. Ba-dum-tsh. I gotta tell you folks, because of this movie, I'm getting pizza tonight for dinner. Mostly because I have been eating much more healthy

because summer's coming. I'm replacing one meal a day with a giant salad and going light on the carbs, and I'm just seeing pizza all over this movie, hearing talk of pizza, I need pizza tonight. The indoctrination works. I know I was I was telling my husband today to it's like, okay, I've, I've also been wanting to slim down for the summertime or get, you know, especially because I just I went on a trip last weekend and indulged a little bit while on a vacation. But I was like, okay, but this whole week I've been good,

but today I was like, okay, I'm gonna exercise extra, I won't eat anything else today, but we're gonna order pizza. Oh, we're both having our own separate pizza dates. That's true. The Pavlovian training, conditioning, totally worked. It's powerful, it's sickening, really, like the turtles. Like, in a world without the Ninja Turtlestles would pizza be half as prevalent in the United States as it was is

But now as an adult I can have beer with pizza. I didn't know as a kid. It was a great pairing The turtles didn't tell us sell us beer as well Michelangelo would scold me. You're a total loser man only idiots drink beer I forgot it as cartoon all-stars. He's like total passive aggressive, like, oh yeah, you're way cool, dude. Oh, I love that special so much. I wish you were dead. Listen to the, we did a great,

what a cartoon podcast about it. Bob connected it to our current president, Joseph Robinette Biden. It's it's one of the best things he's ever done next to the Patriot Act. So yeah the pizza gets delivered and then I mean a $10 pizza boy oh boy that's that's a pretty good deal. Oh good lord I feel like pizzas just your average pizza is like I don't know, $25 maybe? Yeah, you know, I ordered a Papa John's pizza

not too long ago, and it broke my, it is how I feel like a boomer. I broke my brain of like, no, Papa John's pizza cannot be more than $20, this is wrong. I hate to tell you this, but that's cheap garbage. Hey, look, it is, but there was a deal on it. And that was with the deal, it was over 20. You can't satisfy your pizza craving

tonight with Papa John's, I forbid it. We'll be buying, it'll be a local place. It'll be a local place. But yeah, also good pizza, fake pizza here I'm assuming, on the cheese drip when it's Blatts on Splinter's head or the cheese stretch on the bite oh yeah they're not getting actual cheese anywhere near these million dollar puppets I mean it's a risk with whatever fake stuff they put on their yeah whatever these things are

like rolling around in water I'm just like good lord I hope they're okay I hope these suits are okay it well that's why there's the rotted Donatello puppets that got sold. No actually I watched a making of that I watched a making of that was purported to be the making of for the first movie but it actually was them at Henson Creature Workshop building the puppets for the sequel and in it they're saying like yeah for this we're using latex. We used foam in the first one and that's why they all fell apart like the the second movie suits I think had a lot a little more longevity you also

note the Noid on Donnie's napkin they were still advertising with him that oh I missed a rare Noid appearance in a film and Mikey doing the infomercial thing that's one of the few times he actually feels like a teen of 1989. Like that was a thing on real TV. The the the marketing speak he was using there. Then we cut to Raph. I believe in the script. They just had like the comedy of Raphael goes to a monster

movie and thinks it's silly. But fortunately New Line Cinema released in 1986 the movie Critters so they could reference themselves. You know what I've never seen Critters and looking more into it I want to. It's a horror comedy and it stars both the mom from ET Dee Wallace and also the recently departed M.M. at Walsh. Wow I didn't know this I've never seen it either. Yeah and also child actor Scott Grimes now known for playing Steve on American Dad, he's in it. Oh wow, man, see I should watch it to get over my childhood fear of seeing it on,

the VHS cover always scared me as a little, little kid, and this movie didn't help it. Are you sure you're not thinking of ghoulies? Because that to me, I still don't wanna watch ghoulies, they're gonna bite my butt when I take a poop. Obviously that scared me too, as did the VHS cover for Monkey Shines. That was another one that really scared me as a kid.

But no, Critters was up there as one that scared me. It didn't look as fun. I bet it'd be a fun watch. I wonder where that is streaming. It's basically one of the many Gremlins ripoffs, but I feel like it's one of the best, from what I've heard. I'm sure it wallops Hobgoblins. So yeah, we see Raph walking down the street.

This is another like, oh, they got some good outdoor New York City scenes here. I swear, when they're running outside of what I assume is Central Park, it looks exactly like the same block in Ghostbusters where Rick Moranis gets chased by the the big dog Hmm. I don't know a lot of New York geography. I really want to know if you can visit April O'Neill's apartment at 11th and Bleecker It does sound fake right I've heard of Bleecker Street as a real street though in New York City. I was just there I didn't explore too much, but I got around. But this is where

they after walking down the street, Raph sees a couple of hoods, grab a lady's purse, a classic my purse content here, which also happens in the Muppets take Manhattan too, except it's Piggy who does the karate chops instead of Raphael But Raph trips them and then they keep running off and that's where they run into a bad man Yeah, apparently in the original script They had a scene earlier of Casey Jones like suiting up while watching a news report on the crime But that's cuz like you were guessing, Bob, he was written as a Punisher parody,

who's like, only I can clean up the streets, the dirty streets, I gotta kill everybody. Yeah, in the cartoon, again, he made five appearances because he was a little too edgy, even though he was a parody. He never took off the mask, and he spoke with that deep, stern voice. Yeah, that's probably why I just did that voice there.

I was like, oh yeah, that's not how he talks in the movie. But I think in the movie, they make him more like Big Trouble in Little China's Jack Burton. He feels like a Kurt Russell ripoff. Yeah, like a world-weary dirtbag with a heart of gold, that kind of guy. Yeah, yeah. Though I think they also figured he was,

while Elias Koteas was sold as like a young De Niro, and I get that feeling. Oh wow, yeah, I can really, he's got, he's a handsome, very handsome man. He's got kind of like an older face, or like more mature face that did remind me of De Niro. And he's been a bald actor for years now, so seeing him with his long flowing locks is impressive.

And I guess also that makes sense of like, well, if you got a young De Niro, the Punisher is, well actually, the Punisher predates Taxi Driver, but after Taxi Driver, he became more of a Travis Bickle figure. So the connection is there too. But yeah, he, Casey comes down, beats the shit out of these kids. He's seemingly going to like put them into

comas at the very least. He loves brutalizing children with weapons. That's his real gimmick in this movie. And Raph, this is what happens in the Raphael one shot from Mirage back in the day where he runs into Casey Jones and just tells him, no, you know, beat these kids to death. Like I stopped him, it's done. And Casey is like, no, I gotta teach him a lesson. After he says that, you don't feel like he's the type of guy to beat someone to death.

Maybe that too is why the ending of the movie where he does kill someone or thinks he kills someone. Oh right, he's a dangerous murderer. Yeah it made his whoops moment makes more sense if you actually write him as a killer or would-be killer. But yeah also Raph knocks him over instantly that's what his mask gets knocked off and he does not wear it too much more in the rest of the movie But yes, this is when Raph and Casey Jones start fighting That was a crime you per scrubbing pukes and this is the penalty Two minutes for slashing

Two minutes for hooking and let's not forget my personal favorite two minutes for slashing, two minutes for hooking, and lest I forget my personal favorite, two minutes for high stick. How about a five minute game misconduct for roughing, pal? Hey, bogey, now who died and made you a referee? You did your job, now get out of here and let me do mine. These J.V. Lowlifes need to be taught a lesson. Not like that they don't.

Not from you. these J.B. Lowlifes need to be taught a lesson. Not like that they don't. Not from you. Well, it looks like you're the one who needs to be taught a lesson, pal. Class is paying 101. Your instructor's Casey Jones. Look, I don't want to fight you. Well, tough rocks, pal.

Hup! Hup! Hup! A whole Zaykin' zanko bat? Tell me! You didn't pay money for this. I just realized this city has five Batman running around. Ha ha ha! Oh, wow, you're right. Well, there are ninjas stealing things,

so I guess you need five Batman. It's a day. Hey, New York City's dangerous, man. You gotta have these people beaten. But, you know, when he says these JV squad low lives, it's like, so you admit they're underage. You're beating minors up horribly here, Casey. We had different ideas about corporal punishment in 1990. So when he's like, who's sake can Seiko bet?

I don't know why they're making fun of who's sake can Seiko. I forget if there was a scandal, but there's a very funny miss translation of this or Mishearing of this apparently on the UK blu-ray and I saw a tweet about this and I pulled it up Oh the person who was subtitling this did not get the script I guess and was just doing it by ear But they didn't know what Jose Canseco what that that arrangement of syllables meant So in the UK subtitles, it is Hoseiken Seiko.

So the first word is Hoseiken, second word Seiko, like it's a Japanese name. What the hell? Because if you hear Hoseiken Seiko, you're like, if you don't know baseball, you're just like, well, that has to be a Japanese thing because it sounds Japanese. These are ninjas. These are ninjas.

These are ninjas. Wow, that's so funny. Man, that's the reverse of the cricket joke that's in here of like, that instead it's like, well, you have to know baseball to understand the Jose Kinseko joke. You have to know what a crumpet is to understand cricket. Well, now we know he's an absolute lunatic.

I don't know if he's been on Twitter a lot. I mean, when we covered Homer at the bat, we were talking about his crazy social media presence and everything. Yeah, I haven't kept up with the kooky old Jose Conseco, but I looked up, OK, what was his 1989 like when they would have been filming this? Apparently, he had a rougher season that year,

and maybe people were thinking he was a flame out or something something like he had he missed a bunch of games. Oh yeah. So sorry I'm reading this now. He missed 88 games which shows you just how many goddamn baseball games there are. So I guess then the joke is like this isn't as cool as it used to be this Jose Kinseko bat but it's a joke that only works for like four months or whatever. Yeah, I'll tell you what, that moonlighting joke later doesn't get a lot of play these days. That's true.

I mean, like we've been saying, this was an indie film that they figured nothing was going to add, so they're not thinking about timelessness. This is an extremely 1989 movie. And yeah, they he gets hit with the second bad and is told to for one sale pal. And I gotta say imitatable violence in this movie. They worry about the the you know, the sword slicing somebody or whatever. How many kids pretended to be Casey Jones and bashed each other with baseball bats.

How many kids went into the sewer? I mean, I never had the instinct, but seeing all the going into sewers and this, I thought there had to be some very stupid children, very unsupervised, who went down into the sewer. Hopefully, God willing, came back alive to tell the tale. It had to. I mean, I'd hope kids at least know not to open a manhole cover

and that they're not gonna meet the turtles down there. I think that's why in 1990 we had the Ninja Turtles movie and then the adaptation of It on ABC to let you know there could be turtles in the sewer, there also could be an evil clown who'll rip your arm off. It did push the kids back away, didn't it? So yeah, the fight scene, Raph gets one of the bats, he then takes a swing, whiff, as he's told,

but then he hits him the second time, and then stands over his body. That's again where they like play, bum, bum, bum, bum, very silly music. It does feel like they are aware, well this is violence. Quick, add comedy music. I bet you they might have been close to a PG-13 with this movie. I bet you they were, and they relatively knew PG-13 at the time. So a lot of this fight is from the comic page,

but the cricket thing was invented for the movie because Steve Barron, who's British, was in the UK with one of the writers, took him to a cricket match, and the guy put the joke in there that only British people know what cricket is and it's stupid. This is Casey Jones' limit break where he will just knock a guy upwards into an object,

it be it a pile of boxes or a garbage can. You're right, man, he can do, he does that to Raph and to Tatsu. He does them both, it's incredible. If he hits them that hard, really the cricket bat should have just like snapped Raph's neck in the movie. These are very powerful turtles.

Let's just say they're ducking their heads into their shells and we're not seeing it all the time. But yeah, it's funny how he like falls into the trash can and the way an empty suit flies through the air, I'm assuming. Though also too, they said, Baron says like, the purse thieves get tripped, then they jump over a guardrail.

That's in New York. When they land on the other side of the guardrail, then they're in a North Carolina woods that he's like, he's like, please suspend your disbelief and think this is Central Park. Yeah, it stopped looking like New York. They went through a portal. There's just like a weird portal in that area of New York.

Maybe Baxter Stockman is behind it. Oh, the neutrinos are gonna come right any second now on that portal. Also, you can hear, I would bet it's post-effect crickets going off or cicadas, but Steve Barron says that that was a major problem every time they filmed outside of North Carolina in the summer. All you heard were bugs.

Oh God, yeah. Oh yeah, when the turtles are training in the farmhouse, we'll get to it, and they're just, they're rolling around and fighting in the tall grass, I'm thinking to it, and they're just rolling around and fighting in the tall grass, I'm thinking the people in those suits must be just covered in ticks. Oh God, man, ugh, yuck.

Those poor men probably being paid very poorly too. And yeah, then I read this online, I wanna believe it, but when the stunt man in the raft suit after falling down gets out, he does like clutch his nose for just a second. They say that the guy's nose was broken during that scene as John pace, the, the raft factor described it in one interview. It's basically you have so much noise around your head from all the servos while you're wearing the hat, the, the mask that it's like grand central station all around your head from all the servos while you're wearing the mask, that it's like Grand Central Station all around your head except a computer's on your face and you can

barely see anything. And this is filmed at night. There needs to be a VR game called Ninja Turtle Actor where you have to perform scenes as a Ninja Turtle. Now, some indie developer is going to steal this idea, so I regret saying it, but wouldn't that be fun just to understand what that experience is like? You know, it could work with the Five Nights at Freddy branding and it'd be a great horror film, or horror game.

So yeah, this is Casey then gets chased after and that's when they hop back over the fence and we're back in New York City for a few seconds. And this is when Raph's actor gets a on-screen appearance too. What the heck was that? Looked like sort of a big title in a trench coat. You're going to LaGuardia, right? Come back here! I'm not finished with you! Damn!

So the actor in the taxi was the voice actor for Raph, right? Oh yeah, you can totally hear it. Hey, I'm going to LaGuardia. They should get, where was Ray Romano, young Ray Romano. Ah yeah, I'm Raphael, I lost my sight. He was too busy coming up in the ranks as a comedian to apply for this job, unfortunately. I love the voice Pace does.

That's why he gets to stay the voice. Every other actor They were like, yeah, just not really there But he brings so much energy to wrap with that damn or also how he goes Freak like he's so mad to be called freak and yeah, that is our third damn of the movie Over a beautiful shot of New York City, which also notice how the star of the movie It's like they it's a rule, you have to have the World Trade Center in your first shot. There's no, I mean, I guess they're like,

well, Statue of Liberty, that's so cliche now. World Trade Center, that's a little more obscure. I don't know what they go to now. I mean, you gotta think of the good old Empire State Building, right? You know what, I stayed next to it, or near, like just a few blocks from it when I stayed in New York City, looking out my window, I'm like, oh, I stayed next to it, or near, like just a few blocks from it when I stayed in New York City.

Looking out my window, I'm like, oh, I guess that's it. Every other building is so much bigger than it. It feels unremarkable. I love the Art Deco architecture, of course, but now it's just, oh, a tiny building, neat. Did they light it up any while you were there? Oh, they lit it up at night. I mean, there's a giant Starbucks on the first floor.

So I hit that up a few times, but, uh, yeah, it was fun to see in person, but now the skyline, it just, everything has dwarfed it in the Manhattan skyline for, for like decades, obviously. When, when I see it as a, the skyline, I always see the Chrysler building first and think that's the empire state building. I always get it mixed up. Also, this is something that's been killed in the age of app-based ride-sharing New York cabi jokes.

I feel like you can't, you don't have these jokes no more. Yeah, the cabis that have seen everything. I guess a less sensitive movie would have made this a non-white gentleman. I prefer the classic New York cabi thing, and of course you can't, making fun of like an Italian-American And who lives in New York like who can't like nobody's offended by that And of course when you get in an uber it's always a bummer when there's a white driver because they're gonna talk to you

Oh the worst I never want white drivers never that that's the one time. I'm racist against white people So I say yeah ref Is not able to catch up with Casey. Apparently there was again planned because this is in the comic book adaptation. They plan to have Raph then corner Casey Jones in an alley and then they fight to a standstill. That's why Casey calls him my little green friend later and he's kind of friendly because they kind of miss the part of, I mean it makes sense still why Casey helps them when he shows up because they're being ganged up on, but they didn't become friends at any point during this. No, no, yeah, there was never a reconciliation. He became like one of the group, but they never mended their ways.

He became like one of the group, but they never mended their ways But I also do love how he says like man I hate punkers especially punkers who shave their head and put on green makeup And his his description of why he hates punkers is funny Which tells you he horribly beats many people all of the time to have to have ratings of who they beat and now he's got a murder rap ratings of who they beat. And now he's got a murder rap. So then we go back home with Raph and Splinter meeting up. Now this looks like it was filmed for the storyteller,

for sure, like all up close, super dark. Yeah, and this Splinter stuff is totally, I think George Lucas stole this for episode one or two where it's like, fear leads to suffering, suffering leads to this, like it's just the, X goes to Y, Y goes to Z. Yeah, you're right. This is what, you know what? Siskel was saying, oh, where's the philosophy?

Where's the philosophy? This is it right here. He's given him philosophy. Yeah, yeah, it's very basic Buddhist stuff, you know? Get over the emotions, be okay with not having your things, but it's there He's telling him I'm tried. I tried to shape your rage, but I couldn't or whatever and apparently to he was Baron was warned like the the his puppet team said you really can't get the camera this close people are just gonna

See the wires and the seams but they they I think they hit it pretty well even in 4k They they hide it pretty well Yeah, it's it's a really good puppet and I think I might have said this on the recording But I was watching this in my very bright living room during the day And this is a hard movie to watch under those conditions not that it's a technical error or anything It's just the movie was filmed, you know, a lot of things are in darkness to cover up the the puppetry and everything. And Steve Barron also on that commentary, he lets the people on the internet know he's like, look, yes, I've seen you guys on the internet point out where you can see the eye holes or other

things. I could see it then too. I knew you'd be able to see it on the screen if you're looking for it. I wanted to do digital replacement, but there was no money. There was no money for the digital effects on it. But yeah, so after that, we cut to April. She's being, I was gonna say chewed out by her boss, but he's a real drip.

He's just like, April, come on. Yeah, it's kind of a nag. I do recall, you know, I was seeing this chewed out by her boss, but he's a real drip. He's just like, April, come on. Yeah, it's kind of a nag. I do recall, I was seeing this in the theater, I didn't get to go a lot, so it was a fun time, but I recall during this part of the movie just feeling a little listless and thinking, what are all these adults talking? Because we get a scene of April with her boss

and April with the police chief and then Shredder, well it's fun to see Shredder. And I think they jump back to the turtles just to keep the police chief, and then Shredder will, it's fun to see Shredder, and I think they jump back to the turtles just to keep the kids interested, where the kids are watching April on TV, or sorry, the turtles are watching April on TV, just to remind the kids, oh, they're still here, they're still here.

You're not too far, I mean, that's why, like, April doesn't appear in the movie for like 20 minutes, to let kids see all these turtles. Charles just showing up to be like, you know, not only is he whining to April, but then he's also whining to April of like, Oh, and, and I have to drop off my kid at school because otherwise he skipped school. It's how it is. Sucks.

Yeah. He's a real problem child. He's got this mystery Walkman. We see him stealing from April's wallet as she talks with Charles. What a bad boy, man. I do kind of like that Charles is complaining about like, oh, the crime today, which is like, that's literally all media hysteria is all of the time.

Crime is always on the rise if you listen to the media, all that, but I do kind of like that Charles is saying, oh God, it's so dangerous out there when the stealing is happening in this house right behind him. Yeah. Yeah right under his nose and When she mentions a little Tokyo that is a real place. I don't think I've been there though I do think I've had ramen near there, but it's it's described as for people who know New York City It's located in the Lower East Side between 2nd and 3rd Avenue and 8th and 10th Street. Well, the real historical bummer in terms of neighborhoods

is that little Tokyos are never quite as big as Chinatown for the reasons you would suspect. Yeah, well I mean there's many more Chinese people than Japanese people for one thing. And also the government took all of that property during internment. Oh, also that, of course, too. That's what I was implying. Oh, sure, sure.

Well, and also, you know, after, when Mao took over, a lot more Chinese immigrants came to the US, too, as well. Well, I just, I learned about the history of Vancouver's Japantown. Oh, yeah, also the, I think it was after Nina shared Pixar that I read up about like Oakland's lost Japan town which suffered from that internment camp area shame.

And then San Francisco built the We're Sorry block. That's right. Which, hey, it's better than nothing. I'm not making fun of that, but that's essentially what it is. With the peace pagoda and everything, like, oh, we stole from you, we put you in camps. Here's a fun little mall.

You guys love these pagodas, right? We'll build a big one for you. It is a nice mall, though. It is a nice mall. At Nihonmachi, which I of course learned means Japan town, thanks to Duolingo. But I like that April, she's doing the research, all these other racist people are there.

I mean, Charles is probably saying, look, we know who these gangs are, right? Right, April? And April's like, no, I've spoken to Japanese Americans and they think it's the Foot Clan. This element of the plot needs to be investigated more. Who are these whistleblowers on the Foot Clan, these Japanese immigrants?

Yeah, that is, who does know the Foot Clan? There are some deeper questions here, that's true. And then we cut to a police precinct in not a bad parody of bullshit cop speech, which is now like Felix on Unchopped makes fun of it all the time, like we assessed a tactical situation. Yes, the criminal was struck by a fired bullet. Yes, yeah.

Things like that. I mean, this is the Stearns guy, not from the comic or anything, right? I don't think so. He might as well be a cartoon bulldog. The actor Raymond Serra has not been in many other things. Usually he's just like, he's in a law and order here and there. He feels like a guy who failed the audition for Police Academy. He couldn't get mad enough on cue.

Gutenberg just didn't like him, but yeah, I mean his screaming, he's perfectly fine for the totally cliched screaming police chief. Though he's yelling at April like, but you're not April's boss, but now we know cops love telling the media how to do their job and being friendly with them. He should be yelling at some kind of loose cannon style hunk

on his force. You're right, instead of wasting it on April. But yes, we said it before, April is just doing this as all regular media does of saying like, why won't the cops do something? That's her problem. And we also cut to our first vision of Shredder, who has a really baller setup of a ton of

TVs. He basically has the, this show ain't no good, kind of setup where he's got a ton of TVs, they're all cracked, and when he sees something he doesn't like, he just throws a dagger at it. Man, you're right, he's like Elvis. Shredder is just like Elvis here. Elvis wishes he could do as good karate as Shredder does. There are no ninja stars in this film.

These guys are throwing daggers a lot, but maybe there was a concern about ninja stars because I recall kids bringing them to school and the ninja stars were taken away from them by teachers. And then a decade later, UCB would tell us all about the danger. Oh, one of my favorite recurring bits. Kids listen to Throwing Star albums.

They love their favorite Throwing Star celebrity. Throwing Star pornography. Ha ha ha ha. God damn those. Okay, so I also kind of like that they show Shredder with all of his big TVs, and then meanwhile, he showed the turtles with their little black and white TV that they got out of the dump.

So you see, the turtles aren't doing so hot by comparison. We also see the turtles are completely getting extra thirsty for April. Mm-hmm, yeah, that is a, I guess even in Mutant Mayhem, some of the boys have a crush on April in that too, but yeah, the interspecies relationship stuff thing has always been strange with the turtles in April.

Yeah, there's that famous clip of Oprah interviewing them and the characters improv-ing as to whether or not they would date April. Yes, oh God, man, also, now you're reminding me of in the horrible Michael Bay turtles movie, I believe it's Michelangelo who says, "'My shell is getting tight' when he sees Megan Fox's April. Because of his internal genitalia, probably.

Yes, I assume his turtle erection is making his shell tighter on him. One thing I noticed that's true of this April, but not the second one, is that Judith Hoag, actual redhead, she is just covered in freckles if you see her in certain shots. Oh, you're right. I didn't catch it.

I could only find one of those IMDB trivia with no follow-up things of like, why isn't she in the second one? And it's like, it's either pay, or some people say that it's like, she didn't like the violence or she didn't like the shooting schedule, but yeah, it's hard to pin down.

Yeah, I've heard pay because when the movie makes that much, she expected to get a lot more the second time and she was not offered that. I mean, so few people return in the sequel because Golden Harvest and New Line Cinema, despite having a giant hit, they didn't get rich by paying big checks to people. I feel like they've even, Robert England talked about