The Blindboy Podcast - Teenage Margaret Thatcher Turtles

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

How the policies of Margaret Thatcher shaped how the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was written and animated. A extract a boiling hot take through critique of the franchise Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Kerryman's Heaven, you crestfallen Benjamins. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast, if this is your first podcast. Maybe go back and listen to some previous episodes to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. Thank you for the lovely feedback for last week's podcast in which I spoke to the cyber-psychologist Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton. There was quite a large response to that episode. I very much got the sense that people are feeling quite confused about what social media and the internet is doing to

our minds and our behaviour and that that episode gave them a bit of clarity. Before I begin I want to extend my love and support to my American listeners because of the overturning of Roe versus Wade this week in America by the Supreme Court. It's very upsetting to see people once again fighting for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. I don't have any hot takes on the situation. It's a bad thing and I want to acknowledge that. I'm recording this episode in my office right now and there's, I think there's like a band or something quite close by playing some music. So I hope the sound of this band doesn't come in, fly in through the window and fuck up the sound of this podcast. I have a limiter and my microphone turned up fairly high so it should just pick up my voice and not any ambient

noise from a band who appear to be playing the songs of Keane. Nothing against the music of Keane, very well written, straightforward pop songs of the early 2000s. They just give me a strange feeling when I remember their music. When I hear Keane I just think of a man in a denim shirt accidentally dropping his bag of cocaine into a pint of Bulmers. I don't know why, that's just the image that comes up. It's not Keane's fault.

So this week I've been trying to grow San Marzano tomatoes beside my cat house. I bought one of those very small greenhouses, that are made out of plastic, they're about five feet tall, and I placed it beside,

the little house that my two stray cats live in, when I say placed beside, I didn't, I nailed it, I nailed a small greenhouse, to the cat house, so that it wouldn't get blown over by the wind because that's the thing with those tiny greenhouses any bit of wind and they blow away

but the cat's house is made from heavy wood so I nailed the greenhouse to the cat's house they don't mind it doesn't disturb their sleep in any way but I have four tomato seedlings and I grew them from seed because that's just more enjoyable

I don't like buying a small tomato plant and then growing it it feels like cheating if I'm growing a tomato I literally want to grow it from seed so they're about seven inches tall now and they're San Marzano tomatoes which are incredibly delicious

Italian tomatoes that I can't buy fresh in Limerick. Like when you buy good Italian tomatoes in a tin, the expensive ones, the ones that are like 1 euro 50 per tin, they're San Marzano tomatoes. They're really weird and long looking. They're long red tomatoes. And I want to grow them myself. I want a bountiful harvest of San Marzano tomatoes. In around September. And I'm going to make lots of delicious Italian food from it. Using fresh San Marzano tomatoes.

Yum yum. However, I'm being severely accosted by snails and this is why I shouldn't have fucking nailed the greenhouse to the cat's house. So I feed my cats dry food in their little dishes and if they leave any food over at night time, snails come along like loads of them. Lots and lots of snails come and eat the rest of the cat's food every morning I have to wash snail slime out of my cat's dishes it's never really bothered me that much and silken thomas and napper tandy don't mind either but now the snails have stopped eating the cat food and they've started to take an interest in my San Marzano tomato fucking seedlings and they've already completely killed one like I mean decapitated it. Cut a young tomato plant in

half. I noticed this during the week when I saw little bites being taken out of the stems so I engaged in preventative measures. What I did was, so my tomatoes, my four tomato plants, are in pots. I'm growing them in pots because that's the best way to keep, I can have, you know, well-drained soil, I can control how many nutrients are in the soil, how much water I give it, I prefer to grow them in pots.

So the snails are crawling up the flower pots and then eating the fucking tomatoes. So I invested in copper snail tape. So it's this sticky tape that's made out of copper and what you do is you wrap it around the flower pot. It's like an inch thick and it forms a defensive barrier because apparently when a snail with its little slime trail when a snail touches this copper band it gets a very slight electric shock and then the snail is like fuck that i'm not crossing this copper barrier so i did that and it didn't fucking work so if you're getting copper tape to put around pots to keep snails away, it does not work.

The snails just climbed right over the copper. I could see laughter in their slime trails. And they went past it and they decapitated one of my San Marzano plants. Now I've only got three left. So now I'm being put into the situation where it's my tomatoes or the snails and I'm having great difficulty harming the snails. Now I have a snail infestation because you have to remember this is three or four generations of snails that have grown up on cat food. I let the situation get out of hand so we're talking about a lot of snails.

Now they have natural predators like birds. But because the snails are now inside in the little greenhouse, they're gone brazen. They're gone insane. Birds can't get into the greenhouse. The cats don't fuck with the snails. The only thing I can do is at night time when I see some snails, I pick them up and then I move them away.

But there's too many. So the other night while I was thinking, fuck it, do I need to get those pellets, those blue pellets that you put on the ground and they kill the snails? Or will I get one of those traps that you make out of beer that drowns the snails? I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't fucking do it.

So I think I'm just going to let the snails kill my tomatoes. And I'm just going to let the snails kill my tomatoes. And I'm just going to say. The universe does not want me to have a bounty of San Marzano tomatoes. And that's okay. But while I was picking up the snails the other night. And doing it delicately. Not breaking their shells.

Just picking them up by the shell. And moving them to a different part of the garden. While I was doing that. I got little flashbacks to my childhood and this reminded me of why I don't want to kill these snails. When I was a child I was obsessed with the teenage mutant ninja turtles, like properly obsessed. They were my life when I was a little child. Like I told you before, I think it was like my fifth birthday. Like I'd first learned about pizzas from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Like pizzas weren't really a huge thing in Ireland in the early 90s.

And because the turtles ate pizza, that was their shtick, that actually led to pizzas becoming popular in Ireland. In particular, frozen pizzas. Like Goodfellas, I think, was the first brand. And I remember on my fifth birthday, I told you this before, begging my mother, all I want for my fucking birthday is a pizza.

Get me a pizza, please. So she got me a Goodfellas pizza, and she was going to make this for my birthday dinner. But when she looked at the box on the pizza, it said it had to go into the oven for 25 minutes, and my ma refused to turn on an oven for a fucking pizza. Ovens were extravagant to my ma. Ovens were something you did,

maybe Sunday dinner, and if you made a Sunday dinner, you stuffed the entire oven. You made bread, you made buns, as well as a chicken, as well as roast spuds. So the idea of turning on an oven just for one pizza was absurd. So she fried the fucking pizza in a frying pan,

and it was cooked on one side and not cooked on the other, Was absurd. So she fried the fucking pizza. In a frying pan. And it was cooked on one side. And not cooked on the other. And that was the first ever pizza. I had. And I didn't know whether it was. Nice or not. Because I'd never tasted a pizza before.

But here's the other thing I remember. And this only came back to me the other night. When I was removing those snails. So. The cartoon. Of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That came out in Ireland. About a year before you could actually buy any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ties or figurines.

Because why the fuck didn't I say to my ma. I want you to buy me a Donatello can you get me Donatello from the tie shop and that will be my birthday present why did I ask for a pizza I asked for a pizza because the ties didn't exist in Ireland yet it took like a year

so I had to exist in a reality where I was obsessed with the turtles but didn't have any turtle toys to play with. And there weren't any actual turtles like the animal of turtles in Ireland either. So what I used to do, I used to get snails because I remember thinking as a kid, Jesus these snails are like really shit turtles. I mean they're slimy, they're green, and they have that huge shell on their back. So I used to go out to my garden and find like four really large snails. And I used to get my paints and I would paint little like bandanas and turtle faces. On the snails backs. So like.

Blue. Orange. Purple. And red. Leonardo. Michelangelo. Donatello. And Raphael.

I had teenage mutant ninja snails. And I used to love doing it. I didn't care that I didn't have any of the ties now. I had four fucking snails, painted like the turtles, and I used to play with them and do all the different voices of the cartoons. I'd make the snails fight each other by holding them in each hand, but I'd have to do it really, really slowly because they were snails. But then I'd have to do the voices really, really slowly also.

So in my Teenage Mutant snail universe, everything was in slow motion. And it was grand. I had a figurine of the ultimate warrior, the wrestler. And I used to put tinfoil on his head and he was the shredder. But he used to exist in normal motion. But he'd go in slow motion whenever he fought the snails. And because I was so young, my imagination would just take over. And I was having an amazing time. also it'd be pure it'd be raining outside when I'd be doing it too so that felt like

I was down in the sewer with the turtles and then I'd finish playing and I wouldn't keep the snails they'd just wander off back into the hedge with their multicolored backs and then the next day I'd find four more snails and paint them but I was always really careful with the snails because I guess I learned quite early that their shells were delicate I probably broke a couple of shells trying to paint them and when I was taking those snails away from my tomato plants the other night it unlocked that memory I was like why am why am I being so careful with these snails away from my tomato plants the other night it unlocked that memory I was like why am I being so careful with these snails like fuck remember when you used to do that when you were a child but also now this is me being fucking insane but the part of me that enjoys the psychology

of Carl Jung I did find it ironically meaningful that I now as an adult have these snails that are trying to eat my San Marzano tomatoes. But the best pizza base, the best marinara sauce for a pizza comes from San Marzano tomatoes. So I found a lovely meaningful connection there. I had to eat a shit frying pan childhood pizza because I couldn't get turtle ties so instead I played with snails, painted as turtles and here I am in adulthood carefully removing snails who want to eat the pizza tomatoes. As if the universe is using the archetypes of snails and San Marzano tomatoes to communicate to me not to kill him, using visual metaphors that are unique to me and my story. I acknowledge that that's absolutely mad, I know it's mad, but Carl Jung

calls that synchronicity. And when you spot synchronicity, it's worth listening to it and reflecting on it. It's not supernatural, it's like analysing the symbolism in a dream to achieve greater personal meaning. Doesn't mean you have to believe it, but it's worth reflecting on it and noticing it rather than dismissing it completely. So it got me thinking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And I think what I'd like to do for this episode is to have a bit of a cultural analysis as an adult around the teenage mutant ninja turtles because I've been thinking about them all week. I think if I wasn't thinking about them I'd be buying slug pellets right now and being a big greedy fucking San Marzano tomato

magnet who doesn't give a fuck about poor little snails who are having the time of their lives. So the teenage mutant ninja turtles I don't think I really have to explain who or what they are, no matter what age you are listening to this podcast, because if you're in your 30s like me, you remember when the Turtles first came out in the early 90s. You remember that first cartoon. If you're younger, you remember the Turtle cartoon from like 2007. If you're younger, you remember the Turtle cartoon from like 2007. You might also, if you're younger than that even, if you're like 20, you remember the Michael Bay film from a couple of years ago,

where he made a Turtles film, except he made them fucking aliens. But the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are quite culturally important. Not as important as The Simpsons, but certainly in that territory in terms of their cultural footprint and what's fascinating to me about the story of the Turtles is it's a bit like an underground band that did really difficult hardcore punk music and then suddenly turned pop

because the Turtles didn't start off as a children's cartoon. The children's cartoon that we all know that was 1987. It came out in Ireland and the UK in like 1990. But before that

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a comic book that started in 1983 and it was not for children at all. It was quite dark. It was an incredibly clever underground comic book. It was a piece of art made by two comic book artists called Kevin Eastman and Peter Lard. And for me, that original 1983 comic book, which I've only seen as an adult recently, but that original comic book was almost Quentin Tarantino before Quentin Tarantino. It was deeply clever postmodern art that used irony, satire, parody to subvert what comic books were at the time.

Lard and Eastman, who created the Turtles in 1983, they were just two young struggling comic book artists who couldn't get published. They were spending their time trying to make comic books that they thought would be popular and failing. Until one day, for a joke one of them just drew a little picture of a turtle as a ninja almost as the shittest comic book hero you could think of something deliberately stupid of a slow turtle as a ninja one of them drew this as a joke the other one laughed at it and then they said wait a minute, maybe we have

something here. And they began to develop the story. They developed four turtles who were teenagers, who were kind of half human, half turtle. They were mutants and they were ninjas. And their leader was a fella called Master Splinter, who was like an old Japanese man, who was also a rat. and he raised them and taught them how to be ninjas and they lived in a sewer and loved pizza. Now all of that sounds absurd and funny and hilarious and it is but in the original 1983 comic book the universe that they lived in was incredibly fucking dark. It was against the backdrop of an incredibly violent New York City that was overrun by gangs. Their arch nemesis, their enemy,

was a fella called the Shredder, who was like this evil ninja who led a criminal gang called the Foot Clan. And Shredder used to cover his face with a metal helmet, and he had metal claws on his hands. But first let me tell you the origin story of Splinter the rat in the original comic book because it's quite dark and complex. First and foremost in the original comic book Splinter starts off as an actual pet rat in a cage. A rat who's highly intelligent but still just a little rat in a cage. Shredder is a rapist. But he's not Shredder yet. He's a ninja called Oroko Saki.

Splinter's owner is another ninja called Hamato Yoshi. Splinter, who's an actual little rat, witnesses Oroko Saki trying to sexually assault and kill Splinter's owner's girlfriend. Splinter's owner comes in. A huge fight ensues between Splinter's owner and Oroko Saki. The woman is killed. Splinter's owner is killed. And Oroko Saki just stands there as a murderer who's after killing a man and a woman.

Now Splinter the little rat breaks free from his cage and he climbs up and he bites Orokosaki into the face and then Orokosaki rips him off and chops his ear off. But because Splinter the rat bit Orokosaki's face, from then on he has to cover his face and he becomes the shredder. And poor Splinter now is just this little rat who's not a pet anymore, he has no owner and he disappears off into the sewers of New York. He spends his day eating rubbish down in the sewer.

He's frightened because see he's a pet rat. He's not a sewer rat but the other rats don't know the difference. Feeling heartbroken after what he saw. Feeling heartbroken that his master is dead. That his master's girlfriend is dead and he's still just a normal rat and he's lonely. But then one day this young fella is walking past with four tiny little turtles like pet turtles and he drops them down the sewer and now little Splinter the rat has four friends so now it's just a rat and four turtles. But then

there's this like nuclear waste spillage down the sewer and they all start to mutate and now Splinter the rat starts to become half rat half human and he starts to take on the personality of his old master and now Splinter can talk and now Splinter is still a rat down a sewer but he's like massive and he's kind of half human and then the four little turtles who were also exposed to this nuclear waste they start turning into half teenage boy half turtle so now Splinter remembers all the martial arts and ninjutsu that he saw his master doing years ago and he says fuck this I'm now half human half rat and you're half human half turtle and you're my kids so he trains the turtles to be teenage mutant ninja turtles.

Now in the meantime Shredder has completely forgotten about the sexual assault has completely forgotten about the murders and now Shredder's wearing a helmet on his face because he has his face was scratched up by this rat but shredder now has become a huge leader of this gang in new york city the foot clan and in the comic book shredder is a murderer he's a gun runner he's a drug dealer he's an evil gang member so splinter says fuck that i've got these teenage mutant ninja turtles and we're now going to form a gang and you're our enemy and we're going to do everything in our power

to stop you with your drug dealing and your gun running and we're going to kill you and most importantly I'm not a tiny little rat anymore I'm half rat half human I'm a mutant and I'm going to get revenge with my

turtles for what you did to my master and his girlfriend. Also Splinter names his turtles Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo. These are all Renaissance artists because Splinter found a book down the sewer about Renaissance art so he decided to name all his turtles after Renaissance artists. So what becomes apparent there is that's not the cartoon that we grew up with as kids. That's the 1983 comic book. That's where the turtles were invented. And that's not for kids.

That's for adults. Those are very adult themes there. That's quite dark. But it's also incredibly surreal and very ironic. So let's pick apart why I think everything about that plot and everything about that premise is revolutionary and very important art. I mentioned before that it reminded me of Quentin Tarantino before Tarantino. I really love

some of the films of Quentin Tarantino, in particular Pulp Fiction. What I love about Pulp Fiction is that it's pure post-modernism. Now one of the tenets of post-modernism is, and I'm going to make this really simplified, it started in, it became popular in the 1960s onwards and it's within art, it's almost this idea of everything's already been made, we can't really make anything new, so let's nostalgically take things from the past, take art that already exists, jumble it up and put it beside each other to make something that is new and kind of ironic. Pulp Fiction is an example of this and Pulp Fiction remember is 1994 and the Tartars comic is 1983 so that's 11 years. Pulp Fiction is post-modern because Tarantino didn't make anything new.

Tarantino looked to really cliched stories that have been told a million times that we already knew, specifically from pulp novels of the 1950s. In the 1950s there were novels called pulp novels because they were printed on pulp paper and the stories in these were like a detective story or you'd have the cliched story of a boxer that throws a fight, or another cliched story about the gangster who has to take out his boss's girlfriend and then ends up riding her. Tarantino got all of these stories that people were very familiar with, but then put them alongside each other in juxtaposed ways and told the stories in different ways. So you end up with something that feels

incredibly familiar but very new and ironic and knowing. Postmodern art is art that knows it's art and that's what the film Pulp Fiction is. Hip-hop music is another type of postmodern art. If you think of hip-hop music from the 80s or the 90s, hip-hop artists would literally sample records from the 1970s or 60s. So take a song that already exists, get a little snippet of it, loop it over and over, and then rap on the top of it. So instead of trying to create something completely new,

we're taking something from the past, using nostalgia, flipping it in a weird way, and then creating something new by doing that. Within art that technique is known as detournement which was a technique pioneered by a group of artists called the Situationist International. One of the leaders of this movement was a fellow called Guy Debord who wrote a book called The Society of the Spectacle which is considered a primary text of postmodern thought.

I don't want to get too deep into arty farty stuff. So here's why the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is postmodern and why it's similar to what Tarantino was doing 10 years later. Nothing about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was new. Everything was picked from stuff that had happened already and then flipped on its head. The idea of a superhero getting superpowers because they were exposed to nuclear waste, that's Daredevil. That was a comic that was released in the 1960s, I believe. But Daredevil was mean.

Daredevil was cool and hard. So why not get Daredevil and mix it with something fucking ridiculous like Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse or Goofy. You see Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Goofy they're cute fun animals that are tenets of American comic books. So Eastman and Lard who created the turtles said, why don't we get something cute like a mouse or a duck or a dog and then make that a fucking pure badass superhero like Daredevil. Let's get a fucking turtle. Because turtles are slow and harmless. What if we get a turtle and make the turtles ninjas? And they became ninjas because of nuclear waste.

And then you think, but why do the turtles love pizza? Why is that something that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles love? What's going on with the pizza? That's Garfield. That stupid orange cat. Garfield was a comic book that started in 1974 and it's about a man with a pet cat who loves lasagna. So now we have cute little turtles who are dangerous fucking ninjas, hard cunts who love pizza like Garfield likes lasagna. Now why call them Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael? Why then get these silly hard bastard turtles who like pizza? Why would you then get something as silly as that and then name them after really important Renaissance artists?

Well that there is another prime example of postmodernism. Postmodern art mixes high and low culture together because theorists like Guy Debord said, our society is so overcome by the spectacle of adverts, media, images all the time, that there's no such thing as high art and low art anymore. What's an example of this? The work of Andy Warhol. You know Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol got, he did a painting of a Campbell's soup can and put that painting in a gallery and said, that's art. That right there is a very important piece of postmodern art. To take something as ubiquitous, as commercial, as reproducible, something that's everywhere, a Campbell's tin of soup, and then to put that in a gallery and say say this belongs alongside modernist art like Picasso. That there is the mixture of high and low art. Another example is a postmodern artist called Roy Lichtenstein.

Lichtenstein in the 1960s used to get pages from comic books. You have to remember comic books would have been considered very low art, lowbrow, and he used to paint comic book frames and put them in a gallery and say that's art. Like that's the comparison I'm making there with the film Pulp Fiction. Tarantino took literal Pulp Fiction, books that were pulp, that were throwaway, lowbrow stories, the literary equivalent of soup cans or comic books. Tarantino said I'm going to get this lowbrow art, I'm going to mix it together in a new way and I'm going to call it independent cinema. This is art house and this is important.

It's also an example of detournement which I mentioned earlier. Getting to images or sounds that seem unrelated, placing them alongside each other and now they create a new meaning via irony. Nirvana too. I did a full podcast before where I contrasted Nirvana with the music of the Beach Boys but Nirvana took bubblegum pop such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys from the 60s and said we're going to do that but we're going to make it very heavy and discordant and angry and now this is grunge and this is to be taken seriously. We've taken something that exists before turned it on its head using parody, detournement, nostalgia and irony to create something new. So when you get your silly little ninja turtles.

And give them very important names. Like Raphael or Donatello. What you're doing there is mixing high and low culture. To create postmodern art. Now am I saying that Eastman and Lard. Making their little turtles comic book. Were thinking at this level. That they were thinking on a kind of high art level. They probably weren't consciously, but they would have seen it in the media around them.

They would have been familiar with the art of Roy Lichtenstein. They were comic book artists. They would have known who Andy Warhol was. They were just having fun. They were frustrated comic book artists who were sick of being rejected who just said fuck it let's make something ridiculous but the ridiculous thing they made was very very clever on multiple levels. Now I don't want to be completely glowing in my analysis of the turtles because it's a product of American culture and American culture is very much held together by white supremacy. Anything that's very popular within American culture, it's always worth scanning it for hidden racism, even if the creators themselves aren't aware of it.

America is founded upon slavery and racism. White supremacy is quite a dominant power structure throughout American history, and then that trickles into the culture. In the 1700s slave owners would often name their African slaves after Greek gods like Mars or Zeus or Neptune and they would do this because they thought it was funny in a punching down way not a funny haha way the type of humor that would have then trickled down into minstrel culture and those cultural codes don't just disappear they're still present and I sometimes wonder if master splinter naming his servants, his turtles effectively, having the opportunity to give them names. If him naming them after great Renaissance artists operates within that same cynical American code of irony that white slave owners were using when they named their slaves after

Greek gods. I'm not saying it's true, but I am saying the two things are similar and they operate within the same racist culture so it's worth noting. Now another thing that's quite glaring about the the backstory of Splinter and Shredder in particular. I spoke about this a few podcasts back. When you're analyzing any American popular culture from the 1980s in particular, you get a trope which is known as the Yellow Peril. The American fear that Japan will get revenge because America dropped a nuclear bomb, two nuclear bombs on Japan in the 1940s during World War II. And I think the fact that both Splinter and Shredder

are Japanese characters we see a bit of this. You see so Shredder represents the evils of America even though Shredder is a Japanese character he's corrupted by America. Shredder represents capitalism and US imperialism. Shredder is a criminal who's destroying society. He's a gun runner. He's a drug dealer. And within the story he was once a good ninja who abided by very Japanese codes of honour and then he becomes corrupted and evil and then Splinter is also from Japan but then Splinter is literally changed by nuclear waste he holds on to his ninja Japanese code of conduct and then he uses his super nuclear power to enact revenge on the American corruption of Shredder and that's quite evidently that unconscious American fear that you see in films like Blade Runner, Black Rain, cyberpunk stuff and you can position Teenage Mutant Turtles within cyberpunk because effectively

Shredder and the Foot Clan are an analogue to the Yakuza. And also they're very technologically advanced. And that's something you see in American cyberpunk throughout the 1980s. An evil force from Japan who are very technologically advanced. That operate, that have turned America into a dystopia. And Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is dystopian. The police have no power. New York City is run by criminals.

This terror of, oh fuck, we dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese. What if they one day get us back? So that's, like, that's my analysis of the 1983 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book by Eastman and Lard, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book by Eastman and Lard which I do consider to be a really clever well made piece of post modern

art that was very different from other comic books that were available at the time. The only comparison would have been the work of Frank Miller and it's very Quentin Tarantino, 10 years before Quentin Tarantino. So how did this very adult, very clever, underground comic book, this dark piece of work,

how did that end up shaping my childhood as this very funny, harmless cartoon about Ninja Turtles? How did that happen? funny harmless cartoon about ninja turtles how did that happen well that happened as a result of the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher which I'm going to explore in part two after the ocarina pause so I'm in my office I don't have my ocarina with me what I do have is a coffee cup and a USB key so I'm going to gently hit the USB key off the coffee cup and then we're going to have a digitally inserted advert that's put there by Acast. Thinks of evil. It's all for you. No, don't. The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what?

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to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com it sounded like mars code that was was the coffee cup USB key pause. So I didn't alarm you with an advert there. This podcast is supported by you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Boy Podcast.

This podcast is my full-time job. These podcasts are generally monologue essays which require several days of research and writing in order to make. I don't just pull them out of my arse. The only way I can make this podcast is if it is my full-time job. Luckily, I absolutely fucking adore this work. It has been a pleasure to spend the week researching and writing and thinking about the turtles in order to formulate a hot take. So if this brings you any type of entertainment or solace or escapism, please consider paying me for that work. All I'm looking for is the price of a cup of coffee or a pint once a month. If you can't afford that, don't worry

about it. You can listen for free because the person who is subscribing to Patreon is paying for you to listen for free. It's a wonderful model. Everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living. But by subscribing to Patreon, what it does is it keeps this podcast fully independent, by which I mean no advertiser can tell me what to do. No advertiser can change the content. They can't make me do a podcast about Love Island because that's what's trending at the moment. Because that's the shit that advertisers do when they sponsor podcasts. They take a podcast and then far remove it from the audience who's listening to the podcast in the first place.

far remove it from the audience who's listening to the podcast in the first place and then all of a sudden the creator is no longer making a podcast that they're passionate about so please support any independent podcast that you enjoy any podcast that has a small team of people or just one person making stuff that they care about support those podcasts in any way you can you can subscribe to the patreon you can like the podcast leave a review on whatever podcast app you're listening to you can share it on your social media word of mouth is very important because the podcast space in general is becoming very corporate and smarter podcasters are getting pushed to the side and now the only podcasts you hear about are ones that are pumped full of money with celebrities and then what happens is the content isn't that great and that just hurts all podcasts in general so if you enjoy an independent podcast

you listen to support that podcaster directly if you can. I'm taking a break from gigs for a while. I've got like two or three over the next few months. I'm gigging in Ballybunion at the end of July, the Ballybunion Arts Festival. If you're around Ballybunion, come down to that. You get the tickets on Google. So the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. How does it go from this dark comic, this dark ironic comic that's directed at adults,

to become this giant franchise that's now marketed exclusively towards small children? Well, in 1987, Eastman and Laird, who made the comic book, they cashed in. They licensed the Turtles to a toy company. Because here's the thing with cartoons. If you grew up with cartoons in the 80s or 90s, what you didn't realise is that

they weren't really cartoons. They were adverts for toys that were dressed as cartoons. He-Man, My Little Pony, G.I. Joe, Transformers. These were not cartoons. They were gigantic adverts to sell as ties. Now, I went into this in great detail in a podcast from about six months ago called Why I Want to Fuck Captain Planet. from about six months ago called Why I Want to Fuck Captain Planet.

But basically, Ronald Reagan, who was President of America, and an absolute prick, a right-wing, ultra-capitalist racist. Ronald Reagan believed completely and utterly in the free open market. Now, advertising to children in America used to be regulated. In the 60s and 70s corporations weren't allowed to advertise to children because it was seen as immoral and wrong because children don't possess the capacity to think critically so therefore to advertise to a child is kind of wrong. Well, Ronald Reagan disagreed with this. And he deregulated the advertising industry in the early 1980s. And what this did is it allowed toy companies to all of a sudden advertise to children. And this is

what led to an explosion of cartoons in the 1980s and the 1990s. So all the cartoons that we enjoyed they were owned by fucking toy companies. They weren't cartoons. They were adverts to sell us toys. So in 1987 the intellectual property of the Turtles was sold to a toy company called Playmates Toys. So now Playmates Toys are like, we've got this dark fucking crazy comic about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and it's really adult. How can we make some toys to sell to children instead? Let's make a cartoon out of it. And now we're going to have the Turtles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, and it's going to be directed at children. So Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the cartoon that we know and love

was launched in 1987 but here's the thing. If you look at season one right? Season one was made as a pilot and they serialised it into five episodes. Season one of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is quite different to the rest

season one is kinda close to the comic book it doesn't have that story about Shredder as a gun runner or a drug dealer or it doesn't have that plot line about the sexual assault that's gone but still the animation quality is really high a Japanese company animated the first season. It's visually

beautiful and it maintains some of the integrity of the comic book. But then everything changed in season two in 1988. Now here's the thing. I always grew up with this weird little urban myth in Ireland, right? One urban myth was did you hear that Prince had one of his ribs removed so he could suck his own dick? That was something that was said in the playground when I was growing up and there was no internet

so you could never really fucking prove it. Another rumour that used to fly around the playground right up into my teenage years. Someone would always say did you know that one of the people who made the turtles was from Dublin and I'd be like

fuck off no and I used to always try and research it and I'd look up Eastman and Laird and I'm like those lads aren't from Dublin they're from Boston where did this rumour about the turtles and a Dublin person where did that come into it well it turns out that the company who started animating the turtles

from 1988 onwards the series that we grew up with that company who actually had its offices in Dublin it was called Fred Wolfe Films and it was founded by a fella called Fred Wolfe Films. And it was founded by a fella called Fred Wolfe. And a fella called Jimmy Murakami. Now interestingly. Jimmy Murakami. He's an American Irish citizen. He died in 2014 I believe. But Jimmy Murakami is someone. Who I would have loved to have on this podcast.

Just to speak to him. He was. An American. with Japanese parents who was born in California. Now remember earlier I mentioned the American fear of Japan because America dropped atomic bombs on Japan and also what America did because America's racist during World War II America got a load of American citizens who might have had Japanese parents

or Japanese grandparents America got anyone who was even remotely of Japanese ancestry citizens and put them in internment camps in California throughout World War II. A gross violation of human rights on its own citizens. Well this Jimmy Murakami fella, his first name was Teruaki Murakami, but he went by Jimmy. Jimmy Murakami as a child

actually spent time in one of these American internment camps for the simple crime of having Japanese parents. Well, Jimmy Murakami became a fucking legend in animation. Jimmy Murakami made the film Heavy Metal, which is an incredibly important animation film. He made The Snowman. You remember The Snowman from years ago. He made a film called When the Wind Blows, which is one of the most terrifying cartoons you can ever watch. Don't watch it actually, because don't watch that film. It'll just leave you deeply, deeply sad. It's like watching The Notebook. When the Wind Blows is a cartoon about a nuclear bomb being dropped on Britain. And it's just this elderly couple slowly dying from radiation sickness.

It is one of the saddest, most disturbing pieces of film that you will ever see. But it's also a profound work of genius. And Jimmy Murakami made this. also a profound work of genius and Jimmy Murakami made this and Jimmy Murakami founded the company Fred Wolfe Films with Fred Wolfe but Jimmy Murakami came to Ireland in 1970 and fell in love with an Irish woman and Jimmy Murakami lived in Ireland since 1970 as an Irish citizen. So that's where that rumour of did you hear one one of the lads who made the turtles was Irish. Jimmy Murakami was an Irish citizen. He lived in Ireland from 1970. He's considered one of the most important people in the Irish animation industry. Some people say that the reason an animation industry exists in Ireland was because Jimmy Murakami decided to call this place his home.

He was a lecturer in some of the first animation courses in IADT in Ireland. An absolute fucking legend who I would have loved to have had on this podcast but he died at the age of 80 in 2014. But Jimmy Murakami and Fred Wolfe, based out of Dublin, were the ones who produced the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animation cartoon that we grew up with. But they're also the ones that were responsible for making it what it was, something that was deeply, distantly removed from the original comic book and something that was effectively a giant advert to sell toys. You see, after season two,

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles effectively became a weird little slapstick comedy. The narrative was gone from it. Shredder wasn't evil anymore. He was like a bumbling silly man who, he had a boss called Krang who looked like a testicle. Like, the voice of Shredder was actually done by Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He did Shredder's voice.

And even the theme tune, the theme tune to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that was written by the fella who wrote Two and a Half Men when he was a young fella but here's what I want to get at I didn't grow up calling it Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I grew up calling it Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles because in Ireland and the UK

it wasn't called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles also if you think of each individual turtle they each had a samurai weapon. So Raphael had a sai which was like a little fork, Donatello had a staff, Leonardo had swords and then Michelangelo had nunchakus which are pieces of wood with a chain in the middle. But in Ireland and the UK, we didn't grow up with Michelangelo having nunchakus. He had this weird little grappling hook thing. Now there's a reason for this, and the reason is Margaret Thatcher. Just like in America, the policies of Ronald Reagan, where he deregulated

advertising for children, so every cartoon was now effectively an advert for toys. The equivalent of Ronald Reagan in Britain was Margaret Thatcher. They both abided by the same authoritarian, right-wing, ultra-capitalist policies. In Britain, the word ninja was banned from TV. The depictions of nunchucks were banned from TV. Any weapon that looked like it could be improvised was banned from TV. The word ninja was banned because ninja meant assassin. So this is why we grew up with Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and this created a huge amount of problems for Fred Wolfe and Jimmy Murakami who were animating the series. So why was this happening in the UK?

Why under Thatcher's government are you not allowed to say the word ninja or shounon chakus or improvised weapons? So Margaret Thatcher's policies were detrimental to the working class in Britain she shut down a shit ton of mines she removed a lot of funding from working class communities she decimated the British welfare state the problems that you see in Britain today food banks poverty cost of living crisis housing crisis they can all be traced to the ultra-capitalist policies of Margaret Thatcher so when Thatcher was in power there was a lot of resistance from working class people Thatcher's policies were removing social nets

removing livelihoods so there were quite a few uprisings there was quite a few violent clashes quite frequently between working class people and the police who were physically fighting for their social net now Thatcher was aware of this Thatcher knew because she is bringing in policies that fuck over the most marginalized in society that she's then going to get physical uprisings as a result so she brought in her law and order agenda which was a way to criminalize a very a very punitive set of laws and policies

that would give the police more incentivized to be violent and also it would make it a hell of a lot easier to arrest people who were protesting and to hand out harsher sentences. And Thatcher didn't just do this in policy, she also did it by stirring up moral panics. Via people like Mary Whitehouse and the BBFC. The BBFC were the people who censored films and television. One of the moral panics that was stoked was anything to do with improvised weapons. So nunchuckers were banned. They were banned since, I think it was 1980. The Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon was banned.

Any depiction of nunchucks, any depiction of any weapon that looked like it could be made by someone on the street in order to hurt police if they were rioting, this huge moral panic around martial arts films, ninjas, nunchucks, it was all fucking banned completely. They also brought football hooliganism into it. There was an issue with football hooliganism in Britain but it became part of this huge moral panic. Also they had a moral panic around what they called video nasties. So they claimed that people were going to video shops renting out horror films. Texas Chainsaw Massacre was banned because of this I believe and this is making British society violent. So Thatcher drummed up this idea that no there's not a problem with protesting because your policies are killing

the working class what you have is a problem with public violence and public violence is happening because we've got all these martial arts happening because we've got all these martial arts films and we've got all these improvised weapons that you can make that's the problem not my policies the media that you're consuming so we need to get everyone worried about this and ban words like ninja and nunchucks and what that does via propaganda is it shifts focus and it shifts the conversation. So if you're living in London and you turn on the TV in the 1980s and you see the highly edited news and the news is showing miners in the north of England are now all of a sudden literally fighting the police.

And you're wondering, why are these miners fighting the police? Instead of thinking Thatcher's policies are destroying entire communities. Instead of thinking that, you go, I read the Daily Mail yesterday. Those minors are violent because they're all watching martial arts movies. And they're all thinking about making nunchucks. Fuck it, we have to have a conversation about what media our children are consuming. Or maybe they'll grow up and they'll start hitting police officers

and then we'll have chaos. It was very sneaky. So that's why we saw Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, not Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Ninja was illegal. Also, if you try and look at any of the episodes of the Turtles from like season 2 any scene

where Michelangelo has his nunchucks out as his weapon they're either cut completely or they're badly edited in a type of grappling hook. Now this started to get quite expensive for Murakami and Wolfe in Dublin who were making the Teenage Mutant

Ninja Turtles cartoon because they're going, so what, we have to make two different versions of the cartoon? We have to make one that's Ninja Turtles with nunchucks and then another one that's Hero Turtles with no nunchucks? It was getting quite expensive to edit the episodes so that they would be in line with Thatcher's censorship. to edit the episodes so that they would be in line with Thatcher's censorship.

So instead, they just made the TV show less and less violent and more and more slapstick comedy, which then drove the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles miles and miles away from its roots until you had this unrecognisably weird thing where not a lot of violence or fights occurred in and even the foot soldiers they didn't even have any blood they used to be robots on the inside now I'm not advocating that a children's tv show should have been more violent but what I'm saying is that when I was a little kid and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came on for the first time ever it was the first cartoon that made me feel smart.

I never connected with He-Man. I never connected with Transformers. These things weren't intelligent. They didn't have humour. But when I first saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, even that cartoon, the first two seasons that did bear a resemblance to that comic book, that did bear a resemblance to that comic book. It made me feel smart. It showed me irony, humour. As a kid, I got that it was, this is funny and cool. They're fucking turtles, but they're ninjas. They fight evil, but they love pizza. Their leader is a giant rat. They live in a sewer. I don't know what this feeling is, but this feels smart and subversive. And what it was, is it was my first experience of post-modern art directed at me. It was ironic and it was weird.

And it set me up to appreciate other post-modern stuff like The Simpsons a few years later. And then as I got older, the films of Quentin Tarantino. Because they were operating within the same cultural codes of irony that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles primed me for. But what I am saying is a moral panic drummed up by Margaret Thatcher to say that all those riots and stuff you're seeing on TV that's not because of my policies

that's not because people are losing their entire livelihoods no no no no it's because society is really violent because of cartoons and ninjas and nunchucks that's the problem that's what we need to go after I consider that to be a bad thing

because inadvertently what it does is it makes a really important childhood cartoon of mine that I really enjoyed makes that now a tool of propaganda for Thatcherism. So that there is how the policies of Reagan in America and the policies of Thatcher in the UK can directly influence how our childhood cartoons are made.

And what ended the ban on nunchucks, the ban on the word ninja? I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle live action films was what led to the end of it. When Turtles 2, I think it was, came to Britain, there's a scene in it where Michelangelo doesn't use nunchucks. He gets a pair of sausages and uses them like nunchucks.

And the British censors tried to cut it from the film. And then the Americans who made the film said this is fucking ridiculous. And then the BBFC had to say to themselves I think this is a bit ridiculous. We're now cutting out a set of sausages because they look like nunchucks. And that's what led to that rule going away. So that was this week's rambling hot take.

I hope it made sense to you. I thoroughly enjoyed exploring that episode and making it. That was very very pleasurable to do. I will give you an update next week on the San Marzano tomatoes versus the Teenage Mutant Ninja Snails. Dog bless. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night

on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock host the Rochester Nighthawks best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com.