The Dogg Zzone by 1900HOTDOG - Dogg Zzone 9000 - Episode 82, Turbo Teen With Tom Reimann

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

Seanbaby and Brockway bring in Turbo Adult Tom Reimann to discuss Turbo Teen -- the ONLY 1980s cartoon about a kid undergoing an agonizing transformation into a Trans Am that showed you every second of the torture from multiple angles. T-T-Turbo Teen!

Once-Nine-Hundred Hot-Dog... One-Nine-Hundred Hot-Dog... Our podcast slams, with maximum hype. Say Hot-Dog Podcast Work... Yeah! When you taste that nitrate power, you're in the dog zone for an hour. Come on, do nothing number.

One-Nine-Hundred Hot-Dog... One-Nine-Hundred Hot-Dog... Welcome to the Dog Zone 9000, the weekly, highly produced, effortlessly charming podcast for 1900hotdog.com, the final comedy website. I invented being funny on the internet and my name's Sean Baby. I'm joined by my twin barbarian brother, Robert, barbarian brother, Brockway. And here's a Brockway fact. I once hot-rodded a car so rad that hundreds of people, no, thousands of people came to

look at it and Roger Ebert came to look at it and he came by and he said, well, that's just plain cool. No follow up question. I wouldn't have any. That's a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. Our guest today is the hardest target and the maximum risk from the podcast network gamefully unemployed and a monthly columnist at this very revered institution of hilarity. Tom, universal soldier, the return of Riven.

Oh, man, it's laying so many. I was already reeling from effortless charm. I was like, holy shit, how do I live up to that? You've thrown all this at me. Don't have to. It's not legally binding. I think technically the effortless charm was about us. So.

Oh, sure. Yeah, of course. I feel like you got enough in your intro. You don't really need to take ours. Yeah, and next try. My charm takes a lot of effort. Like, I feel like you can hear it. You can hear the effort in my choice.

So fucking hard, everybody. I can go back and change it in post very appreciatingly charming. Can you go back and like really, really isolate my just absolutely killer Roger Ebert impression? Oh, absolutely. That's just exactly what he sounds like. It was like Roger Ebert was in the return from the grave and was in the room recording with us. That's the best hot rotting I've ever seen from our barbarian. That's what he said.

That's a soundboard. I had that on the soundboard because you knew this moment. No reason to use it until today. Yeah, just sitting there collecting dust. That was a lot. Yeah, yeah, right. But now who looks stupid? Oh, there we go.

Oh, well, it's been a there you go. It's never complete until I was the second one starts. Fades off really quietly like, oh, I'm sorry. All right, now, now, now it will be effortless. Like now the slide whistle has has shown me the way. Opened you up. Uh-huh. Yeah, it's of my free of all my inhibitions. We do have a surprise Reynolds on a bear skin rug.

Oh, now we're talking about that charm we were talking about. That's an evocative comment. So what are you working on today, Tom? I was going to say we have a very dense podcast today, but fuck it. We got we got time to chat. Let's plug. Let's chat. What am I working on? Oh, man. Shit.

So much stuff, too much, too much, honestly. I've I've always had a problem with saying no to additional work, and it's only gotten worse, you know, since a bunch of us got let go from a certain website. Uh, so now I have too many jobs. It's not a bad. Yeah, I think that's everybody. I think that's all of us.

All of us. We're in that lesson. It's the cop rock economy, but. I brought a cop rock because you are you are going to do a podcast about cop rock, right? We've already done two episodes of it. Holy shit. So we're like, we're like halfway through this or we're a third.

We're four episodes into out of 13, I think. So see, this podcast is the only time I talk to anybody. So I'm really glad that you brought it up. How many of you to call a mere 13? There's no way you're getting out of that with just 13. This is going to be like, I mean, that's, I mean, that's how many, that's how many official episodes of cop rock there are, right? But you're definitely going to hit some episodes that are going to

require three or four episodes. It's already, listen, if you want us to send you our fan episodes of cop rock. Yes, absolutely. Okay. Yeah. I know anything that I don't have to bring the podcast to an end. I want to just keep doing.

I want to do six seasons of the podcast about cop rock. Let's just write more cop rock. A show that got half of one season. I'd say that's more than enough. Yeah. I mean, you heard that you hear the name cop rock. You're like, okay, I get it. And you see that you're like, no, I fucking get it.

The thing is, is you don't get it. You hear the name cop rock and you think you get it, but you don't. Not until you watch it. That was a very important show in my household. That was like, cop rock is on. The fucking family is watching cop rock. Like that. I can see it like, honestly, I can see that and I respect that because I'm

invested in cop rock. Like I'm invested in the story it's telling. And you have like a very conservative religious right wing family. So were they moved by cop? Have we found the one family that was moved by cop rock? I honestly don't remember everyone's reaction. I think it's just part of being conservative and religious is like you're very susceptible being told what to do.

And the cop rock marketing was like, you cannot miss this television event. And they're like, shit, I think, uh, I think we better believe them. I really needed to miss that. But all right, I guess I can't afford to. I really want to be in that, like be in the middle of cop rock airing. Like week five of cop rock before like everyone realized it was stupid. You know what I mean? So like you think that's week five?

I don't know. I feel like because with stuff like, um, I'm just thinking of recent examples, things like, I don't know, Westworld where like it was dumb as hell from the beginning, but it took like a while for people to sort of catch up to how stupid it was. Like so for a minute, I think we're like, maybe this is a great mystery, but we were also like, or maybe this is a lost thing. Yeah, after lost, I just assumed that of everything.

Yeah. I just, I want to, I want to, I want to go back to that brief window of time where like cop rock got to skate by on people just assuming it was prestige television because it was like Steven Bochko and it was getting like such a hard push, that brief 17 minute window in time. Yeah, I don't know when we turned on it. Uh, as a kid, I, I had a lot more, you know, sincerity. My, my, my irony wasn't as advanced, of course, but, uh, but I do remember

thinking it was very silly when, uh, there was a scene where the jury came out to deliver the verdict and they delivered, they sang it. It's like a gospel song. They're like, your honor, we have the verdict. He's guilty. And then they all start humming. I was like, okay, fuck it. This is too far.

This is insane. And they did a full choir. Uh, I feel like that was one of the early episodes. That is episode one or two actually. Okay. So that's how quickly I thought it was crazy. Yeah. I'm saying 17 minutes, but I'm also saying, I'm just going to call it that judge

had to stand up and deliver like a real baritone solo, right? Like, cause that's a missed opportunity. If that's not the, the, it's either the jury foreman or crap. One of them, the judge, the judge is like really like singing, like just belting it out and like doing an incredible job for this objectively ridiculous scene. I mean, that's just, that's just it's inevitable that that judge has to stand up with like a really deep voice and get a good solo.

You didn't get to the plastic surgeon singing about how, how he was going to cut up the mare and make her beautiful again. I don't recall that. I think I saw one that went viral recently. Oh, would he like sell them a baby? That one I've seen recently. Oh, the baby seller. Yeah.

Yeah. But, but other than that, it's wearing a blue version. I think of, uh, he's like wearing a blue version of Michael Jackson's bad jacket. I think. Yeah. The, the delirious outfit. Bad news. Tom, we just stole your cop rock podcast.

Oh, we just took it. This is, actually, this is better than cop rock because it's fucking turbo team today. I'm so excited to talk about turbo team. Well, do you have anything to plug Tom? And you want to, oh yeah, sure. Just head over to patreon.com slash game flat employed. That's the podcast is trimming network.

I co run with David Bell. Um, we do all kinds of cool stuff, uh, including all these podcasts we're talking about, a bunch of mini series, things like that. So check that out. You're only source for cop rock. And then unless you're listening to this right now, yeah. For more cop rock, go to patreon.com slash gamefully unemployed. All they do is cop rock.

It's the only podcast they have just the cop rock one. Is that accurate? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. Okay. I, we, we, there's not a lot of different ones. No, we, we thought we were going to make 11 different ones, but then we just decided, no, it's just going to be cop rock, all cop rock, cancel every other show.

How about how many podcasts do you think you do in a week? I really appreciate you coming on ours. Cause, uh, this has got to be your sixth one today. Oh, no, no, it's fine. I love coming on. Um, oh, I don't know. It is probably five or six a week. Yeah.

We do, we do too many shows. Yep. That's it. That's officially too many. I need to like, um, treat my voice. If I, uh, as I, as I demonstrate, treat my voice. If I do like more than one podcast a week and you know what? I have done more than one podcast.

Yeah. Are you, are you going to be okay? No. Do you need to look like asking? Yes, I do. I've done a podcast. I have 6,000 words of notes. You can just hang back and I could not.

I was, I'll let you go. I did not stop tight. Like I couldn't type fast enough while I was making notes for these episodes. It's impossible to even like, like from the premise stage. I remember like, I put the, I put turbo teen on and then I paused it and just started writing thoughts about turbo team and I was like, I haven't even started watching the show yet. No, literally, I had to pause it and just write like two or three minutes of notes

just on my thoughts about the opening credits. Yeah. Which is that they're perfect. Yeah. They're incredible. They're incredible. I do want to play them. We'll talk about that.

I'm Brett Matthews. It was a stormy night when a bolt of lightning forced me off the road. My car skidded into a government laboratory where a top secret experiment was underway. I swerved into the path of Dr. Chase's molecular transfer ray, causing me and my car to become one. The incredible turbo team. So that's for a, for a premise, this fucking bonkers to have an intro that succinct and like perfect, where it's just, Hey, I drove off the road into a science beam and that

beam merges man with car. That's what that beam does. And that's what it did to me. Hi, I'm turbo team. They're done with no questions. That's all we learn about his origin. That's, that's, that is the origin episode. It's one of my favorite things about cartoons from this era is they used to just scream all

the exposition at you in the middle of the opening credits theme song. And these are the great, but never was probably the worst about it. This was Joe, Joe Ruby and Ken Spears who left Hannah Barbera after making Herculoids and Space Ghost to awesome, the very stupid and insane cartoons. Wow, that started their own thing. And yes, and they produced just a fucking machine gun of deranged cartoons. They did Mr. T starring Mr. T as himself fighting crime with gymnast children. He did the police academy cartoon, which was just police academy with talking dogs.

He did Rubik's The Amazing Cube, which fucking sucks. And Rambo, the force of freedom, which was like 60 episodes of the most kid friendly Rambo is so good. It's like such a G.I. Joe knockoff and like, yeah, so that's just alone, like publicly was like, well, the fuck is this? You can't make Rambo a kid show. Nobody consulted me on this. Yeah.

Man, Rubik is the big bold swing for me there. That's just it's such a dare at the peak of like, we're making every toy into a show. Somebody was like, no, you're not not every toy. And they were like, what fucking toy are we not making? Oh, like this block with stickers on it. Yeah, the nerds don't even like every attempt to make a pitch deck for that. God damn it. I just love that they keep trying to make an inanimate objects

into super powered children, which is great. And also you could make it any note. You could make it like the MacGuffin that is magic and does sends you to another world, gives you powers, whatever. But you were like, no, the cube is the main character. Yeah. Right. And they did like really sincere, straight things, too.

Like Rambo isn't Rambo in space. Police Academy isn't like Underwater Police Academy. It's just like a bit cartoony. But and, you know, so they did a bunch of toy stuff. They did some original stuff. They did Centurions and sectars, if you remember them. Yeah, I remember Centurions. Yeah, I don't remember sectars.

I assume that's a sex thing that that's gotten turned into a sex thing. Sure. Yeah, they they were people that fucked horses so often, they're like, was that even like a centaur? Like not quite a centaur. I mean, functionally, it is they never separate. They I guess they're like a sex, a sex tar, I guess, is what we'll call those. So I want to talk about the cast. Alex was played by T.K.

Carter, who is was the cook in John Carpenter's The Thing. No, not a big cartoon voice actor. And then Frank Wilker was Dark Rider, who has I looked at my up, he has almost 900 credits now on IMDb. And a time I've heard someone talk like this. That was Frank Wilker. Also, Frank Wilker does like incidental animal noises, too. So even if it's just like a cartoon where a dog was like,

like there's a 99 percent chance it's Frank Wilker. That's my favorite thing. I wish I feel like we've gotten away from that to some degree. And I wish he would come back where just all animals are a guy going like me. Me, me, me, me. That's a fucking mouse. I don't know. That's what a mouse sounds like.

Yeah. And then a Brett Matthews, who's turbo team, his girlfriend is played by Pamela Hayden, who is Millhouse. She sure is. And you can hear it in a couple of parts in the episodes. You can definitely hear it. And boy, does that color the events of the show. Yeah, there's no one. There's no one less prepared to deal with turbo team in Millhouse.

Just scarred him for life. I give you guys two episodes to watch that I think represent the show. Well, just real real quick. I think Millhouse would be the turbo team, right? Millhouse would be the one who would painfully transform into a sports car against his will. It would be his curse. Yeah. Every time he gets overheated.

It's funny to bring it up because I did want to make the case that turbo team is probably the most cursed superhero who's ever lived. It's yes. It's useless power. Yes, we need to desperately, but if you're not going to do it right now, we definitely need to explain turbo team. This cannot be something that we assume is common knowledge because nobody's ever going to believe us.

It's true. It's hard to find. Let's talk about his his transformation here. OK. Well, he he transforms like the like the intro said, he turns into a car. But he does it first. That's first in werewolf style. So it's gets so huge, which definitely before the fetishes, those are before it becomes a car.

Like before it becomes car when it's still when it's still teen and not turbo. It's like it's he remains teen for an uncomfortably long period of his transformation long. He just gets real thick. Like if you didn't know what he was going to do, you'd be like, oh, hell, yeah. Oh, yes. Wait, what is he melting? Oh, he's going to fuck himself. What's happening?

He always seems so surprised when his hands turn into tires. He's like, oh, get it off. What am I? What am I becoming? Yeah, like he's enjoying it up until that point. And then he looks down at like, oh, no, yeah, this should not be. I should have horror. His body has become 1984. And so to do this much extra work was a deliberate and passionate artistic choice.

When you could have zapped into an ostrich, it was just like swank, stock explosion, no, no, no, no, no, no, no ostrich. That's it. Turbo Teen would slowly across hundreds of frames for 100,000 animation cells would get his tendons and his bones stretched into car shape, and they drew a new one at least once every episode. Yeah, it was just one stock animation. It's this agonizing procedure.

Dozens and dozens of times drawn from dozens and dozens of angles. This is definitely a sex fetish or it is. It's 100 percent a whole genre of porn. It started one. If it's not already, it's it ruined a generation of transformation. Porn is a thing. It is probably responsible for all of the sexy cars fan art. That's definitely true. I also I went to film school a bit.

And so something the French filmmakers would do, the very artistic ones, they would take something and repeat it so often that it sort of became more than the narrative. So I feel this might be the work of a perfectionist filmmaker who like needs his audience to understand this character's change goes beyond mere narrative meaning. It's the pain that the audience needs to feel. I feel like we're supposed to understand what is happening to him is terrifying.

It hurts. He doesn't want it. I think that's the point of all this. Nobody around him likes it. Everybody's horrified. Nobody wants it. It's just it's unnatural. This is definitely Cronenberg.

This is like if you gave Cronenberg an animated show and a budget, he would make exactly turbo team, except for turbo team would scream the whole time. I was about to I was literally just about to say he would just look at it and not change a single thing, except the why isn't he screaming? Yes, it would. That's that's it. That's it. We wouldn't change a single frame of this. A single unbroken howling scream.

He would add to it. That's the feel. Otherwise, same sequence. Otherwise, this is perfect. The boys are artists. It would be Jeremy Irons, too, somehow. Yes, it would. So I just I want to have everyone keep in mind that my theory is that Brett

Matthews never knew another moment of happiness once he was fused with his car by that molecular transfer ray. So we watched two episodes. We watched the pilot and what was the other one called the souped up seven. So let's let's talk about the pilot. Can we talk about the opening credits? Yeah, we have to establish first. There's a lot established there, please,

because they establish also just by showing it that his natural enemy is a monster truck, like the natural predator of cars. Like they just show it and you're like, oh, yes, of course. Yeah, obviously. And so I assumed that was another team, but it's actually like Dr. Wiley in a monster truck. We'll talk about that guy. Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

There's also there's a shot is the car wash shot in the opening credits or is it in the actual episode? It's in the opening credits. Yeah. OK, so the car wash, why on earth? There's a lot to unpack. Why on earth? Yeah, like why would you if you were a turbo team and you had the ability to transform in a car, like why would you go?

Why would you pay money to go through a car wash? Why would you just turn back into a team to go bathe at home for free? Like, does it transfer like these are questions we would need to answer? Also, you know, as turbo team, I don't know if we mentioned it, but you know that temperature changes are what changes you back to a team and into a car. Like if you get if you get hot, you turn into a car, which we will also establish means the metaphorical meaning to.

So if you get horny, you turn into a car. And if you get cold, you turn back into a team. So he knows that and he gets like his friends inside of him, which they write inside of him so much like this. They sure do. They sure do. There's also a shot where he's chasing in the opening credits. There's a footage of him chasing some thugs up a spiral staircase in a castle.

Yeah, that's it. As a car, as a car, as a car, they keep showing all of these things, all these situations in which being a car would make it just infinitely more difficult, like he would like luck as a teen. Yeah, I hundred percent. But I feel like if they didn't show that, you would just assume that and say, I'm not watching this crap, but they show the car chasing up the stairs and the audience is like, OK, so he can go upstairs.

That I I was going to ask that, right? They try to answer all your obvious questions in that opening credits. It's the most efficient cartoon, I think they could have had. Like this whole show could have been about like finding the perfect occasion where you need to be a car, then he turns into a car and does something effective. And instead, it's about like I need to fight. So I'm going to turn into a car and then there's a car on like a fucking fishing boat, fighting fishermen.

And you're like, well, why is that any of this happening? That's the high difficulty that they have had themselves. And that's why it's so great. I feel like in the 80s, we're used to that of like, oh, MacGyver is useless until he like gets a bunch of stuff. And, you know, Knight Rider sucks when he's not in the car. A team can't do shit until they like get locked in a tool shit. Like all these things in the 80s was it was part of the formula that we expected.

And turbo teams just always the wrong thing. At one point in one of the episodes we watched, he turned into a car to get on a rowboat. Yeah. Yes. And then immediately sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Because he's a car. It's just I see. I vaguely remember this show. I was very young when this came out.

But I also remember everybody just being like, what the fuck is this? It's so weird. You were really disturbed. And like they sold toys, but the toys could not possibly transform like Transformers did, where it was the animation that they turned into a toy. It would have been just an agonizing horror show. You have 40 different toys and then pull one out. Hide the other thirty nine.

Pull one out, hide the other thirty nine. His agony with a series of like inflating sacks, I guess. I would love that now. But man, that was it's also just real quick. I just established this like right at the top. Like I can't get over how crappy his power is. Like he has the ability to to transform into one of the most common things in the world, something that everyone, including teenagers, have easy access to.

It's like turning into a tranzam, right? No less. I'm pretty sure he's supposed to be a tranzam. Yeah, it's tranzami. I don't think it's officially a tranzam. But yeah, he's a tranzam. It looks like a tranzam. It's definitely the car to get laid in the driver's seat.

So he's got that going for him. It's it's just so funny to me that his power is to turn into a thing that everyone owns that you could just get into. He could just get into and drive. He doesn't have my pocket. These keys, you realize. And he always fights people that are just men in cars that are just. Yeah.

And it's a very fair fight. The thing about it is like he doesn't get an advantage of being the car. He's just if anything, it's a disadvantage to be the car. I want to throw a monkey wrench into your point, which is that he eventually gets turbo boosts. He has them in the first episode, but they start using them like whenever they fucking feel like it. So they do whatever they want.

You can find the seventh episode. Yeah, he's just flying around on rockets. And so he is better than a regular car, but it took him a while before they're like, maybe we should make this better than a regular car. Yeah, they realize they let him be a regular car. They just got his ass kicked for a couple of minutes. He is just a regular car in this first episode. Yeah.

So I do want to talk about his horrible curse, because he's at the drive-in with his friends, his friends are Alex and Patty and his dog, Rusty, and they're sitting inside him as they do. I want to make a note here. Hardly anyone ever sits in the driver's seat. So everyone who sees turbo team is immediately suspicious. It's some sort of a strange, like ghost car or remote control car or something. But they never just go somewhere without drawing as much suspicion as possible.

I think it's in then therefore it's implied that he is the driver's seat. They're like, it's it's not cool to sit on the driver's seat because that's him. That's his spot. Well, the second he transforms back into turbo team, well, Patty's sitting in the driver's seat and she's just riding on his back. Like, like he's a little horsey when they exactly because he does transform on accident because Alex jumps out of the car to chase the dog onto the hood like you get out of a car and he smells like a glass of orange juice at the

driving gear at the drive-in. Like hit the drive-in. I love to get a fresh glass of OJ at the drive-in. Fresh squeezed OJ at the movies. Extra pulp, no straw. It's just warm, a hot glass of orange juice. Well, it was cold enough to turn him back into a boy. Yeah, that's true.

Because again, he's he's determined by temperature and wetness. He can't transform as will. And the specifics of these temperatures are not established. It's not like as soon as you hit 102 degrees, you're a fucking car. It's why did they have to give him further weaknesses? And such the most common things like, you know how it gets caught in cold in different situations, that's that's your weakness. Like, what, whether ambient temperature is my weakness.

It's like your that happens a lot when you're a car. Like, I don't I don't know. I feel like you drive through like hot and cold temperatures when you're just driving in a car. So yeah, they made it they made it so difficult. I mean, thank God for it to put this many complications into the show. But all of the less like the specificity of it, this had to have been just a punishment for like rogue animators.

There's way more rules on what he can't do. What he can't like, it's like they came up with turbo team and then they sat down for like five hours and just wrote out a litany of his weaknesses. This is what he cannot do. He cannot do many things. This is going to be a great cartoon, boss. They start talking about Dr. Chase, who's trying to cure him.

So even in the show's premise, this is more of a disease than a superpower. Yeah. And I just want to try to try to imagine how terrible the life of the turbo team must be if you'd want someone to cure you of being a weird trans am like that's kind of awesome. We're making fun of it. But it's especially better than being a regular teenage boy, a very boring white teenage boy who does and says and is nothing exceptional. I yeah, as as a fellow one of those, I would have taken the weird trans am.

Honestly, yeah, because if you ask me to describe Brett's character, it's I have nothing. I have nothing beyond he turns into a car. He is pointless. He is doomed to turn into a car, a wet piece of bread. That's all this guy is. He'll occasionally drop knowledge right before he does something that they feel like they need to explain.

Like you say, didn't you know I was on the high school gymnastics team? And then he'll like do a flip. And you're like, OK, because they know this guy's such a piece of shit. If he does a flip will be like, wait, wait, wait a minute. That would break him in half. The middle of this fantastic cartoon about a boy who becomes a car. If he does a flip will be like bullshit. Ben presses something.

The opening scene of the show is basically high. I can't control this terrible curse. And then it cuts to two guys just breaking into Dr. Chase's lap to just steal random shit. They're total penny criminals. Generally, they are. They are incidental burglars. No idea what's going on.

They find a file about a boy who can become a car. And they're like, without questioning it, they're like, awesome. Let's find this boy who can turn into a car and sell him for money. They see a team. They go right into human trafficking. And they're like, no questions about how he turns into a car. Literally nothing. They're like, oh, he turns into a car. Well, let's steal him and sell him for a fortune.

We're going to make a fortune. They most fucking DTF burglars. They're so out. First of all, they're dressed incredibly like one guy's just like a bank manager. And the other guy's just like he drives a produce truck. They break into the science lab with no agenda, no specific agenda. They're just in there like, let's steal something that looks valuable.

Yeah. Costumes are weird. Maybe they got them like from Jabberjaw or something. Like, hey, we'll give you 80 bucks for those two guys from Jabberjaw. They're like, all right, they do not look like burglars. Yeah. Like, yeah. And then they just see Brett's file open on the count. It's like, hey, there's some kind of turbo kid. Let's go kidnap him for money.

And that's it. And I want to be clear that 12 seconds later, 12 seconds after they learn he exists, they have him in their arms. They throw him in a truck like that. They are efficient. They are pros. The first bad people who learn of turbo team capture him half a minute later. And he can do nothing.

He can do anything. His turbo team abilities are useless. So they chase him down. Alex and Patty chase him down in a regular car. Alex jumps onto the top and he throws a hairdryer into like some sort of an AC unit that's on the top of their truck. And they fiddles with the wires a little and then it heats up the truck with the hairdryer.

And of course, this lets him heat up and that turns him into a car. And he screams the entire time. Sorry, I watched the Kronenberg cut. So now he just sort of jumps out of the truck and drives into a mall. And here's where I want to talk about how he's kind of fantastic sometimes. Like he's very, I wouldn't say fast, but he has turbo rockets. He can sort of pop a wheelie when he wants. He can turn on a dime.

He can just stop, turn around. But then also all that can go away instantly. So he gets to the mall and he says, oh, no, the floor is slippery. And then he spins completely out of control for forty three full time. It's forty three seconds. He was just in a fucking flat spin across this mall. Killed 800 kids at least. Oh, yeah, he plowed through a KB toys.

Like it's the second. So like the first challenge outside of just immediately getting abducted is is just simply he can't stop. Like I think he even says I can't stop and they do the same thing in the next episode we watched. So it's like how many times does he just fuck himself up because he just can't stop for no reason? Like a lot.

Yeah, every episode he needs more weaknesses. Honestly, honestly, like it's the one thing you would think a turbo team can do is go fast. Like if you can turn into a trans am, surely he can just go fast. And that's like it's pilot weaknesses on the American boy. Because I just stop, stop on a like an unremarkable floor. It would be good to just have breaks that work. Yeah, he just can't stop.

No reason. Just can't stop. Now, one of the reasons he finally like loses the spin out is he gets a flat tire like something a lot of questions about this. Yes, there's a lot of questions about that because I was like, oh, shit. So he like broke his foot or something. Right. Is that tearing his ACL? Did he like slash his Achilles tendon? No, the car damage apparently does not translate over in this scenario

because it is established that the tire is actually his shoe. Right. That's so if he was nude when he transformed into turbo team, it would be a much smaller car. He would just be like the frame of a car, which the tire is missing a muffler or whatever, missing his tires, missing all the body work. Just the the color of his clothing does like roughly match the car. So I wonder if he was nude when he became turbo team, if it would just be this flesh color with no body work, just zoom in down the street.

It's all just why I only drive in the nude for just an occasion. It has body hair. So he smashes into an ice cream shop. Ice cream gets on him. Boom. He's a boy again. The shop. Everybody saw it. Everybody just watched it. But then the shop owners like, who's going to pay for this? And Alex says, send it to fucking Brett Matthews.

Here's his address and they leave. And I don't think in 1984 you could just drive into an ice cream shop and say, here's my home address. Fuck you. I just don't think that works. But also, I feel like they needed to say that out loud so that the spies would hear it. The bad guys would hear that and know where he lives now. Yeah, it's the only way to get to that plot point. And speaking of the could only happen this one way through his cream and relaying insurance information.

They got back to Dr. Chase at the lab and they're discussing classified turbotene information in front of the world's most suspicious janitor. I just want you to keep that suspicious janitor in mind who has a very obvious glasses and mustache disguise on. Yeah. Very clearly listening to their secret conversation. And it's not like this is a massive facility. It's established. This is his lab. It's just his lab. So there's like two people here.

Yeah, there's two other people in the room. The guy he's talking to and this fucking suspicious ass janitor that looks like John Landon Cosplay, Dr. Wiley. I'll take your job as your regular human janitor. Well, now you got it because it kind of looks like he's wearing an Italian disguise, so you got to do dark writer doing an Italian. I'm I'm going to clean all your flaws out. Perfect.

They they hatch a scheme to let the burglars come to turbotene's house while they wait in the bushes and jump him with all their scientist strength. Now, here's a great time for me to let everyone know. Turbotene's parents do not know he's turbo team. They do two other gags later in this episodes where their parents are like, hey, what's going on down there? Well, he's like violently transforming into a car and driving out the front door. So he never changes temperatures at all in front of them.

Exactly. He's always a perfect 72. At no point at any time does it occur to someone to just go to the cops and say, hey, two fucking guys, grab me. I'm not a car. Don't worry about that. As I was a human, these guys grabbed me and threw me in a truck. They'll tell you a non car. Listen to them. Yes. So anyway, the high school bully that hates Brett drives up just randomly and sees turbotene's car and he's like, Eddie Dirksen.

Eddie Dirksen, great bully name is incredible. I just want to real quick. He's dressed like a concert flautist and he's driving the car that Homer Simpson designed that bankrupted his father. You can see it. It's like it's incredible. This is the most incredible bully I've ever seen in a cartoon. And his sidekick is like Looney Tunes special needs.

Like he's like offensive, dumb guy voice where you're like, I there's I don't I'm not comfortable with your sidekick, buddy. Like the mimsy character. Yeah, the mimsy guy and they just kind of missed the tone of mimsy and sort of hit like, anyway, we don't need to talk about it. Uncomfortable 1984. This was the 80s. They can go our word and crash helmet back then.

And it was exactly. And they almost did. They also do. So he gets out and he just starts fucking up the car. Like, hey, here's a funny prank. I'll lift up the hood of his car and just fuck his engine up. That's his brain. That's his head. Right. That's another point, just like with the tire.

Where I was like, oh, my God, this is fucking murder. Is he a lot of money seeing him? Yeah, like pulling his pulling his aorta out without like opening his chest. Right. But I would think so. Yes, this this is like in what was the Hannibal Lecter movie where he pulls open Ray Lou's head and Hannibal's brain. Yeah, that was Hannibal. OK, so this is a lot like that, I suppose. Also, we find out he's asleep and this just doesn't wake him up

to get his skull ripped open and his brain is fucked with. So the scientists say, hey, that must be the burglar, the guy who's fucking up the car and they chased this young child. So they're all very confused running into the night. The real burglars show up and hitch him to a tow truck and take off with him. The dog foils this by just standing in front of the tow truck, just long enough for Patty to walk up to the passenger side and say, hey, guys, you guys shouldn't. And they just kidnap her.

They just like. Thanks for the free girl. We've already established we love taking teens like on impulse, I'll just impulse grab another teen. But while she was getting kidnapped, they did unhook Turbo Teen and they what they take her to a haunted house and Turbo Teen like jumps on the roof and falls to the floor. Like that's their subtle way of going.

Said like, oh, it's probably a trap. Let's not drive through the front door. He just crashes through the fucking ceiling. I worry that we're we're glossing over this. They take him to a haunted house. That's not us saying that it's a haunted mansion by the beach. They explicitly say that the criminals are like, well, we got to go somewhere.

Let's go to the haunted mansion. Right. And end of explanation. Right. It's not just us being cheeky. It is explicitly a haunted mansion. And I should point out this is the fourth unique setting in the show. Like no expense is spared in this cartoon. This is not a cheap cartoon. And so they go there and the bad guys are like, oh, he's a carless.

Run up the stairs, just like we all thought the second we heard about this premise. Yes. And he he chases them up the stairs, but then one of them takes the banister down. The other one swings in the chandelier and lands on the floor. Now, Turbo Teen is like, well, I can't go backwards down the stairs. So for Turbo Teen, that's our law. Yes, that's Carl. So now they re kidnap the first law of cars.

So I love that he comes in. The bad guys run away from his girlfriend. So they're like, cool, we can save the girlfriend. He's like, no, fuck that. I'm going to get those guys fails in doing that. They re kidnap the girl. He scolds her for that. He's like, when is she going to learn?

Because she's got kidnapped again. So then he falls in a no, no, no, no. They get away in a boat. And so Turbo Teen is obviously fucked. So then he drives on to a rowboat and they drive on the rowboat. That's that's it. I mean, they could have gone to the crime barge. They're like, let's take her to the mansion when they had a boat.

A car proof. Or he could have walked on to the rowboat. That too. I just love that like you free part of this sequence is just like, why were you a car for this? Like being a car made this worse. Yep. Like, yeah. And this is it's just it's such an amazing scene because so far

they've done so many things that you are that would violate suspension of disbelief and they don't care and they're not going to follow that logic. And then for this one scene where he drives on to a rowboat and they paddle out there, the rowboat sinks because he's a fucking car on a rowboat and he turns back. Why did you apply reality this one time? It's just worse.

He's a two time trans am on a rowboat. And they're like, yeah, that was a dumb fucking idea. Let's just sink him. What are you doing, writers? What the. I do want to talk about realism here because he sinks down. Obviously, the water's cold. He turns into a boy. He comes back up and he says, it's a lot easier to hold your breath as a car.

I fucking screamed. Does that mean the fucking car needs to breathe? I every damn thing they say on packs like eight hundred problems. I smashed the pause button when those words came tumbling out of his head. What does that mean? These are just little like 20 minute with credits episodes in like eight hundred questions. It's so everything they say ruins everything else.

I did not stop writing the entire time I was writing. I was watching these episodes. I'm so glad we did this podcast. Like we've been waiting our whole lives to talk about turbo. Turbo scene. And again, I want to by this point of the episode, we've seen him transform, I think, three times. Yeah, they love this button. And this is not your one transformation.

Because some shows back then did like, OK, here's the big moment. One transformation or one power. Yeah, and that's it. And they start like shorthanding it and like in transformers, you'd hear that like off screen and they would kind of front flip it of the car or whatever. But in this one, they show you like the protracted, agonizing transformation sequence like three full times in this episode.

Each of them unique. This is not stock animation, like He-Man or something. Fucking every time. New. They they want us to feel something about that transformation. Yes. So so they climb onto the crime barge with their dog, Rusty. Rusty is here for the rescue and the dog and thank God, because he wordlessly executes this complicated like maneuver

where he like lures them out of the way so they can go in and say Patty. And then they all swim away, but the bad guys have a boat. So they need to turn them into turbo team. Like, we got to get the fuck out of here. And now here's the problem with being turbo team. He's like, I can't guys, I'm cold. So Alex strips down to his underpants and just covers him in clothes. So he's got two sets of clothes and it's still not working.

So Patty comes up and gives him a little kiss on his cheek. Boom, turbo team earned. Yeah. So it's it's horniness now. We have established. He's fully engorged. Yeah, I also think it could be a bearish because he was like, oh, no, not in front of Alex and he's like blushing. And so it feels like it's obvious horniness, but the text of the art wants me to think it's embarrassment.

Either one is a nightmare for a teenager. It just happens all day, every day. So he can't live a normal life if embarrassment and horniness turn him into a car, whichever one it is. Right. Like this is this is definitely fucked up his sexual development. He's going to get a horny in traffic. He's going to get horny like just getting warm, getting cold. Is going to have associated memories.

Like you already get a boner for nothing as a teenager all the time. Yeah, poor child. I don't know what it looks like when a car has a boner, but I guarantee you we're at some point in turbo team. We have to see it. If you see the driver's seat, you'll know what it feels like. Maybe that's why nobody's in the driver's seat. The only thing I know for a fact is that it's violent.

Yes, it hurts. It hurts him. It hurts everybody else. Nobody likes it and it's out of control. Make is actively makes the world a worse place. I also think it's worth remembering that these are the very first two people that even know turbo team exists and it's this much trouble. They are regular guys with no abilities. Yeah, they have a lot of vehicles, I guess.

Yeah, they had no agenda. Like they were just like going to steal some random shit. They saw this kid like they steal as kid and now they're just like stealing patty. Yeah, so it's like they're just like, yeah, whatever, whatever, teens. So are they traffickers? Like are they going to traffic turbo time? Sometimes you're in a crime mood. That's true. Sometimes it's just crime time.

It's going to do a new crime. Foiling any plans, just some impulses by two unprepared and unprofessional men just trying to survive their two step plan of get them and sell them. And so they're beautifully, beautifully simple. They honestly, they live probably a much more peaceful existence than I do. Certainly than turbo team does. Yeah, or cursed violent existence living out the fucking plot of titanium every single day.

Life is agony for turbo team. But these guys are living the best life. They have a dune buggy. They get the dune buggy and they start running away. And here's a fun fact about turbo team is he's always exactly the same speed as any other car, truck, tank or boat. So he can't quite catch them, but he does trap them on a pier and like knock the support beams out.

So now they're stuck on top of the pier and now they call the cops. I don't know why now all of a sudden they're like, OK, we can explain this to the police. But like now that they're up on one half of a pier that we've destroyed, that's the perfect time. I didn't hear down as a car. I'm just a regular non car boy. Rick, regular team, no turbo team here could have done any number of things to immobilize these thieves.

It's once again, completely insane that they get up on a pier and then he knocks the rest of the pier out around them so that they are stranded. It's just how do you wind up there as your next logical point from OK, we're in a car chase. Now it's time for the pier scene. It's very like it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world for sure. There's the the scene where he calls the cops, I think is the one like genuinely good.

Like it's his best power is the fact that he can transform into a car that has a cell phone in 1984. Yeah, like the best power is the fact that these kids have a phone that they can use to call the police no matter where they are. That's his most impressive ability hands down in this episode. Now, easily, was I reading the animation wrong or do they have a fucking beach barbecue while they wait for the cops to show up? I think so.

I think it's either before or after both. But yeah, the criminals are all the way like they're just chilling on the beach. They're like, shit, we're here at the beach. Let's have a barbecue while the criminals are up on the pier. I go, ah, shaking their fists. Ah, damn you, you kids, don't put the hot dogs on. God damn you. And I want to make it clear that all every episode ends with either

this joke where they offer him a human thing. But first, fuck it up and offer him a car thing. So let's say, hey, do you want unleaded or mustard on your hot dog? And then someone else will parrot the same joke back. So in this case, he says, hey, stop making jokes about me. Patty, can you pass the oil milk? And like they'll do that after and scene.

Perfect and see. They also like to do the Scooby-Doo ending. And they also do the Super Friends ending where someone like courageously says, I'm not concerned about the thing we just solved. And then like a shadow will show up and they'll say, oh, no, it's the thing we just saw. And it'll be like a monkey with a banana or something.

So those are the three Turbotine endings. Incredible. I was just going to say he's he's a disgusting maniac because they're relaxing on the beach, eating hot dogs and drinking milk. Yeah, like a real psychopath. Give me the fuck away from this monstrous kid and his fucking his fucking beach milk. A Turbotine apologist might tell you that that's just like

because of his car physiology. But yeah, that's disgusting. He needs calcium because of all the horrible things his bones do all the time. Because his skeleton keeps breaking. Just shatters to powder every time he turns into a car. Now, before you brought milk to the barbecue, it would be the last thing you ever said. You got it. Are you going to fucking grill it?

Why did you bring milk to the barbecue? What's you know what? Don't even answer. You're dead. You've been dead since you said the thing. Oh, no, I know what this is. You're a Turbotine. Yep. It's fine. It's OK. Your secret is safe with me. Just don't let anybody else see that you're drinking milk on the beach. Like some kind of fucking weirdo.

Stand away from the grill before you're going to get horny. I don't want you knocking over my grill. I need to point out something. And that is this was the first episode. This was the pilot episode, which is what you use as a writer. This is the demonstration of the types of stories they can tell and the cool tricks you can use within. And it's also one of, if not the best story you can tell with this.

And it's a proof of concept. This was it. Yeah. This was the first episode as like a middle of the episode in season three about your fucking crazy car thing. Sure. But this is the first one. And you couldn't think of like a single actual car thing for him to do. He gets on a boat. He drives upstairs. He hates life. He gets kidnapped.

He does nothing. He falls through a ceiling and gets abducted by Corella Deville's henchman. Basically by random people who decide crime, like crime. Yeah, sure. Right. It's like they broke into that lab on a dare. Totally outmatched by them at every turn. You'll never get weaker criminals than this. There will never be anyone with fewer abilities, more unprepared for anything.

It's the first episode. He needed to warm up. We did skip five and we went all the way to episode six, which is called the sinister souped up seven. So please don't get confused by all these numbers. I know the turbo team fans are dumb as shit. So they're all cars. They're all cars.

Watching any of this sequentially could possibly help you at any point. I they actually do kind of build like they don't have like a continuity. But the characters grow and change like a dark writer does not know he is a car in this episode we're watching. He doesn't know he's turbo team. He thinks it's a remote control car. And that counts. He doesn't understand he's turbo team until episode eight.

When he grows into knowing that he's a car. Exactly. It's actually great. I almost saved it on the sound board. He he chases the car up and then like he turns back into a boy and dives out the window. He's like, where is the car? And then he sees a shoe and he's like, you got a flat tire.

The shoe, a thumbtack. Could the boy in the car be one? You know, why would that ever be the conclusion? What he makes. You are turbo team. I told you, I'm a boy. Turbo team is a computerized car. Doesn't matter what you say.

I will prove you are the car. When more serum is ready, I will turn the other dogs into wild beasts. Turbo team would rather reveal his identity than let wolves stalk the city. Wouldn't be Brett. So that's how he's going to do it. I know how we could do him off the track. So just amazing, amazing and perfect.

His plan does not connect in any way. None of his realizations were these wolves. No shit, I'll turn into where the wolves come in. But that's from a different episode. We're not going to talk about. But part of the torture of being turbo team is here he is in a situation where not revealing his identity will hurt people, but he can't even turn into a car will to save them.

So like he can't even be like it can't even be tortured out of him. Anyway, that's the nightmare that is turbo team. He just can't unless you use the blowtorch. The blowtorch would do it. That's true. You would eventually hit a heat related torture or he'd pee his pants. Be like, oh, my urine's so warm on my leg. So what?

That's comforting. The only interesting control about my body. It does he have to be like uncomfortably hot or like would it also happen? If he likes, I'm now I'm you mentioning the torch makes me realize that I'm a little unclear of like if he was actually like on fire. Oh, are you? Are you a little unclear? So like, but like, I don't know.

I don't know. Is it does it just like heat that's like uncomfortable or is it fully engulfed will also turn you? I think you know the answer in that if there's if there's ever a question, it's whatever is worse for turbo team. So I think so he would he would transform into a car that was also on fire. Absolutely. Or just a completely unrelated thing.

He's like, oh, no, I'm just like a pile of asbestos. I hate this. So in this episode, turbo team is just cruising around Mexico for as far as I can tell, no good reason, no reason. Funtime weekend when they run into Dark Rider for also no reason, no real reason. So Dark Rider just comes out of nowhere, which is sort of a trope of Dark Rider. He just he's a monster truck that can do everything. Dark Rider later in the episode, he emerges from a sealed ancient tomb.

Yes. Yeah, this is he is not a truck. And he can do way more than the guy that's called. He's just a guy looking anywhere and everywhere. I love it. So as they're running away from Dark Rider, they hit a cactus and a chunk of it falls in the front seat and Alex grabs it and throws it out and starts poking pulling out the little spines. And turbo team is saying, oh, which means he can feel pain,

even small amounts of pain like this, which means like when he's peeling out, that must feel like his fucking fingernails are being torn out. Like this car is just in constant pain all the time. And when he's when he's ramming through walls and shit, he's just he's just giving himself concussions. Just fucking full body checking everything, full body checking the world. That's the first plot of this. Like that's the whole episode we're in.

He smashes into a wall and forgets who the fuck he is. Yeah, because for once again, he just randomly can't stop all of a sudden and crashes into a wall and gives himself amnesia. Containing the golden seal of a Mexican secret city of Mexican Indian secret cities. He did. You're right. That is quite a thing to him.

There might be some magic involved. But there's another thing he does here that I really like, where he kicks all of his friends up, like, oh, shit, dark writers here. Everybody get out. And he can't get away from Dark Rider because Dark Rider is just fast and everywhere. His breaks go up for no reason, smashes into the Indiana Jones Chamber, goes unconscious, loses its memory.

And so, yes, as we're talking about that, that that that means that when he smashes into things, which happens a lot, he's he's impacting a skull. He wakes up when two young Indian boys find him and explain to him he's a talking car. He's like, what the fuck? What are you talking about? I'm not a car. They're like, dude, you're a car. And he's like, OK, hop in. They're like, fuck, yeah.

Yeah, they have no. That is the end of their line of questioning. They say, no, you idiot, you're a talking car. And as soon as he agrees, they're like, sweet, we're best friends now. And I would argue it's the first accurate thing in the show. Do it exactly how. How would I coach a boot. There's an evil Indian hot rug gang

that is terrorizing the local mission. Hold on. Hold on. OK. Just just give me that sentence one more time. There's an evil Indian hot rod gang. Yeah. Yeah, there sure is. Driving the classic cars each to their ability. Their leader is this silver serpent, and he is glorious. He is he is as tech, chieftain.

And he's fucking like fifty eight Bel Air or something is right. They're all driving like old muscle cars through the desert. It rules, but it makes no sense at the same time. It's very Mexican. And it's it's all in like as tech designs and death masks. And fucking it's the best car. Everything. It is pretty. It's sweet as shit.

And it's the the first and only time watching this pair of episodes where I saw something where it was like, well, I want that toy. Yeah, right. You finally hit on it with the with these guys with the toys. Like if they came up to me in the desert and we're like, join our gang. Immediately, I would say yes. Yeah. That how I need to get a car.

Do I just are you just going to give me one? Because the fact that there are only seven of them, I like they must be the toughest motherfuckers around instantly. Great storytelling. You can't even get into the gang unless you beat one of them in arm wrestling, as we'll find out later. But here that they're trying to get in the mission and their plan is to roll a giant boulder through the gate.

He's like, oh, I got I've been trying to get in that mission for a while. Let's knock this boulder in. And then here comes turbo team. And they like know that it's the car that is a thing. They're not like, hey, who's that dude? They're like, what is that car? Like they know that the car is the one doing everything, I guess, is the point I'm trying to make.

So turbo team when they should be logically thinking those kids rule, we should ask them to join the game. Yeah, those little kids are driving that car turbo team has conked out of his brain. He has no idea what's going on. So he knocks the the boulder out of the way. And then he just peels the fuck out, throws in reverse, jumps through the gate anyway.

So he does what the gang wanted to do, just cooler. And so the gang is like this car rules. Yeah. Then the Silver Serpent drives into the priest's office and ramps up the stairs, which is yes. Everybody just drives upstairs. You know, it's not a car, man. It's like in the intervening episodes between episode one

and this episode, it's like they figured out, like, OK, we need to establish that like driving around indoors is just a thing that people do in this universe. So like they always do it. I see. And then here's my theory, because in the early episodes, they showed the teens like walking around town and they all walk like they just watched a wiki how on how to walk.

It's the weirdest fucking walk. And the animators had no idea how a human being moves and definitely did not have the capability to match that. So everybody just does everything in cars. It's like Rob Leefield can't draw feet. Just use a car. Just put cars on the foot. Make them drive everywhere.

Rob Leefield wishes he could design something as red as Silver Serpent. Maybe instead of feet, cars. Have you considered that, Rob? Yeah, what if wheels? Not even full cars, just wheels. Give everybody little wheels at the bottoms of their legs. Everybody is a turbo teen monster. I bet Rob Leefield would reboot turbo teen with us.

The hell yeah, let's do it. Let's just do it. He's not calling. He's not. He's not doing anything else. He's not telling about the article I did on his last comic, though. I think that. Oh, he hates himself. I made fun of him once on Twitter, like pretty savagely.

And he showed up and liked the tweet. And I was like, it's kind of cool. It's kind of a win for him. Yeah. And then he came back and was just like, yeah, I know, I know what I am. All right, he'll he'll take Umbridge with other things. Like I have a friend of mine who said very innocuously. Oh, actually, something about like, oh, my favorite ex-force artist

was actually this person and Leifeld blocked him. Oh, damn. Just for saying his favorite ex-force artist was somebody other than Rob Leifeld. Wow. OK. Can I catch him on a good day or a bad one? I don't know. I guess like maybe he can enjoy the like the ripping into him, but like the stuff that's like an actual comment on his on his work. Like, actually, I like this other person better.

Yeah, he takes very personally. He likes a nice joyful burn, but not like a hurtful criticism. If you don't, everyone listening who wants to criticize Rob Leifeld, try to make it fun. So Turbotine is like a sleep trying to sleep off this amnesia and concussion, which is not a great idea. And so he's got a car fall. Don't let that transient fall asleep.

It's got a concussion. Make it keep its radio on. Oh, that's right. I forgot to mention he landed in a fountain, and that's how he turned back into a boy. And he's like, hey, who the fuck am I? And they're like, I don't know, man, but you can have a bed for the night. This was their mistake because he he's in the Mexican desert. He's got a blanket on and he has a nightmare that makes him hot.

And, you know, this hot, probably horny, you never had a hot mayor. A lot of job, Princess. Rides in pain to create an upside down trans am on the bed, shattering the bed completely. Again, we've established another part of the lore is that the position that he's in when he transforms can also render him completely useless like a fucking turtle. He's just turtling his pile of weaknesses of the boy.

His vulnerable undercarriage is exposed to the American boy. So they all flip him over and he immediately smashed the goddamn wall. Like he is trashing the place. So if if you picture the magnificent seven only your brand shows up to the village and just starts blowing everything up, screaming, why am I a car? What am I? That is what we're dealing with here. He's done more damage in one day than the local terrorist gang has, like ever. And it's that they immediately regret bringing turbo team into their home.

Yes, he's fucking destroyed what little they have. He takes after Silver Serpent and Silver Serpent is completely awesome. So he gets to the top of the hill and he Donkey Kong's a log down at him. And he now knows this is a demon car. He's like, fuck this demon car. I'm going to throw a tree at it. And turbo team doesn't know what he's doing. So Alice is like, dude, just jump over the log with your turbo.

And he's like, OK, OK. And he just starts hitting buttons. He finally figures out what the turbo is. We jump straight up and then lands on the log. Like it's such specific types of fucking up. Like how did he do that? And anyway, Silver Serpent gets away. Ironically, he's a terrible driver.

I like the Owen Wilson impersonation suddenly. That was that was pretty excellent. So he gets he gets like knocked off the cliff and he's like stuck to this tiny ledge. He's hanging a tree. He grabs a branch with his wheels. With his needle fists. There is no comment on how this happens.

He's just hanging there as a car. It's incredible. He's he's forgotten now. Everything works to the point where physics won't fucking work around. Physics is just done with them. You know what? Fuck you, too, buddy. I'm out. It's Looney Tunes laws. If you don't acknowledge the physics, they don't exist.

And he's he starts pogo jumping along this tiny ledge while his friends are like inside him. They hit a waterfall. He transforms into a boy. They all like scurry along the ledge. Fanta, even the dog is like belly up against the cliff, like scurrying along. So I think we we missed a quote that I just wanted to call out real quick.

It's right. I think it's after he has his hot mare. Where his friend, Alex, says, it's no dream turbo team. You see, you are a boy and a car. That's going in our song. For the reboot. A boy and a car. I really like I really like Alex a lot,

because he's clearly like a black character written by a white person. So like that he'll say something normal, but then someone's like, how do we put the word jive in here? Like, what if instead of saying hello, he screamed jive, turkeys, what it is like? Yeah, yeah, put it in. Yeah, that's not authentic. My favorite type of characters.

Yes, that's how 15 year old high schoolers talk. So they now decide they need to infiltrate Silver Serpent's gang to go get these secret Indian books back. And so they put on like what a theater kid would think was a tough bad boy outfit and they're like, hey, you know, we're here to join your gang. And the guy's like, OK, fucking obvious American children. Right. 100 percent like a freshman production of like on the waterfront.

The only American children I've seen in this deep Mexican desert. So they have an arm wrestling contest, but it like gets him hot. Like it's a lot of hard work arm wrestling. So he starts to turn into a car. So his giant fucking tire and smashes the guy down. And then Alex doesn't want anyone to know that he's a car boy. So he pours water over his his head.

It's milk. Hand. It's milk. And he says he says, like you would say, he says, got to cool down the winner. Like, sure. That's fucking normal. Delicious milk. And also the guy was looking right at your hand.

Again, we have just you've turned your hand into a wheel car. Which is, man, the problem solving in this show. I just I love it. I I'm chasing their logic like a dog and I'm never going to catch it. Yeah, I'm on board the whole way. I speak this language. I feel like Stallone should have turned into his big rig and over the top. Oh, yeah. Such a better movie.

I'm going. That's what he means when he says I'm going over the top. Yeah. Instead of turning his head when he turns his hat around backwards, that's when his fists turn into tires. Well, he has to turn his hat around backwards, because otherwise when it transforms into the tractor trailer, it like shoots out the wrong direction and it all merges with the floor.

Kill me, son. Kill me. So so the bad guys throw throw them all in jail. They have their own jail. They're like, hey, hey, man, we know you're not real gangsters. So you get in the jail and they're like, how are we going to get out of this? And they're like, well, fucking obviously turned into turbo team. But they can't figure out how to do that until the two kids from earlier show up. They're like, hey, fucking, how about a spicy burrito?

That'll do it. Yeah, I would like to point out that at this point, the only thing these Mexican children have done, have actually done in this episode, aside from be present and escort something is bring a burrito to turbo team to the prison break. They couldn't have even imagined it was a prison break. They just happened upon this prison. They just happened to be walking along, eating lunch. And this will teach you it's a bit of work.

Like he takes a bite and starts sweating. Boom. Immediately. We call that one wild gringo, Jesus. They're raked by the the wall to he obliterate through the wall and they're inches away from the impact zone. They should be dead. But again, turbo team logic. So I have a theory here that like nothing ever works to transform him a second time.

So like she couldn't have like kissed him or they couldn't have piled clothes on him. He couldn't have like gone to sleep and had a nightmare. Like I don't think anything works a second time. Turbo immunity. Yes, of course. Yes. Turbo immunity. He gets inoculated against different types of heat is my theory. So he obviously can't remember anything and it's like fucking everything up. They need him to be top turbo team if they're going to take on Silver Serpent.

So Alex grabs a screwdriver and just starts fixing his computer memory. That's how he puts it. This is obviously yada yada cartoon logic, but it implies someone fiddling with his console could change who he is and how he perceives the past. They could try to change the radio station and suddenly his mother is his first kiss. Speaking of. Oh shit, if they play with his presets, yeah. That's right. He could.

I'm sorry. I'm just saying like it just reminded me that his parents don't know where he is or that he's a car. He's in a Mexican jail run by a hot rod gang. He's a prisoner of a desert hot rod gang and living just the most miserable existence where where his friends are rewiring his brain on the fly. Imagine finding that out about your kid.

You would know that you would failed. I have truly found the wrong family. Hi, mother. Who are you? I'm your son, Brett. I'm not a car. Get the fuck out of my house. So they go back to the secret Indiana Jones chamber and they open the door with the symbols that only turbo team knows that

it's a glowing laser puzzle, of course. Yes, it's an ancient Mexican Indian ruin. Yes, it's it's very before it's time, I guess. You didn't see this in video games until several years later. But then you saw it in every video game. But they open up the secret door that's been sealed forever. And Dark Rider is inside. Imagine this.

Immediately on the other side of the door, so nobody has any questions. They're like, oh, dang it. That's the kind of thing he would do. So they duck in past him. They find an entire underground lost city. Dark Rider is gone. He's not in the cartoon anymore.

I don't think he could get in a second time. So turbo team literally flies like he turns on his rockets and he just literally flies like a bird up to the top of the Mayan Temple. And they have a car race to the music version of Jump for My Love. Fucking amazing. I got that. Yeah. Every episode has a music version of

what would have been a popular song at the time. Oh, I did not catch. I was like losing my mind because I was sitting there like, are they just stealing this song? Or like, what? What's happening here? So that's incredible to learn. Just to know to be really different, my favorite friend. So at this point now, he's almost magical.

Like he's jumping across the top of stone pillars so he can like rock it around, stop on a dime. He falls off the pillars. They push them all over on him because their cars totally kick ass. He grabs them with the front of his car, pushes them back. So they're like having this big shoving match with these giant five dominoes. They drop turbo team in a hole because he can't fight for shit. It is a car shaped grave dug for cars

in the in the in this ancient lost city. The the builders of the architects of this ancient city, they knew that the one threat to the ultimate power that they were concealing within was cars and car shaped teams. One day there will come a turbo team and we will be ready for him. Yeah, he will die here and we will seal him within it. So this is the turbo team chamber, but he obviously is going to break out in the easiest way.

He's just going to ram it with his face and his rockets. So he's just ramming into the opening and ram ram. And this pulverizing his face gets the side of this fucking chamber. Each time distorting another precious memory. It's like Leland Palmer beating himself to death in Twin Peaks. Which is the fate of all turbo teams. The savage hot rod gang thinks this is an earthquake sent

by their ancient treasure gods because on top of everything else, turbo team is very whimsically 80s racist. Oh, yeah. So these guys who have they have cars and technology, but they're like, I mean, the ancient gods are angry. No, but you put a rocket car in the fucking hole next to you. I was just going to say, it was related to the whimsical 80s racism, as Brockway pointed out, the one thing the Mexican children do is bring the character of Burrito.

In this episode, so don't think I didn't notice. So turbo team gets out and then they all jump out of a hole in the ground after like a pretty sweet chase scene, then turbo team squirts them all with oil. And they which is by law, something that oil is a part of him. We have established every part. It's his blood. Is he throwing blood at them? Did he squirt blood on them like a frightened horny toad?

Did you let your own shit on them? Did he piss on them? Did he come on? He did one of those things in this show. It was just like part of his clothes and it comes back and he's just got like the legs of his pants, but no like pelvis. He's just like naked from, I don't know. I'm just I'm trying to sell all of this is valid by turbo team rules, which they have set out for us.

It could be any of those things by which I mean, too many and also not enough. This is in my notes here. It says that Silver Serpent was Carlos Cortez, a guy no one mentioned who wasn't in the cartoon previously. We didn't even know Silver Serpent was wearing a disguise. As far as we knew, that was just his outfit and face. They pulled his mask off to to to clarify.

Like Silver Serpent throughout this entire episode just looks like a normal human guy with like an elaborate headdress. That's all he looked like. He was dressed up. Right. But he just he doesn't look like you said it doesn't look like a mask. He just looks like a guy wearing a headdress. So when they pull his mask off, it's like the headdress and plus his entire face to reveal a different face beneath it.

And they really wanted that Scooby-Doo ending so badly that they never thought that we had to set that up. It never occurred to them so that they revealed a man nobody had seen before. And then the priest runs up and says, it's Carlos Cortez, the man who helped me dig up the books. Again, I barely mentioned the books, did not mention this other guy. None of this has any reason. It's wonderful.

Now, I have another artistic theory. I think this was another passionate choice because it's like the story being told isn't what we're seeing, but how this poor transamboy is stuck within these stories. Well, now that they scrambled and rewired his brain, he of course lost those memories. That could be, yes. But I was suggesting that this car body and this cliche cartoon structure

are his prisons and that things like this are told to us, the viewer, to say, hey, this boy is just being tortured in some kind of a hell. These aren't real things that are happening. So he's a real boy and this is the cartoon hell that some entity has designed for him. Yes, I think that's a take on it that might be valid. It makes more sense than, hey, this is a boy, you can turn into a car. And these are the things that might happen. That's the great thing about this show is that you could say anything you want

and it's exactly as valid. Yeah, it just doesn't matter. All good art is like that, I think. Yeah, there were a couple of other episodes I watched in addition to that. I want to talk about just real quick. There was one. Wait, we skipped over my favorite part. The end of this episode.

We're turbo team then tasks both of the children with keeping his secret, which is not a great look. And then he winks. He winks with his flip up headlights, which are only flip up for this one scene so they can wink and no point in the rest of the show are those headlights flip up. That's true. Child's secret wink flip ups. For when you need to keep a secret with a child. What a perfect cartoon.

I love it. But I just want to talk real quick about some other highlights and to help support my theory that this poor kid is being tortured. So episode seven is called Video Avenger. And the plot of this one is that there's a few cyber terrorists want to take over America. They kind of do a last starfighter thing where they've been simulating their invasion using arcade games. And so some kid throws a pizza on Brett at an arcade.

He turns into his car and the kid goes, I got to get a new pair of glasses, which means seven episodes in the world still does not know a turbo teen exists. And that's also the child version of a drunk guy looking at his bottle. And like, oh, today. No, it's too much of that. So as a car, turbo teens computer somehow taps into this last starfighter arcade game. And now the bad guys are like, OK, shit, we need to start with this plan to take over Washington, D.C. right now.

He fights their tanks and their drills, their carding robots, their forklifts. And here's the horrible part. The guys take control of him. Just they mash some remote control device on him off camera. And he's a complete slave to their whims for a huge part of this cartoon. He's already lost so much bodily autonomy. He barely has any. But he is definitely going to start cutting just to own himself again.

Yeah, he's got just to feel anything, just to feel like he's making choices. Because they just learned about turbo teams. It's not like they could devise some sort of work around his car computers. It's just like they threw a fucking TV remote and it worked. And but more horrifying, much more as anybody. He gets freer, freeze, freeze raid just a little bit on his hood and he transforms into a boy torso with a car body. It's just a fucking monster.

Just a kind of clawing hermit crab car sent her to the music tune of Creatures of the Night by Laura Branigan. And this is what art looks like. I mean, just in all honesty, isolate just that scene and then play it in a museum and they will they will let it stay. Like nobody would ever recognize that that shouldn't be there. Just that scene in the Louvre. No, that's a question I had in my head the entire time.

So I'm glad the answer. Yeah, they did. What if only half boy, half car? Right. But they've also established so many times, like in the very first scene when they spilled a little bit of juice on part of his hood. You've many times only one small part of you has been cold. Almost every time.

Yes, it's not like he took a bite of a burrito and it's like, oh, now my face is car. This poor fucking kid. They're constantly shifting the rules on him. Just sitting there is his car abomination that should not be screaming. This is the rules we settled on rules. So at the end of that, they do save the country and they meet the actual president who gives all the high school kids and the dog on metal. And they they get an extra presidential medal from him for their friend.

And they're being real coy about it. And they're like, he needed he can't be here because he needs to get a tune up. I mean, a check up. Yeah, he had a real hoodache. Oh, I mean, a headache. And yeah. And so now he look at that. They're acting like Ronald Reagan wouldn't just pin a medal on a car.

Like he would do that shit. One hundred percent. He would do that shit on accident. Bring him up here. Perfect, perfect. Perfect, perfect Reagan. No, no, it's no notes. I wanted to play one more clip

because another thing that Turbo Teen is haunted by is that Alex is sometimes just a fucking idiot. And so there's this one scene where they're hiding from Dark Rider and they're in the construction site and they like duck into a freight elevator. And they're like, dude, just fucking stay quiet. And here's what happens. Alex, don't make a sound. You can count on me, T.T.

Honks. He just hung up the horn and honks twice. The horn. Me very intentionally. There's no like I accidentally moved. Yes, they didn't drop like he bumped it with his elbow. He reaches up with his hand, honks it as if like you're just calling your friend who's inside and you're waiting in the driveway.

Just oops. I think I love it. At the very least, he wants to die. Possibly, he also wants Turbo Teen to die. I think he figures he's doing Turbo Teen a mercy. Right. Like this, this is my friend. He can't do it himself. He's in pain.

Yeah. I do also want to get cancer by 13. And in the final episode, the mystery of Dark Rider, they reveal that Dark Rider was, you're not going to believe this, that janitor Carlos Cortez, Carlos Cortez. And then you take off Carlos's mask and it's the janitor. And he didn't know that the car was magic until eight episodes in. And he thought, but he was still trying to get Turbo Teen

because he thought someone else stole his idea for a remote control trans am. So when he saw Turbo Teen, he's like, oh, someone's fucking stole my idea. So he's just trying to get like the IP rights back to the remote control trans am and it just turned out it was a magic boy car. So it's just kind of a janitor working at the lab, expressly designed to make boys into a car abominations. It's quite a coincidence. Yes. It's it's almost.

But he also didn't realize it at no at no point. Did he ask what's the bit? What's the beam do? He was standing there into car monster. That doesn't seem ethical. We've literally seen him in the pilot episode, standing by the people talking about the boy who can turn into a car. Yeah, for the one time we've seen him. And then he drops his disguise on the last episode

and they're like, oh, now we'll never know who he is. So they still left it open that he might be someone from the show. They're like, well, is one of us Dark Rider? And they're like, boom, we'll never get it answered, of course, because the show got canceled, but that's that's Turbo Teen. We did it. I feel so good. I I love that they

they started with this idea that was they clearly thought was a slam dunk. A teen of what if a kid turns into a car? Kids would love that shit. And then we get to watch them figure out over the course of these 13 episodes that they they really couldn't think of anything interesting for the teen card to do because they keep changing what he can and can't do. And they keep changing what his limitations are. And and then they gave the whole thing to animate and storyboard

and design to the weirdest pervert they had ever met. A hardworking pervert, but very, very weird. Yeah, like his work ethic is amazing. For some reason, all he draws is skinless horses fucking each other while they're dying. But I swear to God, it's not going to happen this time. It's the right thing. It's just I just feel it. I feel this is the collaboration we need to make Turbo Teen come alive.

Thank you for being on the podcast, Tom. And we remember it was Turbo Teen before today. You must have heard of him. Oh, yeah, I've heard it's it's been like, you know, a meme all over the Internet. But I've never actually sat down and watched it until today. And man, I'm so glad I was able to do that. Thank you for the opportunity. I'm definitely watching the rest of those episodes.

I already watched one episode. You were like, don't watch this, but I'd watch the other two. And I was like, how can I not watch that? I'm immediately going to go out and do Turbo Kid missionary work. This is how you make sure everyone I know watches it. Yeah, this is how you should do the mystery box format, which is that you don't know the answers. We don't know the answers and fuck you for even asking.

I'm going to clean all your flaws. 1,900, Frankfurt. 1,900, Frankfurt. Our podcast is coming out. And with Maximal and Chow. Say, Frankfurt podcast. Correct. Correct.

Yeah. The craft is not trapped, it's not without. Send it to the dogs. For an hour. Come on, you're kidding me. 1,900. 1,900, Frankfurt. 1,900, yeah.

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