It’s weird to think back to when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic debuted back in the mid-1980s, before the animated series. It felt like something weird and underground and strangely violent that I desperately wanted to be a part of, but wasn’t near cool enough to be. It was the kind of thing kids at school would be a snob about. The, “Um, if you want to read a real comic…” type of attitude. The way I remember it, I was home sick from school and my dad asked if I wanted any comics on his way home because he was stopping by the store. I asked for my first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic. What he brought home was something called, Leonardo: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle – #1 In a One Issue Micro Series.
It was at this moment that I became the rare person whose favorite Turtle is Leonardo. Oh, there are a few of us, be we are in the vast minority. For a few weeks, I could finally join in the playground discussions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but only where it concerned Leonardo, which wasn’t often. Then, in 1987, the animated series debuted, firmly cementing Raphael and Michelangelo as the cool Turtles. It was also cool to like Donatello like it was cool to like George Harrison. Liking Leonardo was like saying your favorite Beatle was George Martin. He’s certainly important, but that’s not a really cool answer.
Well, now, with Jeff Rowe’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, we Leonardo fans finally get our day. Not only does Leonardo finally have a personality other than “stoic leader of the team“ – when the movie starts, Leonardo barks a command in his typical monotone voice, then the other three immediately mock him, “Was that your Batman voice?,” and it’s dropped – he’s finally the main Turtle in a movie.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is something of an origin story, in at least we get their story told to us by Splinter (Jackie Chan) in flashbacks. But when we meet the Turtles, they are already involved in adventures that mostly consist of stealing groceries from the local bodega and catching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at a free movie in the park screening – a movie that inspires them all to just be normal teenagers one day, so they, too, will have the ability to hijack a city parade, as all high school students apparently have the right to do. But Splinter is adamant that humans are terrible and they should never be engaged with – which includes a running joke about how if humans ever caught the Turtles they would be “milked,” and the Turtles are quick to point out they do not have nipples.
It’s love at first sight for Leonardo when he meets April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), a high school student and dork who, once meeting the Turtles, desperately wants to write a story about the Turtles for her high school paper. She’s been investigating high-profile heists of dangerous equipment around town by someone known as Superfly (Ice Cube), who has a whole gang of mutants (which includes a Gecko voiced by Paul Rudd and an alligator voiced by Rose Byrne) with a diabolical plan to turn all the creatures of the world into mutants. The Turtles agree to help April expose Superfly and uncover his secret plot.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is my favorite theatrical Turtles movie. It has a surprising edge for an animated film that the other “live-action” movies don’t have. Also, the other ones – I mean both the ’90s films* and the Michael Bay-produced movies – I guess they have their moments but they are mostly forgettable and phony. There’s a sense of personality and life in the Turtles in Mutant Mayhem that the other movies just seem to try and force. This is the first theatrical Turtles film that comes anywhere close to that feeling in the mid-’80s of something that was weird and underground and a little edgy.
(*Okay, speaking of that first movie. I was going on my first date ever. The plan was to see Pretty Woman, which had been a week or so at the time. I always hear stories about how when people were 13, 14, 15… how they had no problem seeing rated R movies. Apparently, the suburb I lived in in the greater Kansas City metro area was the only place on this planet keeping kids out of R-rated movies because I could never get in. Anyway, “Two for Pretty Woman,” was met with a laugh and we had to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles instead and I was embarrassed the whole time so maybe that adds to my disinterest in that particular series. The next week we tried to see Pretty Woman again by buying tickets to Earnest Goes to Jail and sneaking into Pretty Woman. Yep, we got caught. Finally the week after, her dad just paid for the Pretty Woman tickets and we had to sit there and watch it with him, an experience that made me nostalgic for watching Earnest Goes to Jail. The end.)
‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’ opens on August 2nd. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.
