Below are links to all 192 Turtlethon entries in (mostly) chronological order - a complete listing of our journey through Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!
SEASON ONE (Syndication, December 1987)
1. S01E01 "Turtle Tracks"
2. S01E02 "Enter the Shredder"
3. S01E03 "A Thing About Rats"
4. S01E04 "Hot Rodding Teenagers from Dimension X"
5. S01E05 "Shredder & Splintered"
SEASON TWO (Syndication, October - December 1988)
6. S02E01 "Return of the Shredder"
7. S02E02 "The Incredible Shrinking Turtles"
8. S02E03 "It Came from Beneath the Sewers"
9. S02E04 "The Mean Machines"
10. S02E05 "Curse of the Evil Eye"
11. S02E06 "The Case of the Killer Pizzas"
12. S02E07 "Enter The Fly"
13. S02E08 "Invasion of the Punk Frogs"
14. S02E09 "Splinter No More"
15. S02E10 "New York's Shiniest"
16. S02E11 "Teenagers from Dimension X"
17. S02E12 "The Cat Woman from Channel Six"
18. S02E13 "Return of the Technodrome"
SEASON THREE, PART ONE (Syndication, October - December 1989)
19. S03E01 "Beneath These Streets"
20. S03E02 "Turtles on Trial"
21. S03E03 "Attack of the 50-Foot Irma"
22. S03E04 "The Maltese Hamster"
23. S03E05 "Sky Turtles"
24. S03E06 "The Old Switcheroo"
25. S03E07 "Burne's Blues"
26. S03E08 "The Fifth Turtle"
27. S03E09 "Enter the Rat King"
28. S03E10 "Turtles at the Earth's Core"
29. S03E11 "April Fool"
30. S03E12 "Attack of Big MACC"
31. S03E13 "The Ninja Sword of Nowhere"
32. S03E14 "20,000 Leaks Under the City"
33. S03E15 "Take Me to Your Leader"
34. S03E16 "Four Musketurtles"
35. S03E17 "Turtles, Turtles, Everywhere"
36. S03E18 "Cowabunga Shredhead"
37. S03E19 "Invasion of the Turtle Snatchers"
38. S03E20 "Camera Bugged"
39. S03E21 "Green with Jealousy"
40. S03E22 "Return of the Fly"
41. S03E23 "Casey Jones - Outlaw Hero"
42. S03E24 "Mutagen Monster"
43. S03E25 "Corporate Raiders from Dimension X"
44. S03E26 "Pizza by the Shred"
45. S03E27 "Super Bebop & Mighty Rocksteady"
46. S03E28 "Beware the Lotus"
47. S03E29 "Blast from the Past"
48. S03E30 "Leatherhead: Terror of the Swamp"
49. S03E31 "Michelangelo's Birthday"
50. S03E32 "Usagi Yojimbo"
SEASON THREE, PART TWO (Syndication, December 1989)
51. S03E33 “Case of the Hot Kimono”
52. S03E34 “Usagi Come Home”
53. S03E35 “The Making of Metalhead”
54. S03E36 “Leatherhead Meets the Rat King”
55. S03E37 “The Turtle Terminator”
56. S03E38 “The Great Boldini”
57. S03E39 “The Missing Map”
58. S03E40 “The Gang’s All Here”
59. S03E41 “The Grybyx”
60. S03E42 “Mister Ogg Goes to Town”
61. S03E43 “Shredderville”
62. S03E44 “Bye, Bye, Fly”
63. S03E45 “The Big Rip-Off”
64. S03E46 “The Big Break-In”
65. S03E47 “The Big Blow Out”
SEASON FOUR, PART ONE (Syndication, September 1990)
66. S04E01 "Plan Six From Outer Space"
67. S04E02 "Turtles of the Jungle"
68. S04E03 "Michelangelo Toys Around"
69. S04E04 "Peking Turtle"
70. S04E05 "Shredder's Mom"
71. S04E06 "Four Turtles and a Baby"
72. S04E07 "Turtlemaniac"
73. S04E08 "Rondo in New York"
74. S04E09 "Planet of the Turtles"
75. S04E10 "Name That Toon"
76. S04E11 "Menace Maestro, Please"
77. S04E12 "Superhero for a Day"
78. S04E13 "Back to the Egg"
SEASON FOUR, PART TWO (CBS, September - December 1990)
79. S04E14 "Son of Return of the Fly II"
80. S04E15 "Raphael Knocks 'em Dead"
81. S04E16 "Bebop and Rocksteady Conquer the Universe"
82. S04E17 "Raphael Meets His Match"
83. S04E18 "Slash - The Evil Turtle from Dimension X"
84. S04E19 "Leonardo Lightens Up"
85. S04E20 "Were-Rats from Channel 6"
86. S04E21 "Funny, They Shrunk Michelangelo"
87. S04E22 "The Big Zipp Attack"
88. S04E23 "Donatello Makes Time"
89. S04E24 "Farewell, Lotus Blossom"
90. S04E25 "Rebel Without a Fin"
91. S04E26 "Rhino-Man"
92. S04E27 "Michelangelo Meets Bugman"
93. S04E28 "Poor Little Rich Turtle"
94. S04E29 "What's Michelangelo Good For?"
95. S04E30 "The Dimension X Story"
96. S04E31 "Donatello's Degree"
97. S04E32 "The Big Cufflink Caper!"
98. S04E33 "Leonardo Versus Tempestra"
99. S04E34 "Splinter Vanishes"
100. S04E35 "Raphael Drives 'Em Wild"
101. S04E36 "Beyond the Donatello Nebula"
102. S04E37 "Big Bug Blunder"
103. S04E38 "The Foot Soldiers are Revolting"
104. S04E39 "Unidentified Flying Leonardo"
SEASON FIVE, PART ONE (Syndication, March 1991)
105. S05E01 "The Turtles and the Hare"
106. S05E02 "Once Upon a Time Machine"
SEASON FIVE, PART TWO (CBS Saturday mornings, September - November 1991)
107. S05E03 "My Brother, the Bad Guy"
108. S05E04 "Michelangelo Meets Mondo Gecko"
109. S05E05 "Enter: Mutagen Man"
110. S05E06 "Donatello's Badd Time"
111. S05E07 "Michelangelo Meets Bugman Again"
112. S05E08 "Muckman Messes Up"
113. S05E09 "Napoleon Bonafrog: Colossus of the Swamps"
114. S05E10 "Raphael Versus the Volcano"
115. S05E11 "Landlord of the Flies"
116. S05E12 "Donatello's Duplicate"
117. S05E13 "The Ice Creature Cometh"
118. S05E14 "Leonardo Cuts Loose"
119. S05E15 "Pirate Radio"
120. S05E16 "Raphael, Turtle of a Thousand Faces"
121. S05E17 "Leonardo, the Renaissance Turtle"
122. S05E18 "Zach and the Alien Invaders"
123. S05E19 "Welcome Back, Polarisoids"
124. S05E20 "Michelangelo, the Sacred Turtle"
SEASON FIVE PRIME-TIME SPECIAL (CBS, August 31, 1991)
125-A. S05E21-A "Planet of the Turtleoids, Part 1"
125-B. S05E21-B "Planet of the Turtleoids, Part 2"
SEASON SIX (CBS Saturday mornings, September - December 1992)
126. S06E01 "Rock Around the Block"
127. S06E02 "Krangenstein Lives"
128. S06E03 "Super Irma"
129. S06E04 "Adventures in Turtle-Sitting"
130. S06E05 "Sword of Yurikawa"
131. S06E06 "Return of the Turtleoid"
132. S06E07 "Shreeka's Revenge"
133. S06E08 "Too Hot to Handle"
134. S06E09 "Nightmare in the Lair"
135. S06E10 "Phantom of the Sewers"
136. S06E11 "Donatello Trashes Slash"
137. S06E12 "Leonardo is Missing"
138. S06E13 "Snakes Alive!"
139. S06E14 "Polly Wanna Pizza"
140. S06E15 "Mr. Nice Guy"
141. S06E16 "Sleuth on the Loose"
"VACATION IN EUROPE" SIDE-SEASON (CBS Saturday mornings, September-October 1993 - first aired in Europe in 1992)
142. S07E01 "Tower of Power"
143. S07E02 "Rust Never Sleeps"
144. S07E03 "A Real Snow Job"
145. S07E04 "Venice on the Half-Shell"
146. S07E05 "Artless"
147. S07E06 "Ring of Fire"
148. S07E07 "The Irish Jig Is Up"
149. S07E08 "Shredder's New Sword"
150. S07E09 "The Lost Queen of Atlantis"
151. S07E10 "Turtles on the Orient Express"
152. S07E11 "April Gets in Dutch"
153. S07E12 "Northern Lights Out"
154. S07E13 "Elementary, My Dear Turtle"
SEASON SEVEN (CBS Saturday mornings, October-December 1993)
155. S07E14 "Night of the Dark Turtle"
156. S07E15 "The Starchild"
157. S07E16 "The Legend of Koji"
158. S07E17 "Convicts from Dimension X"
159. S07E18 "White Belt, Black Heart"
160. S07E19 "Night of the Rogues" (Part 1) (Part 2)
161. S07E20 "Attack of the Neutrinos"
162. S07E21 "Escape from the Planet of the Turtleoids"
163. S07E22 "Revenge of the Fly"
164. S07E23 "Atlantis Awakes"
165. S07E24 "Dirk Savage: Mutant Hunter"
166. S07E25 "Invasion of the Krangazoids"
167. S07E26 "Combat Land"
168. S07E27 "Shredder Triumphant!"
SEASON EIGHT (CBS Saturday mornings, September-November 1994)
169. S08E01 "Get Shredder!"
170. S08E02 "Wrath of the Rat King"
171. S08E03 "Cyber-Turtles"
172. S08E04 "State of Shock"
173. S08E05 "Cry H.A.V.O.C.!"
174. S08E06 "H.A.V.O.C. in the Streets!"
175. S08E07 "Enter: Krakus"
176. S08E08 "Turtle Trek”
SEASON NINE (CBS Saturday mornings, September-November 1995)
177. S09E01 "The Unknown Ninja"
178. S09E02 "Dregg of the Earth"
179. S09E03 "The Wrath of Medusa"
180. S09E04 "The New Mutation"
181. S09E05 "The Showdown"
182. S09E06 "Split-Second"
183. S09E07 "Carter, the Enforcer"
184. S09E08 "Doomquest"
SEASON TEN (CBS Saturday mornings, September-November 1996)
185. S10E01 “The Return of Dregg”
186. S10E02 “The Beginning of the End”
187. S10E03 “The Power of Three”
188. S10E04 “A Turtle in Time”
189. S10E05 “Turtles to the Second Power”
190. S10E06 “Mobster from Dimension X”
191. S10E07 “The Day the Earth Disappeared”
192. S10E08 “Divide and Conquer”
There was also a mention of a "Gold Trumpet tower" building you mentioned in "Dontatello Trashes Slash", implying there may be a "Trumpet" businessman, to join McDonald Crump, Donald J. Lofty, Fenton Q. Hackenbrush and AJ Howard.
PS: Let me know if you have my other asks and are working on answering them or aren't interested?
Apologies for the delay, I've been overwhelmed with other projects and will have to be selective about what I can answer at the moment - and some questions I just honestly don't have a good answer for, but let me have a stab at this one!
We discussed in the past how the show would be improved by consolidating all the under-developed gangster and mad scientist characters into just one of each archetype, and I think you could do the same for a lot of these guys. It's the kind of thing that, if more time had been spent developing the world around the Turtles early on, there really would have been a case for, but as I've written about previously there was clearly a feeling that the show has to keep focus on the Turtles themselves at all times, and on the action unfolding in the present moment. Outside of the Channel 6 crew (and even that's being generous), TMNT '87 really isn't interested in doing anything in the long term with anyone outside of the dozen or so main recurring characters. At least not until the Red Sky years, when there seems to have been a recognition that the show's audience was getting older and the storytelling needed to age up with them.
With that said, I think if the show's approach had been more like S8 from the outset, you could have one character who fills this Trump expy role throughout, who's responsible for a lot of the big, often regrettable business developments the Turtles encounter over the course of the series. I'm conflicted as to whether the portrayal of such a character leans towards wealthy doofus (like Crump or Lofty) or the actively hostile business mogul (Howard) - maybe they begin like the former and are gradually revealed to be more like the latter, as the Turtles invariably happen to be on the scene trying to save the day whenever their assorted business blunders are unfolding.
I very vividly remember reading about a David Wise episode where it was mentioned by the Turtles in the beginning that they had proof that Hamato Yoshi was framed by Oroku Saki for his actions against the Foot Clan and Shredder wanting to steal it.
Do you remember that episode, I'm trying to find it?
With AJ Howard, I wonder if there's more to his mutant self hidden under a latex disguise or if he has a slug head with a normal body? The statue of his mutant form indicated his slug self was at least relatively human in shape, so I'm gonna assume he still has legs and fingers under the disguise, even if they're slimy.
As for J. Gordon Hungerdunger, I feel you could turn him into a playmates figure if you mutate him; undoubtably into a western setting animal like a Buffalo. Though then again that might be creeping into Cowboys of Moo Mesa's territory.
PS: The writers of the Dirk Savage episode sure knew the future when they did a plot of a powerful land mogul with his own tower persecuting minorities for his own power play!
I suppose Hungerdunger wouldn't even need to be a mutant animal to make it into the toy line, sometimes there are figures in there who appear conventionally human but every aspect of their look is turned up to 11 (like Tattoo or Pizzaface). Just make him the rootin'-est, tootin'-est guy ever, give him a comically oversized removable 50-gallon hat that's almost as big as he is, make his moustache as wide as his entire body, take that dollar sign bolo tie thing he had going on and make it a big chromed piece, go all-out.
(It's a shame that the flow of traffic in TMNT at the time seemed to go mostly one-way, we got a lot more characters introduced into the show who were created for the toy line than the other way around. Occasionally we'd get a highly requested figure like Mona Lisa and I still think it's incredible that in time they got around to sort-of doing both Super Rocksteady and Mighty Bebop, but the cartoon is full of characters and vehicles that would have made great toys, that just didn't happen - I'm tempted to compile a list, actually!)
Howard kind of got the worst of it from both sides: the requirement for his mutation to be a twist revealed halfway through his only episode meant his backstory was inevitably going to be underdeveloped, and he didn't receive a satisfactory exit. It can't have helped that he had to share screen time with Dirk Savage, plus all of the guest mutants. Maybe the Dirk Savage ep was another one from season seven that would have been better served by being a multi-part show. And yeah, something about him feels... almost like a quasi-mutation rather than a full one, closer to cat lady April rather than someone like Baxter whose transformation would be impossible to conceal. (That's actually something in itself that could be explored if things weren't so constricted: he calls himself the greatest mutant of all time, and maybe the rationale for his hate campaign was rooted in him convincing himself he's not like the other mutants. Behind the mask, he can continue to mingle in high society and act as if nothing had changed, a privilege not afforded to the people he's attacking.)
The comparison to Trump is well-observed, and something I didn't pick up on while writing about the episode. Howard is probably about as close as you could get to just putting Ross Perot in the show as a slug-man without risking legal action; giving him Richard Nixon's voice comes across as an obfuscation to be able to say he's not intended to represent any one person. But yeah, the tower named after himself and its gold interior suggests there was always a little of Trump in his NY property mogul era mixed in there too. Something that I didn't know until I was doing research to write the Dirk Savage Turtlethon entry was that Perot initially polled strongly in the 1992 presidential campaign before falling off. Trump basically borrowed his whole "I'm a successful man of industry, put me in the White House and I'll run it like a business" schtick from him, but had the advantage of not running as a third party candidate.
So I guess AJ Howard deserves at least an honourable mention as yet another Trump stand-in alongside McDonald Crump, Donald J. Lofty, Fenton Q. Hackenbrush, and in the UK Hero Turtles comics, Ronald Bump. There's probably more of these across the wider spectrum of TMNT media that I haven't discovered yet - it seems that wealthy buffoon / unscrupulous real estate kingpin / blustering con-man worked well as a foil for the Turtles at the time.
Hi there!! I’m such a big fan of your reviews, you did a great job with them!! 😄
My biggest questions would be;
Who’s your favorite turtle? And if you had to choose just five episodes from the series, which ones would be your all time favorites? 😁
Thank you!! Have a great day!!
Thank you so much for the kind words! For the record, I'm Team Donnie, always a big fan of the inventor/scientist archetype. (Also my favourite colour is purple, so he gets an extra point right there.)
I feel like when it comes to picking the top five episodes the natural inclination is just to pick the first five, and with good reason; nothing that came after S1 had as much time, care or money afforded to it. So just to make things interesting, I'm going to set everything from season one aside and pick five more episodes that I think also deserve to be celebrated.
5. THE DIMENSION X STORY
The Turtles having to fight their way into the Technodrome (and back out again) somehow never fully lost its allure. This one and "Shredder's Mom" both rank highly in my estimation, and while this is the less visually impressive of the two I think it wins out for how willing it is to mix things up, sending the Channel 6 regulars to Dimension X while two of the Turtles remain behind. Wild, far flung adventures that tap into the more sci-fi aspects of TMNT, and the cherry on top is that this is easily Vernon's best episode - it turns out he's more interesting as April's rival when he's doing well and she has to work to regain the upper hand.
4. THE NINJA SWORD OF NOWHERE
This one gets few points for innovation - Shredder and his crew jostling with the Turtles for control of some ancient magical artifact or high-tech invention is standard stuff for season three, and in this case, it's a dimension-hopping ninja sword. But rarely, if ever, has it been done this well. Splinter and Shredder battling in dimensional limbo is great, and the animation team handling this one really went above and beyond. Ninja Sword of Nowhere almost feels like it should have been held up as a textbook example of what a Turtles episode circa 1989/90 should be, a reference point that could be shown to writers or animators for what the show should be trying to acheive.
3. SPLINTER VANISHES
The intended 100th episode, even if it didn't turn out that way, and one that I remember feeling like a big deal while watching it as a kid that still held up upon revisiting it as an adult. I always know it's a really good ep when writing the entry for it takes hours as I agonise over it, trying to make sure I articulate everything I want to get across to the best of my ability, and I remember dwelling on this one for a looong time, thinking about how the story compels the Turtles - and us - to consider what happens when the adventures end, when it's time to grow up and move on. Probably the most emotionally resonant episode of TMNT '87, and even though Splinter does not come across well by the end of it, the journeys we go on with each of the Turtles as they explore their post-hero lives easily outweigh that. The fact that "Splinter Vanishes" accomplishes all of this and is a non-Shredder episode - when let's face it, they're more often than not filler shows - makes it all the more remarkable.
2. SHREDDER TRIUMPHANT!
I have mixed feelings about the show continuing into the Red Sky era because this episode, the season seven finale, felt like it had brought TMNT '87 to its natural end point. I love how it plays upon the sense that the Turtles (and the viewers) have that they've seen and done this all a million times before, and it quickly becomes apparent that this time things are different, that finally Shredder and Krang are competent and have learned from all their previous losses, setting the stage for one final showdown. All the main characters - the Turtles, Splinter, the Technodrome regulars and the Channel 6 crew - get their chance to shine and show how they've grown over the course of the show's run. A milestone episode for sure.
1. TURTLES ON TRIAL
I think for me this is still The One, the single episode outside of the first season that I'd consider peak TMNT. It's also the first episode I remember seeing on TV, which I think set me up to have entirely unrealistic expectations about how good Turtles would be; fortunately the rest of the run was still a good time even if we never quite got here again.
I like to see my heroes really have to go through the wringer, to have everything thrown at them and somehow just about make it out victorious, and so the environment we see the Turtles forced to contend with here, a city full of people who have been conditioned to be actively hostile towards them, while they're also dealing with the usual Shredder/Krang stuff, makes for compelling television. Yes, Clayton Kellerman and "On Trial" are a perfect encapsuation of the media landscape at the time - which still feels relevant today - but on top of that this is a gorgeous episode with some terrific battles between the Turtles and Shredder's bunch. It's simply the bee's knees. (Or should that be the turtle's knees?)
Did you ever hear about the shows Japanese dub, I read there were two but the long and really popular one was the TV Tokyo dub which used a lot of big voice actors and added a lot of localized humor.
That’s also the one that got a two part OVA parodying anime like Saint Seiya (the super mutations are supposed to look silly). Makes me wonder if a new TMNT developed in Japan could work?
I'm vaguely aware of the existence of the Japanese dubs, more so the TV Tokyo one. The most interesting thing about that to me is that they abruptly stopped at "Donatello's Badd Time", which in retrospect is a shame because I think the show's depictions of Japanese characters and settings actually got better later on - especially in "The Legend of Koji". You can tell at that point that David Wise was making a real effort to fix up a lot of the Foot Clan lore that was almost an afterthought in the early days of the cartoon. (Also, in a wider sense, for fans in that market to have missed out on the show's season seven upswing is unfortunate, they really got a raw deal.)
The OVAs are something I really should have covered at some point, they seem like ideal material for Turtlethon Extra Slices, and maybe I will eventually. I often hear fans talk about them as a missed opportunity and lament that they'd like to see a real TMNT anime in some shape or form, one that's more focused on the source material. That might be more viable now than it's ever been, given that Paramount/Viacom could use some easy wins at the moment and seem to be open to licensing the IP to just about anyone, the simple thing to do is let some external party handle the production while they enjoy the royalty fees; if it turns out to be a disaster they can always distance themselves from it on the basis that it wasn't an in-house production.
The other one is much later in the show's run, in "Dirk Savage: Mutant Hunter", when we learn that Shredder continued to experiment on innocent people, over a period of years, to the point where there were so many mutants running around town that a politician could run on an anti-mutant campaign platform.
Do you remember exact dialogue on that? I watched that episode recently and the only thing I remember was that Tokka & Rahzar were stated to be the result of the Shredder experimenting on Zoo Animals, which I assume to be a reference to the Groundchuck and Dirtbag episodes.
As for the other mutants like the Giraffe lady and mutant bird, I assumed they weren't Shredder experiments but just people or animals that got hit by carelessly placed mutagen during the show's shenanigans rather than deliberate experiments.
Also I feel Baxter Stockman's harsh treatment from Shredder and Krang may have been because he was something of an outsider; being coerced into working for them and once trying to betray the Shredder. Rocksteady and Bebop's gangs were thugs that had been working for them to begin with, so I feel they'd get better treatment.
Upon reflection (and going back and watching the opening of the Dirk Savage ep again) I think you're right: the intent seems to be that the events in the zoo during the Turtleoids special have led to the creation of subsequent mutants over a period of a few years. I'm many months removed from watching the show at this point, so I was basing that on what I wrote at the time and my already potentially fuzzy recollections.
Regarding Shredder and the gang (and by extension, Krang/Baxter) I think where you stand on Shredder's willingness to undo their mutations probably depends on how evil you interpret him to be...
This Shredder is presented as a credible ninja master and criminal mastermind, and is the one who mutated the gang members...
This Shredder is considerably less capable, to put it mildly, and if we're being honest more in-line with how he's presented for the bulk of the series. Outside of his feud with Splinter and the Turtles, his desire for world domination seems to be entirely rooted in his own vanity and self-aggrandizement.
His villainy/competence isn't a binary thing IMO, I think it can be charted on a spectrum depending on the era of the show and who's writing, but as a trend it keeps nudging into ineffectual goofball gradually up to the beginning of season eight, when it dramatically swings back in the opposite direction.
On that basis, I think the likelihood of Shredder undoing the mutations of the gang and letting them go depends on which point in the show it actually happens. If we're assuming it's in the window between S1 and S2 then maybe not, but after the S2 opener the way he's presented changes considerably and he seems to be borderline subservient to Krang rather than the two of them being in a fifty-fifty partnership. At that point I could see him just releasing the gang on the basis that he has enough to deal with, and doesn't need them hanging around.
In regards to Krang (and his attempted vaporizing of Baxter), I've long been of the opinion that as an alien warlord he likely places little value on human life, but I kind of like the idea that the presence of Shredder, Rocksteady & Bebop in the Technodrome softens him a bit and prevents him from being a total monster, in part because their incompetence invariably scuppers all of his plans and stops him doing any significant harm in the end. It's notable that he ordered Baxter's execution while Shredder, Rocksteady and Bebop were all on Earth, and there was no-one around to reason with him; I don't know if I'd go so far as to say they serve as his conscience, but, y'know... something like that!
Whilst I actually like the Red Sky seasons (though feel they aren't perfect), do you think its interesting that Titanus and Carter don't appear to be animal mutants? I wonder if that's due to a change in the show's tone or unintentional?
PS: Let me know if sending too many asks is overwhelming and I'll slow down.
My initial impulse is to assume that would have stemmed from trying to reshape the show to more closely resemble X-Men, but honestly I think by that point they had long since lost any grasp on what the in-universe rules were supposed to be around mutation, and any fantastical comic book hero and villain types that seemed like they might work were considered fair game. (There were probably always weird nerdy kids like me watching who were continually frustrated every time the show contradicted its own rules, but I imagine our numbers had dwindled considerably by 1994.)
Regarding asks: I might not get around to answering them all immediately, but I'll do my best! I'll have to try and be a little more succinct and curb my tendency to write essays or I'll never get through these, LOL.
Personally on the fate of Rocksteady and Bebop, assuming they weren't with Shredder and Krang (given Mung only retrieved those two, its possible the two mutants were still with them in Dimension X), I like to imagine they stayed mutants.
Outside of Landlord of the Flies, Rocksteady and Bebop seem to consistently like being mutants unlike alot of human born mutants, which I feel is unique. Also with the exception of Bebop's (or perhaps Rocksteadys?) mention of their mutation scaring their mother, it seems the gang's social circle were all people that wouldn't mind them being mutants.
The idea of Rocksteady and Bebop finding something to do in dimension x is also interesting.
fanfiction.net/s/6481997/1/The-Long-Road
I don't know if you like fanfiction, but there's a well written one called the Long Road that manages to capture the spirit of the show I'd argue.
We see that with Splinter and the Turtles too, where as the show progresses they wind up appreciating the benefits of their mutations and broadly seem to abandon any pining they might have had for their situation to be different. I touched on this in the entry for "Splinter Vanishes" but the idea of what happens when the show is over and everyone has to move on is something I find fascinating - I think that's why the glimpses we get into future timelines are so intriguing, and also why the events of "Get Shredder!" are initially so exciting - after years of everyone running on the spot, so to speak, there's a sense that things are changing at last.
Agreed on Rocksteady and Bebop: they generally seem to be portrayed as being in their element as mutants. I think by the end of their time on the show they've made their peace with their current forms and in all likelihood wouldn't go back; also by the time you get to the Red Sky era the world as it is in TMNT has changed so much, and I imagine as time progresses people are going to have to come to terms with the fact that mutants (and aliens, and other fantastic creatures) just live among them, that's their reality now. On that basis, if Rocksteady and Bebop break off from Shredder there's little incentive for them to want to turn back to how they once were.
I was thinking instead of all the minor mobster characters, a better TMNT 1987 could make them all these mafioso, Don Turteli, promoted to regular. Don Turteli would eventually get turned into a turtle mutant, thus coinciding with Playmates releasing an action figure of Turteli.
Do you think that'd work better? I'm trying to think of something for the generic mad scientists too?
I think that if you had a smaller pool of writers during seasons three through five working on fewer episodes, with a stronger focus on coherent storytelling, then yeah, you could absolutely consolidate all of TMNT's mobsters into one, and Turtelli feels like the obvious candidate. You could mutate him into a villainous gangster Turtle, either from the outset or later on. Certainly that kind of character would be more marketable, more appealing to kids, more likely to work as a potential toy in the Playmates line, all that fun stuff. But the key thing is that he would need to be presented as a true threat to the Turtles, ideally in a way that would differentiate him from Shredder and which would be compelling.
There are a few characters throughout the show's run who are able to apply pressure and challenge the Turtles in ways different to Shredder, but they tend to be guys with some kind of money or institutional power (think AJ Howard or J. Gordon Hungerdunger, who each have money/clout but who aren't much to look at, and who I doubt would shift many units as action figures). IMO, the best example of what could be done in terms of introducing a second big bad is actually from the much maligned Red Sky era, and it's Titanus. Here we have a guy who ticks all the boxes: an actual crime boss, in this case from a far-off future, who commands a group of generally interesting mutants, has a compelling look that works when placed next to other characters in TMNT, who can go toe-to-toe with the Turtles but also has clout via his H.A.V.O.C. group. If we're talking about just having one strong recurring mutant villain in the show from S3 onwards, someone who isn't Shredder but could be almost as compelling, I think Titanus is the blueprint, it'd just be a case of implementing something like that several years earlier.
Did you ever give any thoughts on Rocksteady and Bebop’s old gang, whom were even seen in mutant form at one point, kinda strange they never reappeared or became action figures: Wingnut could’ve been Scrag for example.
I headcanon they didn’t work out as mutants, so Shredder used the retro mutagen gun to return them to human form and let them go. As you said, it’d fit with his treatment of Rocksteady and Bebop.
It sure seems like the two most likely outcomes for what became of the rest of the gang, in-universe, are:
Shredder undid their mutations and let them go back to their old lives.
Shredder didn't undo their mutations and uncermoniously dumped them back on the streets of New York as-is.
I kinda want to believe Saki isn't completely heartless, but there's a few indicators in the show that have me thinking the second outcome is more likely...
One of them is that in "Shredder & Splintered", even though we see Shredder demonstrate the de-mutation of Scrag at the start of the episode, by the time we get to the final showdown with the Turtles he's back to being a mutant again. Between these scenes is an interesting exchange after Rocksteady and Bebop are defeated, where Krang points out to Shredder that his forces (the mutants) are depleted, suggesting that neither of them considered the rest of the gang a viable threat to the Turtles by that point. My reading of this is that Shredder was intending to continue detaining and possibly experimenting on them purely out of spite.
The other one is much later in the show's run, in "Dirk Savage: Mutant Hunter", when we learn that Shredder continued to experiment on innocent people, over a period of years, to the point where there were so many mutants running around town that a politician could run on an anti-mutant campaign platform. I could see Shredder eventually reverting Bebop & Rocksteady to their old selves by the time they're all written out of the show simply because they're practically family by that point, the two overgrown children he'd never planned on having, but I'm not sure he'd extend that courtesy to anyone else.
(There is a third outcome, one that I've never seen discussed and which seems to line-up, story wise: that the captive mutants were vaporized by Krang after the Technodrome was sent back to Dimension X, because once he'd been reunited with his rock soldier army he had no use for them. That's what he tried to do to Baxter, for much the same reason. But it's such a gruesome outcome that it almost doesn't bear thinking about!)
The old gang is certainly one of those interesting creative dead ends present in early TMNT, and I wonder if they would have been fleshed out further had the show went down that alternate direction MWS proposed with the Turtles living in the Technodrome with a reformed Baxter, ideas firmly rejected by Eastman & Laird. Maybe in that timeline the gang are freed by the Turtles and also become good guys, maybe they stay affiliated with the Foot Clan, maybe they become a stand-alone group of villains in their own right. So many possibilities!
I'm still around, the workload from my other projects has been keeping me busy though! There are some one-off Turtlethon entries I want to write at some point in the future when I get the chance. In the meantime, I'm happy to talk about the Turtles and answer any questions!
ABOVE: The Turtles make a promotional appearance in the UK, circa 1990. These puffy versions of the green teens showed up on TV and in the press often during Turtlemania, and resemble the characters as they were depicted on licensed Hero Turtles items during that era.
I’m old enough at this point to feel comfortable in saying that life is full of periods of awkward re-adjustment, where the world moves around you and it can take a while to find your bearings. You go to school for years and it feels like it’ll never end, then one day you’re just... done. A day job that perhaps you feel like you’ll be doing until you reach old age and keel over abruptly ends for whatever reason, and suddenly your routine is gone, leaving you wondering what to do with yourself.
Years ago, on a whim, I made the decision to re-watch the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon from the beginning and live-tweet about it over on the birdsite. Things were stop-start in the beginning, but at some point during the pandemic the project began gathering momentum. The threads got longer, my need to point out every weird little thing that happens in any given Turtles episode outgrowing the format of a Twitter thread. And so, almost exactly two years ago, Turtlethon made the jump to Tumblr, and in short order the format for each entry began to take shape: a beat-for-beat walk through a single episode of TMNT, complete with screengrabs and the occasional video clip, and an analysis of why that particular adventure does (or doesn’t) land, typically 2,000 words in length, longer still if it’s really good – or exceptionally bad.
In time, we settled into a routine: two new entries would appear every week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sticking with that turned out to be an undertaking that I vastly underestimated the scope of early on, and there were times where the obligation to write about, screencap, edit and post about Turtles became exhausting, but I didn’t want this to be a project I abandoned halfway through. It was of the utmost importance to me to persevere, to get to the end no matter what.
Now that day has been and gone. We watched Splinter hurriedly declare the Turtles to be his equals, the credits rolled, and honestly it was all underwhelming. Upon further reflection, there’s no doubt there was more story to be told – there's no way Mung angrily telling Dregg he’d gone mad was the intended payoff to him getting pushed around all season – and presumably that’s something we would’ve seen followed up on had the show returned in 1997. But that’s not the world we live in, and so instead, we have to assess Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as it is: the 192 (or 193) adventures that were broadcast, which we can now observe as one overarching body of work. And I guess now all that’s left to ask is... what even was TMNT ‘87? Beyond the obvious and most cynical analysis – that it was initially an effort to promote a line of action figures, before becoming the heart of the Turtles business empire in its own right – what, if anything, was the series about? What was it trying to communicate to those of us who grew up watching it?
Peel away that initial "toy cartoon" layer of interpretation, and the next observation is perhaps only slightly less world-weary: it’s about communicating the idea that the Turtles are cool, to create adventures that will be compelling to kids, ensure they keep coming back and hopefully convince them to explore the other facets of the franchise too. Early on, the show was successful in these respects commercially, but from a creative standpoint it took a while to find its feet. Through the first three years the Turtles were first and foremost a unit, rarely getting to venture beyond their respective descriptions in the theme song. Leonardo leads, Donatello does machines, Raphael is... not exactly rude but certainly quippy, and Michaelangelo is indeed a party dude, whose pizza fixation sometimes appears to reach “this guy genuinely has a problem” territory. (It’s remarkable how integral pizza is to the first seven seasons of the show, only for it to be abandoned completely in the Red Sky era: I’m sure there must have been a strict “NO PIZZA” edict handed down from S8 onward that explains why the series ended on an ill-fitting popcorn gag instead.) One of the common themes explored in the Turtlethon entries for the golden era episodes is that Shredder, Krang, Rocksteady & Bebop make the show work comedically in the early goings, in part because they’re allowed to be flawed and vulnerable: meanwhile the Turtles are constrained by that need to be super cool dudes, the world’s most fearsome fighting team.
With the success of the show assured around season four, we finally begin to see a willingness to explore who the Turtles are beyond those base traits conveyed in the theme song. I’d argue that in this incarnation of the series, Leonardo is the member of the group whose personality adheres closest to what the team were when originally conceived for the Mirage comic: he’s a ninja first and foremost, even memorably declaring his intent to finish off Shredder in the first season. Season three’s “Take Me to Your Leader” explores how the burden of leadership weighs upon him but it’s the following year where he’s fully rounded out, the pros and cons of his overbearing strictness explored in “Leonardo Lightens Up”, while his competitive nature turns compulsive in “Leonardo Versus Tempestra”. More than anything, his role is to serve as an anchor, ensuring TMNT stays somewhere in the neighbourhood of being an action-adventure cartoon and doesn’t float off into complete tomfoolery.
Raphael is the inverse of Leonardo, encompassing everything that makes the Fred Wolf TMNT what it is – for better or worse. He’s the goofball, the one typically given the task of breaking the fourth wall, and if anything is actively pushing against what Leo is here to achieve. With his incessant zingers, Raph is the embodiment of everything that purists who resent the show for not being a faithful recreation of the Mirage comic dislike about it, a situation exacerbated by the fact that the 1987 cartoon version of the character is such an outlier, eschewing the angry, brooding depiction of him seen almost everywhere else. This idea that there’s something inauthentic about Fred Wolf Raph is so pervasive that modern media and merchandise based around the MWS show often skews towards making him “the angry one” instead of the wise guy. It’s an unfortunate bit of revisionist history that loses sight of the fact that 1987 Raph is wildly popular, perhaps now more than ever. The fans who like him really like his witty retorts, outings such as his memorable romance with Mona Lisa, and the entertaining performances from Rob Paulsen that brought him to life. His value is in keeping things light, and in doing so he differentiates TMNT from the earnest action cartoons that preceded it.
Okay, but if Raph is the fun one, where does that leave Michaelangelo? I’d argue that his depiction as the team’s “party dude” is merely window-dressing, a means to convey what makes him marketable but which doesn’t really get at what makes him tick, in part because as alluded to above, in the early days of the show none of this stuff had been thought out. Anyone watching seasons one, two and much of season three would be forgiven for seeing him as one-dimensional, the cowabunga guy. Pizza, pizza, pizza. Dude, dude, dude. These aspects of him can be... grating, to be certain, when watching the series as an adult. Eventually we start to occasionally see beyond this. There’s a sense that Mikey is the youngest member of the team, even if there’s nothing in the show itself directly confirming this: by extension he’s the most innocent, sensitive, and personable member of the group, the one who’d be most likely to befriend you and invite you into the Lair if you were to encounter him, rather than viewing you as a threat. Michaelangelo is both the most “human” Turtle and the one who displays the greatest longing to live as a human, something seen in episodes such as season three’s “The Gang’s All Here” and the following year’s “Poor Little Rich Turtle”. When it comes down to it, Mikey’s character is easy-going but more importantly, he’s kind. There’s an irony in him being the one whose weapons had to be excised from the show entirely, though if anything I think that only gave him a little renegade appeal over and above even the other Turtles.
Donatello has always been my favourite Turtle, and not just for aesthetic reasons as “the purple one”: coming in from Ghostbusters as many of us did back in the day, I think it’s natural that if you were on Team Egon, you were likely to be Team Donnie, too. He's the most creative Turtle and arguably the most introspective, two qualities that also make me gravitate towards him. Putting my biases aside, he’s by far the most necessary member of the team for the series to work: his intelligence and ingenuity seem to almost always play into the climax of any episode as the Turtles scramble to stop whatever enormous threat is facing the city, and without him it’s inarguable that Leo, Mikey and Raph would have been majorly screwed countless times over the course of the show’s run. Around the mid-point of the series his accomplishments seem to go to his head, and his abilities make him vastly overpowered relative to the other Turtles. Despite this, Donnie remains the big purple cog that keeps TMNT ticking.
The show upholds its four main characters above everything, even in situations where this becomes detrimental, and this goes hand in hand with a focus on immediacy: what anyone else is doing isn’t a concern unless it will impact the Turtles somehow, and nothing that’s happened to anyone in the past matters unless if affects the team in the present moment. There’s an unspoken anxiety at work in TMNT that runs throughout the series, apparent even at its height: a fear that if the Turtles aren’t front and centre, chasing the macguffin of the day, then young viewers will grow bored and switch off.
These considerations are apparent in the series from the outset, affecting even the origin of the Turtles themselves, who in this continuity go from pet turtles to their established forms in the space of seconds: they’re not allowed to grow into their teenage selves over the course of years for the same reason that only the most barebones information is conveyed to us about the Hamato Yoshi / Oroku Saki feud that led to their creation. This show isn’t about getting caught up in the details, it’s about the Turtles existing in the present moment.
Yoshi and Saki’s ongoing rivalry is one of the most fascinating aspects of the entire series, and yet one barely explored because the show only cares about the elements of it directly relevant to the Turtles. At some unspecified point in the past Saki framed Yoshi and took control of the Foot Clan because... he was just naturally power-hungry and evil, I guess (later we learned that his mother was also villainous, so there might be something to that). There’s a huge chunk of the timeline which takes place after this of which we know little, covering Yoshi presumably stowing away on a boat and beginning a new life as a penniless refugee living in the sewers of New York. By all rights the story should end here, with Saki having vanquished his enemy and now ruling over his own turf as the head of a criminal organisation in Japan, but his inability to let go keeps things rolling: at some point he follows Yoshi to America, sets up an elaborate network to spy on him, and in a botched attempt to kill his enemy inadvertently mutates the four heroes who will ultimately be his undoing: Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Donatello and Raphael.
Oh, and along the way Saki happened to run into a disembodied alien warlord brain from Dimension X who had himself been on Earth for an unspecified amount of time, the two bad guys forming an alliance to achieve world domination. None of these events unfold on-screen as the Turtles weren’t involved: instead, Shredder and Krang arrive fully formed, how they met and the circumstances that led to them working together are deemed unimportant. Similarly, Splinter is a wise old man whose exact age is unclear, capable of applying mystical ninja abilities that vary depending on what the plot of the day requires.
Given how scant the details of Splinter and Shredder’s feud were, it should perhaps come as no surprise that in the end, it was never resolved in any satisfactory fashion. By the end of the series Shredder and Krang were banished to another dimension by the Turtles for the umpteenth time, but the power struggle between Splinter and Shreds over the leadership of the Foot Clan that kicked all of this off doesn’t receive any closure; to make matters worse the final three appearances of Shredder and Krang tease the idea of them becoming... well maybe not good guys, but at the very least neutral figures having been overshadowed in the evil stakes by Dregg. I think by season ten, the viewers would have been ready for that: to have Shredder and Krang perform a heroic act to stop Dregg that definitively concludes their run on the show as villains, then let them ride off into the sunset. If we’re to assume there were plans for a twelfth season, there’s no reason that Karai or another villain new to the series couldn’t take their place.
I’m going to skip over writing about Bebop and Rocksteady here as this post is long enough as it is, and I covered their contribution to the series in the entry for “Turtle Trek”. The only thing I would add is that if anyone was truly deserving of that elusive redemption arc and/or a happy ending, it was them: this is one of the areas where the Archie TMNT comic got it right, the idea of them living peacefully on the animal-friendly Eden Worlds providing an opportunity to for the duo to move on.
April is perhaps the most important character in the show other than the Turtles: there are plenty of episodes in the first seven years of TMNT that don’t feature Splinter, Shredder or Krang but none prior to “The Legend of Koji” that don’t incorporate her into the adventure in some capacity. She's interesting to view through a feminist lens: for a character who first appeared on TV in 1987 in a cartoon primarily marketed towards boys, not only is she integral to the proceedings but from the outset she’s her own person, a (somewhat) established career woman who just happens to cross paths with the Turtles and strike up a friendship with them. Because of that need to keep the focus on the green teens we never get to see her grow much beyond this – she likes the Turtles, she likes getting to cover anything that will make for a Great Story™, but that’s as far as it goes. There are a few rare occasions where the show will toy with having a male guest character serve as a potential love interest for her, but it’s not central to what she’s about. First and foremost, April cares about journalism and about sticking up for her friends, the Turtles, and for a cartoon from 35 years ago it’s kind of refreshing that’s she’s allowed to maintain that focus.
Irma’s introduction to the series feels as if it was intended to play up April’s qualities by bringing in someone who in many ways is her opposite: there’s little indicator that Irma cares about her job or is any good at it in the early goings, and while April only makes occasional references to finding a partner throughout the series, Irma is obsessed. Her desire to find a man to sweep her off her feet in some paperback romance novel scenario is a constant theme throughout the first four years of the show, and I get the sense that part of the intended gag is that all of this would come easily to April if she wanted it, but for Irma – frequently inferred by the show to be frumpy or plain – such things remain perpetually out of reach.
When it comes to Turtles discourse there sometimes seems to be borderline hostility towards Irma, perhaps in part because she’s driven by a desire for those old traditions, but I think largely based on people focusing on her appearances in those first three seasons (the only ones people tend to pay attention to, especially outside of the fandom) and viewing her on a surface level: April, so the thinking goes, is glamorous and exciting, Irma is merely her gawky sidekick. I’ve consistently gone to bat for her throughout Turtlethon’s run precisely because The Struggle is Real: Irma exists, living and growing as a flawed human being alongside the successful, infallible April and her friends, the ever-valiant Turtles. She messes up, she fails, she frequently ends up being on the receiving end of pure bad luck but through it all she keeps going, persevering in the background while the focus remains on April and the Turtles. As the show continues, we start to see her maturation, both in terms of taking on different roles within Channel 6 and the downplaying of her man-hungry antics. By the end of season seven there’s a sense that Irma has grown into a fully capable person and shed her insecurities, culminating in her brief reinvention as an action heroine and her defeat of Krang(!) in “Shredder Triumphant!”
There’s an argument to be made that season seven should have been the end point of the series, or at least that years eight through ten ought to be viewed as merely a possible continuation, a look into how things could have continued rather than something set in stone. The truth is that aside from maybe Shredder, the core cast is served poorly by the Red Sky era: the Turtles come across as miserable throughout, April seems adrift after moving on from Channel 6, ultimately losing prominence following Carter’s introduction to the show, Bebop and Rocksteady are robbed of any semblance of personality and Irma only makes two appearances in season eight before being unceremoniously dropped entirely. I’ll freely admit that by the end of season nine, watching each episode for Turtlethon was becoming a deflating experience: by that point the spark was gone from the show, and seeing what it had become just felt sad. Happily, things improved a bit in S10, but I can’t shake the feeling that Shredder, Krang and The Boys riding off in the pick-up truck at the conclusion of season seven would have been the right time for the Turtles to bow out.
TMNT ‘87 was looked down upon from the outset by readers of the Mirage comic who saw it as sacrilege, a mockery of everything the source material was about, and once newer animated iterations came along that adhered more closely to Eastman & Laird’s vision the perception of the MWS version took an even greater hit. Ironically there are a bunch of disgruntled guys around my age – Xennials and the youngest Gen Xers – who will now swear blind that the ‘87 Turtles are the one true faith, and that any deviation from the way the team were depicted then is a disgrace. Click on any TMNT post on Instagram, especially the ones pertaining to Mutant Mayhem, and you’ll find these dudes in the comments pissing and moaning about how much better things were in their day, when the Turtles were real tough guys and manly men, which is an oddly rose-tinted perspective of a show where a significant portion of fights were won with a cream pie or pizza to the face. That’s the thing: at its heart, Turtles is a fun adventure show, one that over its run draws heavily upon martial arts tropes, sci-fi macguffin chases, aliens, monsters, dimension hopping and occasionally time travel: these concepts are all part of the DNA of the superhero comic book, and in that respect, the show is absolutely in the spirit of the Mirage comics which were themselves conceived as both a parody and a loving tribute to that artform.
That’s it. That’s what the point of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show is: it’s a fun adventure cartoon that might not aesthetically resemble the Mirage comics, but it has an innate understanding of how to adapt the underlying concepts of those stories into a series that connects with its target audience.
One of my intended aims for Turtlethon, in pulling apart and analysing every episode of TMNT, has been to dispel two commonly held stances about the show that I see online all the time:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) was never good.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) was only good for the first five episodes, everything after that was terrible.
People who take the first stance are harder to reach. Some of them are from that group of Mirage readers who were around back in the day and still hold a grudge, but the majority of those who hold this opinion have a wider disdain for eighties cartoons in general. They dismiss the contributions of everyone who worked on these series entirely because they were all “thinly veiled toy commercials”: to them TMNT and every other show from that era are nothing but sound and fury, signifying nothing. I hope in my analysis I’ve shown how far this is from the truth: even the clunkiest episodes of Turtles occasionally have moments where the animators go above and beyond to create impressive sequences, and when the show was at the height of its popularity during seasons three and four these teams created a lot of television on a modest budget within a short timeframe. On the writing side, over the course of the series Turtles incorporates themes into its stories of environmentalism (including climate change and conservation), how sensationalist media and wealthy individuals in positions of power can cultivate hate movements against marginalised groups, and gentrification, to name just a couple of topics off the top of my head; an entire side season was also dedicated to having the Turtles travel around Europe to be exposed to its arts, history and culture. These efforts are a drop in the ocean compared to what the Archie Comics version of TMNT was doing during this period but are respectable, nonetheless.
The second position – that the show goes off the rails after “Shredder & Splintered” - is something you’ll hear from viewers who have perhaps purchased the first few seasons or the entire series on DVD and have started watching it, but they’re not engaged with the source material. If you’re only half-watching the show, if it’s background noise while you perform other tasks, then the visual drop-off from “Return of the Shredder” onward combined with the drudgery of the Eye of Sarnath arc might make you wonder if there’s any point in venturing further. Undoubtedly there are stretches of the series that tested even my patience: the ungainly syndicated adventures in season four, the bizarre, sometimes directionless Vacation in Europe arc, and pretty much all of season nine. There’s still great stuff in there, however: the second half of season two is far stronger than the first, season three is full of classics such as “Turtles on Trial”, “The Ninja Sword of Nowhere” and the concluding Big Trilogy, and seasons four through six have phemomenal adventures and character spotlight episode scattered throughout. Season seven – the proper season seven, not the vacation episodes – might be the strongest stretch of adventures in the entire series as TMNT regains its focus and attempts to mature in step with its original audience. There’s so much good stuff in Turtles if you stick with it, and I can’t see how anyone could watch the series in its entirety and come away thinking only season one has value unless your criteria for what makes a good cartoon comes down purely to looking cool and some vague aura of edginess.
ABOVE: A June 1990 TV Guide cover in which Ariel from The Little Mermaid mingles with Bart Simpson, Donnie, Leo and Raph. Yes, Bart is missing his ear, but also WHY DO THE TURTLES HAVE THREE TOES WHAT THE HELL
I hope that if you’ve never actually sat down and watched the 1987 version of TMNT from beginning to end that maybe the breakdowns of each adventure I’ve cobbled together for this blog will inspire you to do so, and that if you’ve seen the show before they’ll allow you to rewatch it with additional insight. More than anything, the goal of Turtlethon has been to point out why Turtles works, while also acknowledging the times when it doesn’t. It’s lost to history now, but there was a vanishingly brief window of time – pretty much just the entire calendar year of 1990 – where the ascendancy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in pop culture occurred in parallel to the rise of The Simpsons. The two series were linked by their indie comics origins and their anti-establishment appeal, however Simpsons was able to reinvent itself after the hype around Bart died down as one of the greatest TV series of all time by continuing to up its game and making Homer the central figure of the show. TMNT was never in a position to make that leap, hampered as it was by budgetary restraints, parental backlash and being more overtly targeted towards children, but as a body of work it still has value, and its longevity speaks to how strongly it resonated with viewers around the world. It is, in a word, tubuloso.
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When Turtlethon was in its early stages, I gave some consideration to what series I might like to deep-dive afterwards. I reference Transformers all the time on this blog and it’s without a doubt my First Fandom, so there’s a natural inclination for me to want to go back and examine the 98 episodes of that show. Between that and TMNT, Ghostbusters was my second major fixation, and there’s a lot of The Real Ghostbusters to explore too.
The natural extension of our journey is to move on to Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation, but I honestly doubt it would be fun for me to write or for you to read. I dunno, maybe you want to see me rip it to shreds, but I'm unsure how much financial compensation I’d need to make up for the psychic damage that would inevitably be incurred. (The tip jar is there, if you’re so inclined; let’s just say that Yale could use an international airport.) Moving on to the 2003 version of TMNT would be much more fun, but also a tremendous undertaking that - for now - I don't want to approach. After years of writing about the Turtles, I’m exhausted. I’m also acutely aware that while Turtlethon has been beneficial for me in many ways as a writer – it's allowed me to refine my skills, to learn how to create and maintain a regular schedule, and made me a more effective editor, even if you’d never know it from the length of my posts – the time I’ve devoted to writing about the Turtles would have been better spent working on my own comic series, Corinne Morgan, Corbie, which has been on hiatus throughout the life of this blog.
[SIDE NOTE: If you want to see me put my money where my mouth is, and if I’ve learned anything through analysing Turtles, read Corbie when the new edition of issue #1 comes out in a few weeks. Its influences are more rooted in the Archie version of TMNT than the MWS series, but if you like cute, light-hearted and socially conscious superhero adventures then I think you’ll soon become a dedicated flocker.]
I’ve undoubtedly been teetering on the edge of burnout lately, and my workload has been further encumbered by the technical changes implemented by Tumblr that negatively affected the last two seasons’ worth of Turtlethon entries. Behind the scenes, I’ve gradually been making moves to port the blog in its entirety to a stand-alone website where all 193 entries can be enjoyed in the original format. The thinking is that this will allow me to also write about anything else that takes my interest, post my art and generally keep you up to date on the status of all my assorted ongoing projects. With that in mind, I’d like to introduce you to Portertronic, which is now live. The Turtlethon entries for the first two seasons of TMNT have been posted there already, with the rest of the series to follow in the weeks and months ahead.
This isn’t the end, for Turtlethon or for this account: you’ll still see new TMNT posts from me here, as I have a laundry list of one-off bits and pieces related to the series I still want to explore. The plan is that new content moving forward will be made available first to Patreon and Ko-Fi supporters, then appear on Portertronic, and eventually get posted here too. To kick things off, there’s a pair of upcoming Turtles-related CDs I’ll be looking at as part of a crossover event to introduce Excess Volume, a sub-blog that will cover pop music of the 1980s and early 1990s. I’m not going away, just getting off the treadmill I’ve been on for the last couple of years, and trying to refocus on writing shorter bursts of material while I return to working primarily on Corbie.
Turtlethon has always had a modest following – there are only so many people in the world who are interested in reading long-form analysis of a decades-old cartoon – but going into it I had zero expectations that anyone would connect with it at all. I’ve never lost sight of the fact that in real life, if a classroom’s worth of people were willing to listen to me talk at length about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles twice a week that would be incredibly edifying, and over time the readership grew to roughly double that. It probably should have been a YouTube channel from the beginning, but the thought of continually being struck down by DMCAs from Lionsgate ensured that was a non-starter, and perhaps that would have defeated the purpose. I like to draw, and I like to write – obviously! That you’ve indulged me in doing the latter and gushing about the Turtles for the last few years means a lot, and I hope you’ll join me – either through Corbie, over on Portertronic or here on Turtlethon – for the adventures still to come.
Season 10, Episode 8
First US Airdate: November 2, 1996
Lord Dregg absorbs the powers of a group of alien warriors as he prepares for a final encounter with the Turtles.
After ten seasons, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reaches its final episode, “Divide and Conquer”. Jeffrey Scott is credited as writer for this milestone adventure.
The Turtles battle a plasma blaster-wielding alien near an airport, who has one eye on a stopwatch the entire time. Michaelangelo takes out the bad guy by piloting an old airplane; when Leonardo confronts this mysterious attacker and demands to know his intentions, he snatches the team leader’s belt and teleports away. Talking amongst themselves, the Turtles note that this is the sixth time in the space of a week that a foe has appeared out of nowhere and then vanished again, with Michaelangelo’s grappling hook getting nabbed in one of the previous encounters.
We go from an airport to a spaceport/cantina, where it’s revealed that Lord Dregg survived the destruction of the Dreggnaught in the previous episode and is challenging assorted alien lowlifes to defeat the Turtles within 90 seconds, promising power and wealth to whoever can pull it off. Back on Earth, the Turtles head home in their van, still trying to figure out the story behind the assorted bad guys who’ve been popping up lately. Michaelangelo discovers a tracking device which had been placed within his shell, and hurls it out the window, but it’s too late to stop their next challenger from materialising in the back of the vehicle: a blue-skinned, four-armed woman who shape-shifts into a rhino-like alien as the Turtle Van is sent flying off a cliff. The vehicle lands safely thanks to an in-built parachute, but not before the invader snatches Donatello’s bo staff, disappearing seconds later. Confused as to why their opponent would flee when she had the upper hand, the Turtles note that the tracking device resembled Dregg’s microbots. Back at the spaceport, Dregg selects five aliens, including the two who most recently clashed with the Turtles, to participate in his next scheme.
Still trying to figure out what’s going on, the Turtles reach April to ask if she’s heard of any unusual alien activity recently. We’ve touched upon our ace reporter’s apparent Internet addiction throughout this season already, but I think it’s also worth noting how odd it is that she sits in her home at night, working in her office, and wears her new jacket the entire time when she isn’t going anywhere; I guess it’s too late in the day to justify the creation of an alternate indoor attire for her now. Back in the Lair, Donatello tracks the transporter energy from which the assorted aliens have been appearing back to the black hole Dregg had been sent into. Convinced that they’ve overheard an intruder nearby, the Turtles sneak out of the workshop only for Leonardo to almost end up thumping Splinter – somehow, they managed to forget that he lives in the Lair, too. The team are encouraged by their sensei to join him in meditation to calm their nerves.
Mung oversees the breeding of new swarms of microbots when Lord Dregg arrives, demanding a cannister of the robots to use in his Scheme of the Day. The underling points out that they’ll require all the microbots for the creation of their invasion force, and is sort of half-assedly knocked to the ground for what Dregg views as insubordination. Dregg launches into a tirade about how he doesn’t care about timetables and had nearly defeated the Turtles when he “had the power of Shredder and Krang”. (There’s a little bit of revisionist history going on there on Dregg’s part, as of the two of them he only managed to absorb Krang's abilities.) Now obsessed with gaining revenge against the Turtles above even his desires for galactic domination, Dregg declares he needs “something special” to finish off his enemies once and for all. When Mung points out in the politest and most conciliatory way possible that this is misguided, Dregg unleashes his laser eye beams to punish his flunky, missing him and instead hitting a tank full of microbots. Scooping up a handful of the tiny robots, Dregg places them in a cannister and makes his exit. For the first time, Mung is clearly furious, yelling at his departing master that he’s “gone mad”. Teleporting aboard the Dreggnaught – which was seemingly destroyed for a second time at the end of the last episode, so presumably this is the third version of the ship – Dregg sets the microbots to work, enacting the next stage of his plan.
In the Lair, Splinter oversees a training session for the Turtles, during which it’s revealed he’s taught them a new move in which they leap onto the back of their enemy, restraining them from behind. The team are told that if they perform the Flying Claw well, they won’t need to learn any further attacks. Back on his ship, Dregg watches as the microbots complete the creation of the morphogenesis exoskeleton, a suit which he dons before using it to absorb the five alien warriors he recruited. Ready for his final battle with the Turtles, Dregg prepares to teleport to Earth.
It doesn’t take long for the Turtles to pick up on the transporter activity. Heading up to the surface, they confront Dregg in a construction site in his new get-up. The team assume their old enemy must have arrived with a group of his underlings, but soon discover he doesn’t need troops now as he uses the exoskeleton to become a giant who towers over them. Dregg announces that the warriors that had been sent to dispose of the Turtles were the most powerful in the galaxy; now, having absorbed them, he’s become an enemy that the green teens will never be able to defeat.
The Turtles work together to turn Dregg’s new abilities against him, wrapping one of his arms – which has transformed into a lengthy chain - around one of the construction site’s girders. This doesn’t work for long as Dregg is simply too powerful, and is able to bring down the entire structure. The Turtles run for cover but again, Dregg has an answer for this, turning himself in an enormous ball and hurtling down the street after them. Dregg uses x-ray vision to pursue our heroes as they escape into the sewers, dropping a robotic arm through the ground and briefly pinning Michaelangelo. The Turtles escape into the lower drains of the sewers, flooding in the area above them as they leave to slow their foe down; a resulting surge of water knocks the warlord into the air.
Returning to the Lair, the Turtles tend to their accumulated injuries. Splinter suggests to the team that “when the hermit crab wants to impress its enemies, it gets a bigger shell”. This gives Donatello an idea, as he rushes to his workshop to bring up the schematics for Krang’s android body on his desktop PC. As you may recall, Krang’s duds had the ability to grow to giant-size, something showcased most memorably in “Shredder & Splintered” but also later in season six’s “Krangenstein Lives”. To get what they need, the Turtles will need to travel to Dimension X and retrieve it from the Technodrome, a risky prospect given that the team had written off the idea of ever using Donatello’s dimensional portal again at the conclusion of the previous episode.
April’s Internet addiction leads to her having a hallucinatory episode, as she sees the vision of Lord Dregg’s face appear on her monitor. Okay, that’s not technically true: this is the real Dregg, who emerges from the screen to take shape in her apartment in his new super-sized form. The villain sends a transmission to the Turtles over their communications systems, threatening to send the captive April to “the labour mines of Dimension X” if they don’t show up to rescue her. The Turtles opt to split up, with Leonardo and Raphael setting out to save April while Donatello and Michaelangelo head through the portal.
In a nice touch, the old Technodrome theme music returns as Donnie and Mikey approach the now dilapidated fortress. The Turtles make their way inside, unaware that they’re being watched. Back on Earth, Raph and Leo free April but are manhandled by Dregg, who threatens to finish them off with his integrated weaponry as we head into commercials.
Okay, here we go – the concluding act of the last ever episode!
Dregg gives the captive Turtles the choice of being killed by a liquid nitrogen ray or his carbine shredder, and while there’s perhaps something fitting about idea of the Turtles meeting their maker in the last episode at the hands of a shredder, that’s not how things play out. Instead, Leo and Raph use their surroundings to their advantage, dropping furniture onto Dregg and sending him crashing through the floor, marking yet another time that the Turtles have inadvertently destroyed April’s home and demonstrated zero remorse. Our heroes leave with April in the van, but Dregg remains undeterred. He bursts out the side of the building and – I shit you not – becomes MOTORCYCLE DREGG, popping a wheelie before speeding off to pursue the Turtles as I stop what I’m doing to try and contain my laughter one final time.
In the Technodrome, Donatello and Michaelangelo uncover Krang’s android body, but there’s definitely something off about it: for one thing, since when did it have fangs? Before the duo can retrieve it, the alien brain’s old suit reveals itself to be a shapeshifting creature that springs to life, opening its mouth to expose a forked tongue and going on the attack. From the sidelines emerge a group of creepy cyborg-like beings who the two Turtles fight off before finding the real android body under a pile of scrap metal.
Motorcycle Dregg chases the Turtle Van into a scrapyard, where it soon becomes trapped in a crane by the villain and is set to be dropped into a trash compactor. Meanwhile Donnie and Mikey opt to use the Technodrome’s portal to return to New York rather than their own, but struggle to get the failing systems in the fortress operational while also fighting off the assorted enemies now hanging around the place. Mikey’s last “cowabunga” begins as he leaps into the portal with Donnie, and ends as he emerges in the scrapyard on the other side.
Leonardo, Raphael and April face the prospect of being squished by Dregg in the trash compactor when the now giant-sized android body appears on the horizon, piloted by Donatello and Michaelangelo in Krang’s place. Dregg uses his assorted powers to attack the android, leading Mikey to suggest they increase its size even further, but Donnie explains the bigger it becomes, the more rapidly it’ll collapse: as it is, they only have about one minute before Krang’s old suit shrinks to the size of a ping-pong ball and explodes, with the two Turtles inside it.
Leonardo and Raphael use the roof-mounted blasters on the Turtle Van to fire upon Dregg, but he rebounds by again assuming his ball form, knocking down Krang’s body like a bowling pin. Changing shape again he takes on the form of a tentacled creature, resembling one of the five warriors he recruited earlier. With only seconds remaining, Michaelangelo suggests they do “THE MOVE, dude”. Taking the controls, Donatello has Krang’s android body perform the Flying Claw, capturing Dregg from behind. Mikey and Donnie escape and push Dregg through the portal along with the android body seconds before it's due to explode.
All of this brings us to the very last scene of the series. In the Lair, Splinter tells the Turtles that they are “truly exceptional students... and [he is] proud to be [their] equal”. This confuses Michaelangelo, who’s used to referring to Splinter as their sensei, but he explains that this would make him their leader or guide, something they no longer need: “like the lion,” he tells them, “You have no superior in the jungle of life”. Leonardo agrees that the Turtles can take on any challenge when a noise is heard from nearby. Rushing into the kitchen, the team find a bag of popcorn overflowing in the microwave: Raphael gets the last line of the series, remarking that the one thing they can’t handle is Donatello’s cooking.
And so, this is how is how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ends, not giving us any substantive sense of closure but simply puttering over the finish line. That last scene, all 35 seconds of it, is the closest thing we get to a goodbye after all these years, a hurried acknowledgement that the Turtles are now equal to Splinter that honestly doesn’t feel earned: we just had a bunch of episodes in a row where the team were staring death in the face and the planet was in danger, today’s adventure feeling restrained by comparison. After pulling apart the adventures of the Turtles for a few years now, I went into this one expecting to feel... I don’t know, something, anything, but there’s almost nothing emotionally resonant in “Divide and Conquer”. I’m honestly disappointed.
Why did TMNT end in such an anti-climactic fashion? I’d speculate that, much like the conclusion of season seven, there was a desire to not fully close the door. Turtles as a property at least still had name recognition at this point, and perhaps Fred Wolf’s camp felt there remained a chance that a rival network would pick up the show for a few more seasons on that basis. It’s entirely feasible that an eleventh season would have seen either Dregg or Shredder and Krang return, but given how troubled the last few years of the show have been creatively, I’m not surprised this didn’t come to pass.
The first Turtlethon entry opened with an acknowledgement that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles debuted on TV only weeks after the series finale of Transformers, and this could be considered a passing of the torch: TMNT was, in many ways, the last great series of the 1980s “half hour toy commercial” era. As we close things out in the autumn of 1996, the Transformers have finally made a successful return to western animation with Beast Wars, which should give you some sense of how much the world has changed in the time between the premieres of “Turtle Tracks” and “Divide and Conquer”: that kind of half-hour computer generated animated show would have been unthinkable in the mid-eighties when Turtles was green-lit, but will come to dominate kid TV schedules as the millennium approaches. Which brings us nicely to...
AFTERMATH
Let’s do a lightning round covering how the various parties involved in the creation of TMNT fared after the show went off the air:
CBS pivoted to showing nothing but educational programming on Saturday mornings beginning with the 1997/98 television season. This came about as the result of strengthened regulation requiring that broadcasters air a set number of hours of informative fare each week, but also followed on from the budget cuts for programming mentioned in previous entries, and increased competition from cable channels such as Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. A few years later the network would be absorbed into Viacom, Nick’s parent company; Nickelodeon would go on to purchase Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as an IP from Mirage Studios at the end of 2009.
Fred Wolf Films, the successor to Murakami Wolf Swenson, would putter on for a few years after the loss of their meal ticket. In a newspaper article from the boom years of TMNT, Fred Wolf suggested that the studio wasn’t making any money from the success of the series at the time due to the huge financial outlay required to make as many episodes as they did, and that it wouldn’t be until the show had ceased production and began playing in reruns worldwide that they would begin to see a return on their investment. It doesn’t seem like things played out this way, the firm moving on to work on a few Zorro and Sinbad cartoons as the nineties closed out; their website, last updated in 2000, is somehow still online and suggests they were looking to move into web animation around that period, but as far as I can tell nothing ever came of it.
Playmates Toys had financed the initial effort to bring the Turtles to television and would keep the brand afloat at retail throughout 1997, in part by re-releasing older toys in new packaging. They would go on handle the figures for the next incarnation of Turtles a short time later, and in fact continue to hold the master toy license to this day, a line of figures based on the recent Mutant Mayhem movie currently running in parallel with (often shoddy) recreations of toys from the classic era.
Mirage Studios perhaps had the most to lose with the continuing decline of TMNT and the end of the original cartoon. To ensure the survival of the property and that they could continue to employ their roster of artists, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird made the decision to do business with Saban Entertainment, the production company behind Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers; this was the same series which, as covered in previous Turtlethon entries, had been a key factor in TMNT’s rapid decline in the kidvid marketplace to begin with. The Mirage/Saban alliance would lead to the creation of the live-action Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation, a disastrous series which would not only damage public perception of the Turtles further but also create a rift between Eastman and Laird which has only in recent years been patched up.
The four original voice actors for the Turtles are still active in the industry, and occasionally reunite on the convention circuit, often alongside Renae Jacobs (April). Barry Gordon, Rob Paulsen, Cam Clarke and Townsend Coleman reprised their roles as the green teens for the 2022 video game Shredder's Revenge. Between these stints Paulsen returned to Turtles for the 2012 incarnation of the show on Nickelodeon, this time as the voice of Donatello. James Avery (Shredder) passed away in 2013 following complications from open-heart surgery. David Wise is also no longer with us, having lost a brief battle with lung cancer in 2020, but both live on through their respective remarkable bodies of work, including their extensive runs on TMNT.
As I’m sure you know, Turtles continues to endure, not just in its 1987 incarnation but the countless versions which have popped up in the years since. Recently Viacom announced that they’ve finally reached an agreement to secure the broadcast rights to the original series: the first season is already up on YouTube for free (albeit in an altered form, and with a new theme song in place as presumably Chuck Lorre’s asking price for royalties was simply too high); the show is also in rotation now on Pluto TV’s Totally Turtles channel in the US and will be arriving on Paramount+ in short order. Personally I’m still hoping we get a nice Blu-Ray set of the series down the line at some point with the entire series in better quality than the occasionally substandard Lionsgate DVD prints.
So... now what? Next time on Turtlethon we’ll wrap up all the loose ends, reflect on the last few years of exploring TMNT and try to figure out what the point of all this was – as well as where we go from here. See you then!
Season 10, Episode 7
First US Airdate: October 26, 1996
Lord Dregg plots to draw Earth into Dimension X.
"The Day the Earth Disappeared" is the penultimate episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As with the rest of season ten’s episodes, Jeffrey Scott is credited as the writer of this adventure.
Wasting no time, today’s show gets right into the action as the Turtles emerge from the sewers to find the city streets crumbling around them due to a disturbance in the Earth’s crust, a volcano popping up and erupting right in front of them. In the sky above the Dreggnaught appears, a group of parachuting bat-men emerging from it to surround our heroes. Lord Dregg arrives and easily defeats the Turtles, having his troopers cover them in an ooze-like substance that freezes them on the spot before he uses a ray gun to shatter them into pieces. This, as it turns out, is a ruse: the real Turtles reveal themselves to be very much alive, the ones that Dregg destroyed mere holographic projections. With the tide of battle turning, Dregg and his men teleport back to their ship.
Later, Dregg re-watches these events on a viewscreen in his ship alongside Mung. With the construction of a new vortex transporter complete, the villains get to work on their new plan: to use the transporter in a modified capacity as a space warp that will transport the Earth to a new solar system, one controlled entirely by Dregg. This activity sets off the early warning systems in the Lair, warning the Turtles that a huge disturbance has been detected in the Earth’s magnetic field. A space warp soon opens above the planet, large enough to be visible to April from the window of her apartment; examining the situation using his computer, Donatello calculates that it’s already a thousand miles wide, and growing at a rate of 3,000 miles an hour; if it keeps growing at this rate, within two hours it’ll be large enough to swallow the planet, transporting it to Dimension X. Faced with the challenge of pinpointing the source of the warp, which is a thousand miles above the planet, the team turn to Donatello’s dimensional portal as a means of tracing the energy flow.
Back aboard the Dreggnaught, Mung detects the attempts by someone to interfere with their scheme. Dregg orders that whoever is responsible be sucked into a black hole adjacent to the warp, and is warned by his underling that moving the hole too early could destabilise the warp, preventing them from successfully pulling the planet into Dimension X. Dregg refuses to listen to Mung’s advice, insistent that his commands be followed.
Having determined that the Dreggnaught is the source of the warp, Donatello suggests that the team use his dimensional portal to board the ship, thwart Dregg’s plan and return to the Lair. The other Turtles are wary, given the portal’s reliability in the past has been patchy at best. Before they can agree on a course of action, Dregg turns the portal against the team, using it to pull Leonardo and Donatello inside. April watches on a viewscreen which is itself destroyed by the force of the warp; moments later, Splinter is also pulled into the portal.
We begin act two with Dregg elated at the news that two of the Turtles have been pulled into the warp, refusing to let Mung rain on his parade by pointing out that even this means the other half of the team has survived. The alien warlord insists that the black hole be moved closer to the warp; again, Mung insists that this is a risky course of action, further raising the ire of his master.
With Michaelangelo and Raphael still clinging on and trying desperately not to get sucked into the portal, April leaves her apartment hoping she can arrive at the Lair in time to save her friends. Meanwhile Leonardo and Donatello land on a dimensional planetoid that has been suspended in a gravitational whirlpool. Now separated from Splinter, the pair set out to try and find him.
Mung’s concerns about placing the warp nearer to the black hole turn out to have been valid, a warp storm forming as a result that threatens to tear the Dreggnaught apart. As Dregg’s lackey rushes to try and resolve the problem, Splinter finds himself teleported onto the ship. Evading a patrol of bat-men, he begins looking for a way to aid the Turtles in defeating the villains.
April arrives in the Lair seconds before Raphael and Michaelangelo are pulled into the portal. The pair find themselves on a seemingly barren alien world, and are soon confronted by a fire-breathing monster, which grabs Raph with its mouth; Mikey taunts the beast until it lets go, both Turtles diving back into the black hole, the creature following them. Elsewhere, Leonardo and Donatello are grabbed by rocky claws that emerge from the ground beneath them.
With the storm no longer an issue and the warp fully opened, Dregg orders that the black hole be moved into position. Act two ends with the Earth seen being pulled closer to the warp, now on-course to be transported to Dimension X. We get a taste of the impact this has when the show returns from commercials, with people across the world fleeing in terror as cities begin to crumble. Meanwhile, in the Lair, April attempts to close the portal without success.
Aboard the Dreggnaught, Splinter fights off a group of bat-men before altering the controls for the transporter. (If you’re wondering how he has any idea what he’s doing, it’s inferred that he’s using his heightened ninja senses to figure it all out.) Meanwhile Raphael and Michaelangelo arrive alongside the fire-breathing monster in a world covered in ice, where they attract the attention of a giant yeti-like creature.
Having two pairs of Turtles running around alien worlds getting chased by monsters seems to have confused the heck out of the animators, as the next scene opens with Leonardo trying to free himself from the clutches of one of the hands rising out of the ground using his katana, except... he’s drawn in Raphael’s colours, and also appears to be on the ice world. Donatello appears alongside him, also unable to escape and concerned that if they don’t do something soon, there won’t be an Earth to return to.
With sixty seconds remaining until the planet is pulled into Dimension X, Dregg orders that as soon as the shift has been made the black hole be transported elsewhere, taking the Turtles with it. The villain soon becomes aware of the presence of Splinter aboard the ship, who escapes into an airlock before re-emerging to transport the black hole into the Dreggnaught. A furious Lord Dregg declares that this will result in everyone on-board being “destroyed” - which is to say, killed – to which Splinter counters that it’s Dregg’s own evil that will be the cause of his destruction. Leonardo and Donatello are transported onto the ship, with Leo slicing the transporter control panel into pieces. Dregg points out that this will do nothing to save the Earth, and will merely prevent the black hole from being withdrawn. Donatello counters by picking up a laser blaster and opening fire upon the ship’s computers, closing the warp; somehow this also moves the Earth back into its normal position.
Now left with no means of returning home, the two Turtles are reminded by Dregg that thanks to the destruction of the navigational computers, his ship is now adrift in space, doomed to be pulled into the black hole and ultimately destroyed by its gravitational force. The spacecraft is seen crumbling as Dregg declares that in death, he’ll at least have the satisfaction of taking the two Turtles with him. This turns out to not be the case, as Michaelangelo and Raphael arrive via a dimensional portal, pulling Leo, Raph and Splinter back inside. Our heroes land safely back in the Lair, hurriedly ordering April to close the portal to prevent Dregg from following them through; a huge explosion is then seen as the Dreggnaught hurtles toward the heart of the black hole.
Later, in the Lair, the Walter Cronkite-esque newsreader is seen on TV reporting on how the space warp closed, “allowing the Earth to remain in its orbit”. This is framed by “Walter” as an issue that resolved itself, with the efforts of the Turtles never acknowledged, to their chagrin. The episode concludes with Donatello announcing his latest round of modifications to the portal have finally ironed out the bugs, only for the claws of a gigantic blue creature to briefly emerge from it. The team force the intruder back, destroying the portal's controls and agreeing that it'll be off-limits from now on.
"The Day the Earth Disappeared" is nothing new: we’ve seen variations on this idea of the planet being pulled into Dimension X before, and the Turtles encountering weird aliens while portal-hopping is a particularly well-worn concept. If anything, it would be surprising this far into the tenth season of the show to see any kind of innovation: there’s little sense in reinventing the wheel now, and so this and the previous episode have been about determining what has worked in the past and sticking with it. There is, at least, something intriguing in the growing friction between Lord Dregg and Mung that makes this episode compelling for viewers who have tuned in for the entire season, preventing it from feeling like we’re just going through the motions. So far Mung has dutifully taken the abuse dished out by his master but it’s evident that he’s reaching the point where he’s almost had enough. It’s a scenario reminiscent of Baxter’s lingering resentment towards Shredder throughout season two, and something that – at the risk of spoiling the series finale – will pop up again in the next Turtlethon entry. (Yes, somehow both Dregg and Mung are still alive.)
Next time, we explore “Divide and Conquer”, the final episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I really don’t know if I’m emotionally prepared for this.
Season 10, Episode 6
First US Airdate: October 19, 1996
The Turtles battle an alien amoeba crime boss who seeks to steal a supercomputer on behalf of Lord Dregg.
The tenth season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles continues with “Mobster from Dimension X”. As with the rest of this year’s episodes, this outing is credited to Jeffrey Scott.
At a college campus, Professor Huxley is seen unveiling a revolutionary “protein computer”, watched from afar by Donatello as the other Turtles reluctantly tag along. Huxley goes on to demonstrate how a headset can allow him to link up the computer and mentally control anything connected to it such as lights and air conditioning. A group of laser-gun wielding gangsters show up to steal the computer, but their efforts are thwarted by the Turtles, with both parties escaping when the police arrive.
Back in the Lair, the Turtles try and determine why the gangsters had targeted the computer when an early warning system sounds, informing them that traces of transporter energy have been detected. Convinced that this is a sign Dregg may have returned after being banished to Dimension X in the previous episode, the green teens head off to investigate.
At their hideout, the group of gangsters try to downplay their inability to steal the computer to their boss, a bright green slime monster in a suit and fedora named The Globfather. One of the men is punished by being turned into a pile of goo, and the others are warned the same fate will meet them should they fail in the future. The Globfather reveals that he was sent to Earth to retrieve the protein computer “by someone who is willing to pay dearly for it”; his underlings are promised that if they succeed, he’ll provide them with enough alien weaponry to easily take over the city. The crooks are instructed to try and steal the computer again, this time under the direct supervision of their boss.
The crooks leave moments before the Turtles arrive in their van, having determined that the teleportation activity they detected took place in the hideout. Once inside, the team find the puddle of goo that was once a member of the mob group on the floor, and are shocked as the puddle of slime manages to utter a few words, revealing the name of the criminal kingpin and his intent to steal the computer from Huxley’s lab before reverting to being lifeless ooze once more.
At “Computer Science Lab”, Huxley is seen continuing to conduct his research, his son Ronnie hanging around nearby and playing with a radio-controlled car. Dressed as military officials, the gangsters infiltrate the facility and inform Huxley that it's under attack, offering to escort him safely outside. Dressed in uniform, the Globfather then reveals his true intentions, his men filing in to steal the computer seconds before the Turtles arrive. Seeking to protect his computer’s “brain” from being damaged during the battle, Huxley secretly places it in the shell of Ronnie’s RC car.
Act one ends with the Globfather attacking Raphael by wrapping him in goo, which he promises will turn him into an amoeba, “just like [him]”; When the show returns from commercials, the other Turtles are warned that should they touch him they’ll become blobs too. The gangsters make their exit with the computer (minus its brain), with Ronnie leaving soon after; meanwhile the Turtles are left to deal with Raphael’s predicament, which Leonardo resolves with some unintentionally hilarious rapid-fire swishing of his katana blades.
Reviewing the lab’s security camera footage, the Turtles watch Huxley place his computer’s brain inside the shell of his son’s toy car, before in turn dropping this into his backpack; moments later Ronnie is seen picking up the backpack and leaving the building. The team set out to find Huxley’s child before the Globfather realises what’s happened, contacting April and asking her to have the police help in the search for him.
At their hideout, the gangsters realise that the computer is incomplete. Globfather presses a tied-up Huxley for information, threatening to turn him into an amoeba too if he doesn’t comply. The Professor coughs up the information about where the brain was stashed, though this leaves the crooks in a position where they still can’t visually identify the boy. Fate intervenes as a Channel 6 news broadcast displays a photograph of Ronnie, with viewers being asked to contact the authorities should they see him. (This marks the penultimate appearance in the series of the Walter Cronkite lookalike newsreader, who quite incredibly is the last recurring human character to appear in the show bar April, having even outlasted Shredder.) Globfather makes his exit, leaving a large portion of goo on Huxley to ensure he doesn’t attempt a double-cross.
Ronnie is chased by the mobsters but the Turtles intervene, with Leonardo snatching a pair of their laser weapons to use against them. The Globfather arrives in his limousine and is trapped inside by our heroes, but uses his shapeshifting abilities to slide through a vent onto the street before re-forming. He soon changes shape again, rising via a drainpipe before snatching the backpack from an escaping Ronnie as act two ends.
We begin the final act with Ronnie left dangling from a balcony. Globfather taunts the Turtles, challenging them to make the choice of saving the child or retrieving the backpack, and makes his escape as the team choose the former option. Back at his hideout, the slimy mob boss contacts his “benefactor”, Lord Dregg. The alien warlord outlines the next phase of their plan, as he intends to have Globfather connect Huxley’s invention to the national telephone network. This will allow Dregg to “control all Earthly computers” with his brain, including military defence systems. (This seems to presume that all computers on the planet are hooked up to a dial-up modem which is connected all the time, I really don’t think he’s thought this through.) We also learn that a new Dreggnaught is in the process of being constructed by the microbots, the completion of which will take several days: once it’s done, the vortex transporter will allow for the villain’s return to Earth.
The Globfather and his men barge into the phone network facility, where the protein computer is hooked up to the system; the mob boss then uses the telepathic headset demonstrated by Huxley in the episode’s opening scene, gleefully declaring that he “can feel [his] mind connecting to millions of computers around the world!”
I’m becoming increasingly convinced that since leaving Channel 6, April has chosen to fill her free time by becoming addicted to this newfangled “Internet” thing, and is justifying her dependency by telling herself it’s in the name of journalism: rarely nowadays, outside of her direct interactions with the Turtles, do we see her anywhere other than hunkered down in front of her computer in her apartment. That’s exactly where she is as the next scene opens, and when the Internet goes down her response is to immediately whip out her notebook computer (which she helpfully declares incorporates a cellular modem.) Using the device, she views an image of “all the world’s phone lines”, which are being tapped into: seconds later, the Globfather appears on-screen, announcing that all communications systems are now under alien control and threatening reprisal towards anyone who tries to interfere.
With Globfather preventing anyone from making phone calls, April instead reaches out to the Turtles, as the Turtlecom signal is apparently unaffected. From their van – and despite the warnings of Ronnie – Donatello attempts to establish a connection with the phone network. This somehow grants the crime boss control of the Turtle Van, and he quickly utilises its weapons to blow the rear doors off before setting the vehicle on a collision course with an oncoming truck. After Raphael destroys the on-board computer, the team regains control, steering the van to safety at the last second. Ronnie attempts to advise the Turtles on a plan of action, but the team talk over him, deciding to return to the Lair.
Dregg teleports in to join the Globfather just as the military is about to claim control of the communications network, and instead uses a weapons satellite to stage a counter-attack. He warns a group of world leaders that the planet’s nations have only fifteen minutes to surrender, threatening to use the satellite to begin destroying cities if they don’t comply.
In his workshop, Donatello – drawn in one particularly lengthy shot as Raphael, “R” belt and all – constructs his own telekinetic headset which he intends to hook up to the computer system and counteract the efforts of the Globfather. When the headset malfunctions, Ronnie again tries to provide advice, only to be ignored by the Turtles who fumble through and resolve the problem themselves. Tired of being brushed off by our heroes, Huxley’s son quietly makes his exit.
The leaders of “all nations” managed to agree within that fifteen-minute timeframe to surrender to Dregg, which somehow might be the most implausible thing to occur in this episode about a mob boss made of slime who takes over the world with a computer hooked up to a chunk of meat. Never fear, as the Turtles infiltrate the network facility to begin taking out Globfather’s blaster-wielding goons. Aware that he’s under attack, Dregg prepares to use the satellite space lasers to begin destroying cities as planned. Donatello uses his own mind control helmet to try and counteract this, leading to a brain-off between the two that ends when Ronnie re-emerges, using his RC car to damage Dregg’s control panel. Donatello is then able to assume command, connecting with a mobile vacuum robot that sucks up the Globfather. His plan foiled, Dregg teleports back to Dimension X alongside the robot now containing the defeated mobster.
Ronnie is reunited with his father, and the Turtles congratulate the Professor’s son for helping them save the day. Michaelangelo is enamoured with the RC car, convinced he could have pulled off the same trick in using it to defeat Dregg, but instead is knocked to the floor by it as everyone laughs and the episode wraps up.
“Mobster from Dimension X” isn’t earth-shattering, but following on from a trilogy where the Turtles were presented with one of their greatest challenges ever, I appreciate that the show is taking an opportunity to slow things down for a bit ahead of the upcoming series finale. Structurally this is the 1987 Turtles as it used to be: some scientist invents a game-changing doohickey, a bad guy makes a play to steal it, and our heroes work to get it back before it can be used for world domination. The key difference of course is that typically in the old days it was Shredder doing the deed, having received his marching orders from Krang, and as this is a Red Sky-era episode there’s a greater emphasis on action than on one-liners.
The Globfather is particularly interesting as he represents an area where late-stage TMNT has an edge over the classic era incarnation of the show. Off-the-shelf mob boss characters alternated with evil scientists throughout seasons three and four and hampered the show by being boring as hell: Don Turtelli, Pinky McFingers and Mad Dog McMutt were just three of this seemingly endless parade of crime kingpins who were barely distinguishable from each other. They presented the Turtles with little challenge and felt out of step with the imaginative and outlandish characters that drew kids to TMNT in the first place. The Globfather takes that same archetype and makes it work within the context of the series: while there’s nothing revolutionary about him, his design is visually solid and the ways in which his slime powers are utilised suggest to me he could have had a long run in the show had he been introduced in the early days. This is a long way of saying that I wish all the Pinky episodes could have been Globfather ones.
Hopefully you enjoyed this breather. Next time, things will begin ramping up again: Dregg returns with yet another scheme as the Turtles fight to prevent the planet from being pulled into a black hole in the penultimate episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, “The Day the Earth Disappeared”.
Season 10, Episode 5
First US Airdate: October 12, 1996
The Turtles of the past and present work together to prevent Lord Dregg from using the sun to destroy the world’s cities.
The final season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles continues with "Turtles to the Second Power". This is the third part of an ongoing storyline which began with “The Power of Three” and continued with “A Turtle in Time”.
As with the previous episode, we begin with a retelling of events so far, summarising Dregg draining the Turtles of their powers, his plan to transport pieces of the sun into the heart of Earth’s cities which was thwarted due to Shredder’s sabotage of his equipment, and Carter requesting the help of time-hopping resistance warriors Landor and Merrick in summoning the Turtles of two years earlier from the past to provide a life force transfusion for their present-day counterparts. The Turtles of season eight would go on to rescue their season ten selves from the Dreggnaught and return to New York alongside April and Carter, but now find themselves face to face with Dregg’s “invasion force”: a beastly robot monster piloted by a group of bat-men.
It’s faintly surreal to watch the two sets of Turtles emerge from Dregg’s nuclear power plant base, the healthy ones from the past each propping up their ailing current-day counterpart. April leaves to inform the wider world of Dregg’s schemes while Carter returns with the Turtles to the Lair. Aboard his ship, we see Lord Dregg take out his frustrations on Mung, something he’s been doing with increasing frequency as the season has progressed. He demands to be given a status update on when the rest of his attack force will be ready, and is informed it’ll take another fifteen hours before they’re ready to begin taking over the planet.
In the Lair, Carter assists the Turtles in using the de-mutation ray to begin the life force transfer needed to ensure the survival of the current-day green teens; when quizzed as to how long it’ll take, he responds that the procedure will be done in – yes – “about fifteen hours”. Elsewhere in the city, Shredder and Krang begin plotting to strike back at Dregg, with Shreds still in possession of the chip from the villain’s vortex transporter and now intent on using it against him. The duo captures one of Dregg’s bat-men, with Krang using his powers of hypnosis(!?) to gain control of the trooper.
We jump forward to the completion of the life force transfer, the health of the present-day Turtles now restored. Their season eight counterparts are ready to return to their own time and resume the battle they were participating in during “Turtle Trek”, and so Carter again uses Donatello’s computer to try and summon Landor and Merrick. This time the efforts to establish a connection are unsuccessful, the message “SECURITY BREACH” appearing on the monitor. Raph points out that they only have three hours left before the time warp paradox will cause them to cease to exist.
With his invasion force now ready, Dregg beams down with Mung to Earth. Act one concludes with the heavily armed machines being teleported into the heart of the city, where they begin opening fire and causing citizens to flee in terror. When we return from commercials April is seen pleading with an unconvinced sergeant at the police station, who changes his tune after seeing Dregg’s mecha fleet decimating portions of the city nearby. The two sets of Turtles, accompanied by Carter, also become aware that the invasion is underway, emerging from the Lair and immediately needing to take refuge in a nearby alley after being fired upon. Some fun action sequences follow in which each of the season eight Turtles works alongside their season ten counterpart to try and take down the machines, with Carter also briefly adopting his mutant form.
Via Turtlecom, April informs Michaelangelo – both of him – that Dregg’s forces have materialised not just in New York, but in cities all over the world. Carter leaves with one set of Turtles to confront the villain at the power plant, the others remaining behind to battle the rampaging mechs. Back in the Lair, Landor and Merrick arrive fashionably late, being brought up to speed about the unfolding situation by Splinter, who suggests April may be able to assist them in tracking the team down.
Shredder and Krang have the hypnotised bat trooper pretend to hold them at gunpoint, providing them with cover as they appear to be marched into the nuclear power plant. Feigning reluctance, Shreds hands the stolen chip back to Dregg. The villainous duo is marched toward the transporter, about to be sent to the Dreggnaut; in reality, the chip provided by Shreds is a fake, which Dregg picks up on due to knowing how Krang’s mind works after absorbing his intellect in the previous episode. (And yes, on paper it doesn’t make much sense that he can tell what Shredder would do because his mind contains a duplicate version of Krang’s thoughts, but as in the previous episode the idea seems to be that the two villains have worked together for so long that Krang knows exactly how Shreds thinks.) Dregg attacks the duo with his laser eye beams, takes “the real chip” back, and announces his intention to finish off both villains when the Turtles and Carter crash the party, gradually taking down the bat-men.
Out on the streets, the other set of Turtles – who as they don’t have Carter tagging along are presumably intended to be the ones from season eight, though it’s never outright stated – use a bulldozer in an unsuccessful effort to take down Dregg’s giant robots. Briefly, it appears that Michaelangelo has been flattened alongside the vehicle, but he emerges from a nearby manhole unharmed, the last time you’ll see this well-worn misdirect used in the series.
Back in the power plant, Dregg attempts to gain control in the jostling over the microchip by threatening to finish off Krang if Shredder doesn’t surrender. Donatello’s own sabotage efforts are also thwarted, the Turtles being held at gunpoint by the bat-men. Now fully in control, Dregg is ready to initiate his original plan and transport pieces of the sun into the world’s biggest cities. He begins doing so, to Carter’s audible horror, as the second act ends.
Act three opens with the Turtles, Carter, Shredder and Krang being made to watch as the results of Dregg’s plan are seen on a monitor, one city after another being incinerated as portions of the sun are transported. Even Krang, who in the past has been known to place little value on human life views this as a step too far, but Dregg remains unrepentant. Elsewhere, the other Turtles race to the top floor of an office building. From there, they leap into the cockpit of one of the mechs, tying up the bat minions piloting it and assuming control themselves.
Moving on to the next step of his plan, Dregg demands to have a Zoom call with a member of the League of Nations, intent on threatening to destroy even more cities if control of the planet isn’t handed over to him. The dignitary who appears calls him out on his bullshit, pointing out that the planet’s major settlements are doing just fine thank you very much; as it turns out, Donatello re-routed the computer systems to instead create a virtual reality simulation of what it would look like if Dregg had went through with his scheme.
Seconds later, the other group of Turtles arrive in the robot they’ve commandeered, blasting through the wall of the power plant. Dregg has his microbots dismantle the machine, and is momentarily stunned when a second set of Turtles emerge from the wreckage. More sequences follow of our heroes working in stereo with their counterparts from the past, with the two Donatellos transporting Dregg’s robotic fleet to an asteroid elsewhere in the galaxy. Dregg again makes a play to teleport portions of the sun to Earth, for real this time. The two Donnies and a mutated Carter try in vain to stop this, but Mung presses the button to begin the process. One of the Donatellos reveals that this attempt, too, has been sabotaged: instead of sending part of the sun to a city on Earth, it’s re-located to the Dreggnaught, which is immediately destroyed. This has the unintended side-effect of overloading the transporter platform within the power plant, which now threatens to explode. The past and present Turtles work quickly, de-powering Dregg back to his normal state and dumping him – along with Shredder and Krang – in their respective dimensions before fleeing from the disintegrating facility.
Outside, the Turtles face a further problem: only ten seconds remain before the consequences of the time warp paradox kick in. With oblivion beckoning for all of them, April pulls up in her sports car, accompanied by Landor and Merrick. The season eight Turtles are sent back to their own era to resume their battle with Shredder and Krang.
Carter uses this as an opportunity to announce – again - that he intends to go back to college to work on finding a cure for his mutation. Landor and Merrick suggest he instead travel with them to the future, where a solution may be found. After all three disappear, the Turtles just stand there, gawping, with nothing to say, and the episode abruptly ends. This is the last time we’ll see Carter in the show, and it’s incredible that this character, who I compared to Poochie in the Turtlethon entry covering his debut, ultimately makes his exit from the series with a full-on “I have to go now, my planet needs me” moment.
It’s highly tempting at this juncture to put the boot in, to say good riddance Carter, you won’t be missed. Really though, does it matter? The show would have likely continued on the same trajectory with or without him, still burdened by the interminable “new mutation” arc, the loss of TMNT’s key writer and several of its voice actors, and all the other largely ill-advised changes which have taken place since the end of season seven. I imagine the end point for TMNT would have still been season ten minus Carter, but the last two years of the run would have been a far more enjoyable watch if the focus had remained on the Turtles and the rest of the established supporting cast instead of devoting so much time to this new character. His exit coincides with the resolution of the unstable mutations plot for the Turtles, which won’t be brought up again in the short amount of time the show has left.
Perhaps it would have been fitting for TMNT to conclude with Shredder returning for one last encounter with our heroes, given that alongside Krang he was so integral to the series for much of its run. Both instead bow out here, mere supporting players in a storyline where Lord Dregg remains the main antagonist. There was an opportunity here for the pair to take a more proactive role in stopping Dregg at the climax of this episode, perhaps granting them a moment of redemption when pitted against a villain willing to do things that even they consider unspeakable, but the show just isn’t willing to follow through with such a grand gesture. It’s a problem that will pop up again before the series is done.
Dregg’s scheme in this episode – depicted as occurring during the story in what turns out to be merely an illusion, though it’s made explicit at the climax that he can and will try to go through with it for real – is easily the most horrifying act perpetrated by any villain in the show’s run, which if it had happened would have been a mass genocidal incident in which millions of people would have been instantly killed. Naturally the Turtles thwarted this, but it’s still jarring to see the 1987 TMNT cartoon, so often derided for its juvenile nature, even propose such a nightmarish scenario. If nothing else, it creates a challenge big enough that it justifies having two sets of Turtles running around.
Something not addressed in relation to the time travel aspects of this episode is that the knowledge the season eight Turtles have obtained about the events that will occur in the two years to come will surely affect the actions they'll take, and lead to things playing out differently: they now know in advance about the arrival of Lord Dregg, April losing her job, inventions yet to be created by Donatello and doubtless countless other things of which they had no awareness at the conclusion of “Turtle Trek”. Do the past Turtles, for example, prevent Carter from accidentally mutating himself when doing so would relieve him of his burden, but also erase the instances in which he was able to use his powers to save them? All of this could be explained away by assuming that the S8 Turtles had their knowledge of future events wiped, but there’s nothing in the episode suggesting this is the case and no precedent in previous TMNT time travel adventures for it either. Based on what we see unfold here, we can only assume the past Turtles now have some difficult ethical, borderline existential issues to grapple with.
“Turtles to the Second Power”, along with the two episodes which precede it, make for a creatively ambitious adventure that ties up a lot of loose ends as TMNT approaches the conclusion of its staggeringly long run. There are now just three adventures left, the next of which will provide a change of pace as we harken back to the early days of the show with an old-fashioned macguffin chase and the debut of one last gangster villain in “Mobster from Dimension X”.
