Anyone who is around my age usually tends to have one thing in common, we are all big fans of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! We all grew up with Turtle Mania running wild! Action figures, cartoons, music, comics and lots more! But one thing I think we may have all loved maybe even more so than some of the rest was the fist live action turtles movies that came out in 1990!
Now before we get into more about the movie lets take a quick look at where the turtles started. See the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all started with a comic book in 1984. A comic that had all four turtles wearing the same color mask and also doing in The Foot Soldiers in way more dark and gruesome ways. Imagine my shock when I, just a little turtle fan, found an old comic that had the fun loving turtles jamming a sword through the skull of a member of The Foot! It was cool but it was one hell of a shock. The cartoon was a far cry from the comics. And while I did love the turtles as they were on Saturday mornings I had love for the dark tone of the original comics as well.
Now this goes back to the movie because I really feel the first movie was soo well received because it stuck with the dark tone of the comics all the while adding in the fun pizza loving elements of the cartoons. A tone that the movies lost with each sequel that followed. Sure, Leonardo didn’t decapitate a Foot member or anything gory like that but we did have the original origin of Splinter that I always found much cooler than the cartoon one.
Plus one other thing I loved soo much about the movie was the fact that Raphael who was always my favorite is pretty much the main focus of the film. You kids can keep your Michelangelo! Raph was my kind of turtle. He was always pissed off, he got down to business, and he was an asshole! What was not to love about Raphael?? So add him in with another favorite of mine in Casey Jones and we got ourselves a kick ass karate movie that I happen to still own on VHS!..YES!…VHS!!!
That reminds me, I still need to upgrade to DVD..Anyway, back to the movie.
While I love the movie (as I’m sure most of you do) the praise wasn’t as wide in the movie reviewer world when it came out..not that I’d expect it to be. Legend Roger Ebert only gave it 2 and a half stars, saying, “But this movie is nowhere near as bad as it might have been, and probably is the best possible Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie.”Well yeah it’s the best “Turtles movie” but I also think it was a damn good movie in general. The film was also somewhat looked down upon (by uptight parents I’m sure) for its level of violence, but it was mostly stylized and not graphic so what was the big deal?? But we can’t have a turtle straight up kicking someone’s ass in-front of the kids now can we?
But still it’s different strokes for different folks I guess. You may not like this movie but I love it..even today.
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