The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Group Watch Thread

[Octopus Prime]

Notes From the Underground (Part 3) wraps up the story arc in a way that… I’m pretty sure means it’s going to be revisited later. As we pick up, the turtles and their buddies l, three sapient monsters, were trapped in an underground city with a horde of considerably less sane and peaceful monsters attacking them.

Luckily a bunch of glowing spheres come shooting out of nowhere courtesy of… some robed wizard guy who kind of looks like Uatu the Watcher, and the attacking monsters, most of the nice monsters, and also Donny, get disappeared by them before running off.

The Turtles chase him to another, yet deeper, considerably more alien city while the wizard guy keeps appearing to Chuck more light globes at them, and the turtles have to avoid the pitfalls brought on by the fact that the alien necropolis is in a tremendous state of disrepair, and eventually Mikey is the only one left when he reaches the middle of the city and the wizard. Who explains that he and his people came to earth Eons ago, and hide deep underground while humanity evolved on the surface, and he’s the last survivor of his race. Furthermore; he found out that the Shredder stole his people’s power source and was using it to kidnap and mutate people into monsters for evil ends and decided to solve that problem with *yet more crystals* to mutate them back..

This all sounds good, but the wizard looks weird and creepy, and he also blurts out that no part of his plan involved letting either the turtles or the monsters go; the raw loneliness and despair of being the last of his race has driven him mad (like… just that second, he was pretty chill until anyone mentioned leaving the city), and a fight breaks out. The turtles wind up winning and the wizard gets frozen in the same machine he was healing the monsters with, just as the healing process finishes and the monsters are reverted to human (Quarry was a woman btw, it was a very Metroid revelation), and that’s great *but* it turns out that the healing crystals that unmutates them only work in the city so they’re stuck there anyway, and the only guy who can help make the changes permanent is frozen in a block of ice and also insane so… well… it beats being a mindless killing machine monster. And so the Turtles leave kind of unsatisfied with the way this all resolved, and less happy when they return to their lair only to find the sewers swarming with Foot Ninja looking for the turtles to avenge the Shredders apparent demise. So they Turtles and Splinter leave the sewers and force themselves on to Aprils hospitality by barging into her apartment and declaring that they live there now.

Which brings us to The King which is, of course, a full episode dedication to Jack Kirby; complete with a “Dedicated to Jack Kirby” opening cue card and might be one of the weirder episodes of this cartoon about nuclear turtle men who fight ninja crime. Donny is earning his keep, since the turtles don’t pay rent or have paying jobs, by doing home repairs in Aprils building (apparently she’s a landlord in addition to an antique dealer and Mad Scientist Assistant? She has a lot of side hustles) and in the course of fixing the water heater, he’s attacked by a Parademon, straight out of New Gods. This, as it turns out, was inadvertently created by Aprils tenant, a comic artist named Kirby, who found a glowing crystal and decided to tie it to his drawing pencil and was then only *kind of* surprised that it caused everything he drew to come to life.

It should be noted that Kirby isn’t remotely surprised to see the mutant turtle man in his bedroom because when you’re Jack Kirby, that’s kind of… low on the list of creative imagery.

Jack Kirby also casually mentions that he drew a Boomtube that leads to another dimension but never bothered investigating it farther since, you know… he wanted to draw more stuff not investigate the things he already drew, but with Donnys coaxing the two of them decide to pop their heads in, and find themselves in a Fourth World/Asgard mashup populated by monsters and warriors juuuuust different enough from Marvel and DC characters to avoid litigation; taken entirely from the sketches in Kirby’s sketchbook. A magical sci-fi cosmic fantasy world is, like, two degrees removed from how Donny lives his life anyway so he gets up to speed pretty quickly and joins the warriors in defending the city from the endless monster hordes (Kirby sheepishly admits he drew waaaaay too many monsters) and Kirby helps by whipping up more defenders and weapons to fight the monsters with, before wising up and just editing the existing drawings of monsters to make them less dangerous. Then the Boomtube starts collapsing because the living drawings don’t last forever and Donny manages to make it out of the Fourth World but Kirby elects to stay behind, passing on a sentiment that isn’t “Comic Will Break Your Heart” but offers a similar sentiment. And Donny goes off to be sad at losing his friend that he knew for, like, ten minutes and is now the creator god of a world of his own imagination.

 

[FelixSH]

I'm caught up on the Nick show. Good stuff. I like how Xever and the other guy (Dogpound? Forgot his real name) were at their first meeting demolishing the Turtles, but slowly, they become less unbeatable brick walls, that you needed tricks against. It's probably just the typical thing, where regular villains have to get comparatively weaker, so that the heroes can win. But in this case, it felt a bit like the Turtles are just becoming better fighters, which is fair.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Which brings us to The King which is, of course, a full episode dedication to Jack Kirby; complete with a “Dedicated to Jack Kirby” opening cue card and might be one of the weirder episodes of this cartoon about nuclear turtle men who fight ninja crime. Donny is earning his keep, since the turtles don’t pay rent or have paying jobs, by doing home repairs in Aprils building (apparently she’s a landlord in addition to an antique dealer and Mad Scientist Assistant? She has a lot of side hustles) and in the course of fixing the water heater, he’s attacked by a Parademon, straight out of New Gods. This, as it turns out, was inadvertently created by Aprils tenant, a comic artist named Kirby, who found a glowing crystal and decided to tie it to his drawing pencil and was then only *kind of* surprised that it caused everything he drew to come to life.

It should be noted that Kirby isn’t remotely surprised to see the mutant turtle man in his bedroom because when you’re Jack Kirby, that’s kind of… low on the list of creative imagery.

Jack Kirby also casually mentions that he drew a Boomtube that leads to another dimension but never bothered investigating it farther since, you know… he wanted to draw more stuff not investigate the things he already drew, but with Donnys coaxing the two of them decide to pop their heads in, and find themselves in a Fourth World/Asgard mashup populated by monsters and warriors juuuuust different enough from Marvel and DC characters to avoid litigation; taken entirely from the sketches in Kirby’s sketchbook. A magical sci-fi cosmic fantasy world is, like, two degrees removed from how Donny lives his life anyway so he gets up to speed pretty quickly and joins the warriors in defending the city from the endless monster hordes (Kirby sheepishly admits he drew waaaaay too many monsters) and Kirby helps by whipping up more defenders and weapons to fight the monsters with, before wising up and just editing the existing drawings of monsters to make them less dangerous. Then the Boomtube starts collapsing because the living drawings don’t last forever and Donny manages to make it out of the Fourth World but Kirby elects to stay behind, passing on a sentiment that isn’t “Comic Will Break Your Heart” but offers a similar sentiment. And Donny goes off to be sad at losing his friend that he knew for, like, ten minutes and is now the creator god of a world of his own imagination.

This one is actually directly based on one of the earliest comics, one of the side story comics Laird and Eastman started releasing when the series got really popular.

 

[Daikaiju]

That's my favorite of the oneshots, Mikey's being #2.

Interestingly, the comic colored Fugitoid figure comes with the gravity displacer weapon from that story, seen on the cover art.

 

[Alex]

I also remember having a book in the style of the 80s cartoon that was an adaptation of that story.

 

[Octopus Prime]

TCRI starts so abruptly I thought that I’d missed an episode, and it’s also a Krang episode.

The aliens rediscovered the power cell the turtles had stolen from them and stole it back to their main base, and after consulting with Leatherhead, the turtles realize the Krang headquarters is the TCRI building; the gigantic skyscraper that looks very much like an alien fortress in the middle of Manhattan that dominates the skyline and which nobody ever noticed before I guess. Using Leatherhead as a distraction the Turtles get in and have some Meral Gear shenanigans as they make their way to the top floor, which is a completely alien atmosphere that the Krang can thrive in leading them to conclude that part of their plan is to terraform the earth in favor of their species, in addition to the whole “make freaky monster people” thing, and the activate a portal to bring their armies through thing.

Lots of irons in the fire with these brain/slug peeps.

The turtles damage the upper floors of the building so all the toxic air escapes (this… has to be bad for the city) and tries to destroy the teleported but fail and a giant lava-spewing stone soldier appears (he’s not named but I assume this is Kragg). The turtles can’t beat him either, but Leatherhead saves the day, having punched his way through 40 floors of Krangdroids, and sacrifices himself by knocking the stone monster through the portal as it’s activating, destroying both and himself.

Back at the lair the turtles don’t even take the time to properly mourn Leatherhead (Mikey was the only one who actually liked him) because Donny salvaged some tech from the Krang base before it exploded and discovered that part of their invasion/conquest plan hinges on April for some reason.

And we follow that up with a MotW episode; Cockroach Terminator. Donny built a little tiny surveillance system he can mount on a cockroach and sent it into a Krang outpost to spy on them. This works pretty well as it clues them in to a Krang plot to make New York a bit more volcanic than it should be with a laser drill, but it also fails because cockroaches, while sturdy for a bug, are still pretty flimsy in general and it winds up falling into a vat of mutagen.

So while the turtles are trying to stop the more obvious threat of the volcano drill, they’re under constant pursuit from the newly mutated cyborg cockroach, which is now 6 feet tall and Cronenberg-y. Weirdly, Mikey doesn’t take the time to name it anything; I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a homage to Verminator or Scum Bug from the original series but… maybe both?

Anyway, they turtles realize that the bug is really just focused on Raph, since he tried to crush it when it was tiny and it holds a grudge, and decide that the lava drill thing is a bigger priority so they abandon their brother to 1v1 a giant mutated version of an animal he has a phobia of, and he eventually overcomes his fear when he realizes he’s spent the entire episode beating the hell out of it.

Granted, beating the hell out of it didn’t amount to much since it has a scaled up version of a cockroaches resilience, and cybernetic upgrades, and also it transformed into an even more monsterous and goopy flying form after getting a few too many cars crashed into it, but its still a cathartic moment.

Raph eventually solves both problems by luring the roach to the laser drill and disrupts the drills aim to use it as a weapon to blow the roach to pieces and also redirect its beam to blow the drill to pieces as well.

Alls well that ends well except that the exploded goo of the roach is still alive and already working on regenerating itself

 

[Octopus Prime]

Back to Fox with The Shredder Strikes Back (part 1 and 2)

First off, the Nick series is tremendous and all, but *man* am I liking this series more.

Anyway, this is basically 40 straight minutes of our heroes getting the absolute holy hell beaten out of them; enjoy.

Leo is still smarting from the fact that the Foot have moved in to the sewers, keeping them from their home and forcing them into Aprils apartment, and goes for some exercise to blow off some steam. And then is excited to see some random ninja crime happening so he can blow off more steam by beating on some Foot.

This immediately turns out to be a bad idea since the Evil Ninja population of New York has skyrocketed lately and he’s not fighting two or three Foot, he’s fighting dozens, including the Foot Tech Soldiers, and Hun, and apparently mystical Foot Elite (also called Foot Mystics and The Heralds of the Shredder), who look like the Three Storms from Big Trouble in Little China, if they looked 30% Mortal Kombattier, and also an apparently resurrected Shredder.

So they all just beat the friggin’ crap out of Leo as the episode is almost entirely a dialogue less fight scene of Leo battling insurmountable odds occasionally broken up by the rest of the turtles doing little bits in Aprils apparement. This culminates with Leo’s viciously beaten body being thrown through Aprils window to reveal that the Shredder is back, before passing out into a coma.

Then it’s the rest of the Turtles, Vs. Shredder and his consequent Ninja Army, but now having to protect an unconscious Leo and defenceless April, and trapped in an enclosed space that being flooded with yet more Foot Ninjas.

This is a pretty bad situation, and even Casey suddenly joining the fray (weirdly him swinging a baseball bat is more effective against the Mystics than the four trained nuclear animal ninjas) does amount to much and the group are forced into a meatlocker, which is correspondingly barred shut and then Shredder says “screw it” and explodes the entire building with them inside by both setting it on fire and slicing open all the gas lines.

Well… shows over, I guess?

 

[jpfriction]

Gotta respect Shredder’s hustle. He don’t do anything by half measures.

 

[Daikaiju]

The Fox Turtles were a gift.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Also, the goofy bits breaking up the fight scenes were generally *pretty solid*,

 

[Octopus Prime]

Back to Nick with Baxters Gambit which is nominally a Shredder episode, but he barely appears in it and it’s more of a Henchmen episode. Baxter is tired of being mocked by the Turtles and *especially* tired of being ridiculed by his fellow henchmen Bradford and Xever, so, under the auspices of setting a trap for the Turtles he goes AWOL and lures both groups into a murderous death maze he’d built. He’s effectively doing an Arcades Murderworld plot and I love those so you don’t see me complaining.

The two groups begrudgingly have to work together to survive, and Raph and Xever realize they have a lot in common besides being nuclear animal people, the main difference being species and where they fall, ethically, in terms of vigilante ninja crime. Eventually the two groups meet in the center of the maze and have a big fight against an (admittedly pretty kickass) fight against Baxter and his giant robot boss monster, and destroy that but Baxter escapes vowing to go back to solo villainy; meanwhile the Turtles and Bradford/Xever are too dang exhausted to bother fighting each other so they call it a draw.

Meanwhile, April is still getting her own Ninja training (this came up once before and was on the back burner as a plot point ever since) which consisted of her choosing a cool weapon; settling on blades fans. Splinter also casually mentions that his daughter, had the Shredder not killed her, would be about Aprils age and would also have preferred blades weapons. So… going to turn out that she’s still alive, and is Karai right?

Anyway, the Krang and Shredder plots collide, again, in Enemy of My Enemy which… kind of doesn’t slot together quite as well as it should. Karai ambushes the Turtles while they’re investigating the Krang and is shocked to learn that the turtles claims of there being an alien invasion coming are, in fact, completely true and the Krang send a whole-ass spaceship out to kill all the Ninjas in town. She… should already know this because she’s met them before and the show is continuity strong enough that it’s not like the episodes have gone out of order like that. Anyway, she realizes that Alien Invasions are a bit more important than her dads desire to kill a rat and several turtles, so she agrees to steal from one of the Shredders weapon deals to pilfer an *entire rocket launcher* and help the turtles at least bring down that gunship.

Which, weirdly, nobody else in the city seems overly aware of (this is at least the basis of a couple of jokes).

The Turtles think this is a good idea, then they think it’s a better idea to use this knowledge to try to kill the Shredder themselves since they’ll be able to ambush him and Karai is a bad guy so she’d probably betray them anyway.

So this doesn’t work since, while he’s a murderous criminal and master ninja, Shredder is still her dad and Karai doesn’t like attempts on his life; so she saves him, but still secretly hands off one of the missiles to Leo so he can knock the UFO out of the sky, and the Turtles scram before Shredder can kill them as they’re still vastly out of his league.

But also is still sad because he definitely lost his chance with his perspective girlfriend as he betrayed her trust and furthermore, tried to murder her dad with grenades.

Both comparable dealbreakers for even healthy relationships not built on a foundation of theft and clandestine assassination.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Back to Fox for Tales of Leo which is the more narratively significant of this weeks episodes.

Picking up where the previous episodes cliffhanger ended; the Trutles were locked in a meat locker just as the Shredder explodes them, and the building they were standing in, and also a few of the surrounding buildings (also absolutely murdering a bunch of first responders in the explosion).

Luckily they weren’t as locked in as suspected, since April knew of an old escape tunnel in that locker from prohibition days, and since the Turtles (and April) and effectively homeless and have every criminal in New York out for their blood they head upstate to Casey Jones’ grandmothers farm to hide out for a while while Leo recovers from being beaten into a coma/to death. Then they share memories of times when Leonardo established “Leads” as his chief characteristic as they were growing up. And eventually they share enough fond childhood memories of near drownings and alligator fights (?) to allow Leo to regain consciousness.

Meanwhile, Shredder is much more genre savvy than expected and is obsessed with the fact that there were no giant nuclear turtle corpses dragged out of the rubble of the building and is aware he lives in a world with comic book rules so that means they *must* have survived. Baxter agrees to find evidence of their demise using his Mousers in exchange for a closer look at the strange armor Shredder dug out of the river.

Baxter is also now sporting a neck brace, artificial arm and no legs owing to his repeated failures, but Shredder is definitely the kind of employer who believes in second chances and allows him. Baxter, on the other hand, is not the kind of employee who learns from his mistakes and decides to fake evidence of the Turtles’ deaths when he realizes there are no nuclear reptile corpses in the ruins, because surely that won’t come back to bite him in the ass.

The Monster Hunter is another one off episode, while Leo recovers from his injuries (including working the farms smithy to reforge a new pair of katana to replace the ones Shredder destroyed) Mikey gallivanting around the forests outside the farm caught the attention of an aspiring Bigfoot hunter, Dr. Abigail (who looks like Cable but with lipstick instead of a glowing eye), who decides that the secret to professional success is hunting down and exploding a woodsman instead of monetizing the monster hunting autonomous drones she built, or by becoming a fitness instructor because she is holy crap jacked.

The turtles wind up discovering that there actually is a cryptid in the forest, and so to protect it and also be left alone from a gun toting madwoman obsessed with gunning down Bigfeets they discredit her by dressing Casey up in leaves and swamp muck and tricking her into catching him and revealing himself during a press conference she held.

Then Leo finishes reforging his Katana and says “Hey… I think we should go kill Shredder, eh?”

 

[Octopus Prime]

Back to Nick starting with Karais Vengeance, which is mainly an April episode since the Turtles are busy dealing with a Krang base that’s poisoning the New York water supply.they fight a Loch Ness monster.

April, meanwhile, has gotten some degree of practice in with her own Ninja training, which comes at a good time since, after interrogating a Krang soldier he’d captured, the Shredder learns that April is, for some reason, integral to the aliens plans. And he also knows that she’s important to the Turtles so, you know, two good reasons to target her for assassination. So he sends Karai off to do a l’il murk’.

Aprils training is well above taking a weekend martial arts lesson at the mall, but well below “Personal Murder Tool Trained By a Ninja Crime Lord” so Karai beats the absolute holy hell out of her like she was a rented drum, and only survives when she’s able to throw Karai off her game by casually mentioning that her mother died (this resonates with Karai pretty strongly considering who her dad is) and booting her down some stairs before running off. Splinter realizes that since both the Krang and Foot want April she can’t possibly go back to her regular life and has to live in the sewers with the Turtles until this whole Shredder and Alien Invasion thing blows over.

The Pulverizer Returns brings back insufferable dweebus and Ninja Turtle fan Timmy (no last name given). It seems that the Turtles have gotten… a bit over leveled fighting Foot Ninja lately, to the extent that the Shredder has quite literally run out of even semi-competent henchmen and they’re down to the absolute dregs of the New York Ninja Themed Criminal Goons (we also learn that mall dojos are recruiting tools for the Foot) and they’re sunk so low they’ve even brought in The Pulverizer as a foot ninja.

Timmy, for all his TMNT obsession doesn’t seem to have noticed that the Foot are the main guys they fight and is pretty sure he’s another vigilante hero but now with the most basic of fundamental training. When he realizes the Foot are bad guys (by being told so, just once. He’s… not hard to convince of anything) he decides to be a double agent for the turtles. Which he is also very very bad at, and reveals that the Foot are planning on stealing Mutagen from the Krang to build some bio-horror soldiers to fight the Turtles with. The Turtles already knew this because Timmy is awful at everything he does.

Timmy also volunteers to be a test subject for the Mutagen since everyone else who got mutated got really strong and/or cool powers, and most of them were also evil so if a good guy, like him, got mutated it’d be a real boon for the Turtles and they’d finally accept his help.

Unfortunately… he succeeds, but the Foot’s mutagen experiments were pretty slap dash and instead of turning into a nuclear reptile or cyborg bug or anything like that all his skin dissolves off and he becomes a barely sentient blob of acid with exposed organs floating around in himself; The Mutagen Man, who is… only kept out of being the most horrific character redesign in the series by merit of Rat King existing.

Donny lures Tim into a Muragen container so he doesn’t burn everything he touches to toxic slag, and they all take him back to the lair where they throw him in a closet because he is so gross to look at at Donny vows to find some way to turn him back into a human. If Tommy can even understand any of this is a mystery because he only seems to be vaguely aware he’s even alive.

Let this be a lesson about making teenagers your role models.

 

[gogglebob]

Donny vows to find some way to turn him back into a human

Spoilers for remainder of the series: Donatello never cures him. Ever. This sticks in my brain to this day.

 

[Octopus Prime]

It ain’t the kind of thing you fix up with a bowl of soup

 

[Octopus Prime]

Back to Fox for like 45 straight minutes of punching Return to New York Part 1 and 2

It’s a 3 parter so it cuts off before yet another 22 minutes worth of punches.

Anyway, after two episodes worth of coma related flashbacks and Bigfoot hunting, the Turtles have headed back to New York with the intent to kill Shredder since they’re pretty cheesed off that he tried to kill them and was pretty good at it.

Luckily the roving ninja army has pretty much vanished as Shredder was convinced they were dead, so, with no preamble, and with April acting as Mission Control, the Turtles and Splinter crash their van into the basement of the Foot skyscraper and then proceed to pulverize every. Single. Ninja. who works there.

It is straight up a video game where each floor is something wildly different and full of thematic ninjas.

They also manage to get through relatively unscathed consider the amount of cyborg ninjas and mutated Shredder clones and actual wizards they’re boss rushing their way though; Mikey loses his mask to a very close chainsaw and Splibter badly burns his hands fighting the Wizard Ninja, and Leo is still dealing with his PTSD from being nearly killed the last time he had to fight this many guys at once, but otherwise they reach the top floor intact, and have to deal with Shredder and the Foot Elite.

…only to have the floor cave in around them all as Baxter Stockman, now sporting an entire Metal Gear of a mech suit, explodes out of the ground and announces he’s going to kill the Shredder for all the mockery and abuse he put him through. And also the Turtles for being the guys who thwarted him so much.

Hurt People Hurt Turt People, I guess…

 

[Daikaiju]

This explains a lot. I never knew Laird was deeply involved in the '03 series.

 

[Octopus Prime]

All right, back at it with two Nick episodes

Parasitica is a monster of the week episode, and a Mikey focused one, and it’s pretty slight. The Turtles find a giant mutated wasp at a Krang base (weirdly it’s just a large wasp and not a gnarly bugman thing) and it winds up stinging Leo before they can kill it. This is a parasitic wasp so it winds up turning him into a zombie obsessed with protecting the wasp egg. He winds up infecting the rest of the turtles, but not before Donny can almost whip up a zombie vaccine, which Mikey manages to finish as he was actually paying attention to the instructions on how to finish making it. The Turtles acknowledge that Mikey *did* save the day, but most of the problem was his fault in the first place and he did it in the most obnoxious way possible so, no, they will not be grateful.

Operation Breakout is much more narrative heavy and sets things up for the season finale; April receives a coded message from her father showing where he’s being held captive, which Donny decides and he decides to launch a solo rescue mission in order to impress her.

Sidebar; April has been living in the sewers with four nuclear turtle men for a few months and has never been shown wearing a different outfit, so I’m assuming the girl needs a hundred showers.

Anyway, at the Krang Prison, Donny manages to find and rescue Aprils dad, and as part of the distraction he also lets the other prisoners escape, which, unfortunately includes the guys that the Krang had locked up for a good reason; the Newtralizer (who is The Punisher except a newt), who immediately goes on a killing rampage through the prison.

Dude straight up eats a Krang alive. Which I was not expecting to see in a children’s cartoon.

The rest of the Turtles realize their brother has done something uncharacteristically stupid for a characteristically stupid reason and launch their own rescue mission of Donny when they realize he’s in tremendous danger even without knowing about the alien killing machine he’s locked in with, and it leads to some jokey bits where they try to track him down by thinking like Donny (got some chuckles out of it), before finding him, Aprils dad and the alien gun lizard trying to murder everyone.

The Turtles manage to drive off Newtralizer, not permanently, more like they declare him a tomorrow kind of problem, and get Aprils dad back to the base… when we learn that the Krang were the ones who sent the coded message in the first place and allowed Aprils dad to be taken back to their base, on behalf of their new partner The Shredder, and because they needed to capture April for still unclear reasons.

Also, April can apparently hear Krang radio transmissions and she follows them to a piece of alien machinery she took back to the lair unaware of all the other stuff that was happening in the episode.

Busy day for the Turts!

 

[jpfriction]

April having magic ninja powers took me out of that show a bit, not gonna lie. Not really sure why that feels like a such a stretch to me in a children’s cartoon about nuclear turtle men but whataryagonnado.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Near the end of the first season, I like the Nick series plenty, but not *nearly* as much as I do the Fox series, so I’m probably going to focus on one instead of both

 

[Octopus Prime]

Back to Fox for two episodes that made me say “Yes! Hell Yes!!”

First, wrapping up the Return to New York 3 parter, where we left off with Baxter Stockman, in his shiny new Metal Gear-ass battle mech interrupting the final battle between the Turtles and Shredder… and we open with the Turtles and Foot teaming up to bring him down. Which takes half the episode because Baxter was not skimping on materials for once (presumably because this was a robot that was protecting him directly instead of being a henchman, and partly because he was basically robbing the Footclans resources to build it rather than his own). Eventually he’s beaten because Baxters gonna Baxter and he can’t help but brag about his armors weapon systems and Donny is able to use that to find its weak points and blow him up. Presumably to his death but he apparently died a few times in this fight so I don’t think it sticks. Plus i already know he’s in the rest of the series.

Anyway, despite coming together to fight a common foe, and even letting Shredder get in a few quips of his own (“What does it take to make this guy stay down?” “That’s a question I ask myself every day”), everyone remembers that the reason they’re here today is to kill one another so the Real Final Battle begins; between four exhausted Ninja Turtles and a Shredder who doesn’t seem any worse for wear despite a giant robot cracking his sternum like a walnut five minutes ago. Furthermore Shredder still has, like, so many Foot Ninja and Foot Elite and tanks and stuff waiting around in his penthouse Boss Level. Also Shredder kicks Splinter in the chest really hard and off the roof and he’s looking pretty damn busted up at the bottom.

Luckily those Blade looking guys who occasionally pop up to be enigmatic but helpful show up right around then, when they realize that the turtles have the Tengu Sword on hand and Shredder really wants it so… an extra pair of hands is appreciated.

Leo and Shredder face off, they do that Ninja Gaiden “two guys jump at each other and then there’s a slash sound” and Leo comes down and Shredders friggin’ head comes off. And to put a cap on it, he also uses the Tengu Sword to destroy the Foot Tower, also destroying the sword in the process.

All of which would have been a satisfying finale to both this storyline and the series, except when the turtles go to retrieve Splinter, they don’t find their badly hurt father or a smushed up sack of rat-pieces, he’s missing all together.

Lone Raph and Cub is a full episode homage to Lone Wolf and Cub, and had I seen that movie or any of its sequels I’d appreciate the homage more on that level, but on its own it’s still a really fun one.

Irritated that the rest of the team isn’t hunting for Splinter (partly because they’re still recovering and partly because all their stuff is still being repaired) Raph heads out on his own to look for him… and winds up finding a kid who is being attacked by some mafioso goons. Turns out that without Shredder around, the city has started to descend into an all out gang war, and this kid is the son of a reporter who was working on putting down one of the aspiring crime lords who is trying to step up, and she gave him the evidence she found that could do it.

So Raph winds up becoming the protector of the kid while being attacked by mob guys and trying to reunite him with his mother (who is just kidnapped and not *totally murdered* by deadly mob guys). Raph winds up bonding with the kid on the grounds that they’re both extremely short tempered and looking for a missing single parent, though the kid drastically misjudges how helpful he is in a fight owing to the fact that he’s not a nuclear turtle man who is a skilled martial artist. But he also winds up needing to rely on the kid after he’s temporarily blinded.

Eventually Raph finds and beats the bajeezus out of the mob boss (who looks like a recolored Hun) and reunites the kid with his mom (who looks a lot like Irma from the original cartoon, but no hay is made of that so it may be a coincidence) and, satisfied at having beating the crap out of a lot of low level goons, Raph… goes on to just beat the hell out of those same goons again because his sights been restored and he was enjoying himself.

 

[Octopus Prime]

And we’re wrapping up season one of the Nick series with Showdown (apart 1 and 2)

So the Turtles catch wind that the Krang have apparently done enough prep work for their conquest of Earth and opted to just get on with it by summoning the main attack ship of their army; The Technodrome and laying waste to the planet with that.

Just them saying the word “Technodrome” excited me in ways that all the other 80s callbacks failed to do, I think it’s because I love the sound of that name.

Anyhoo, the Turts launch a desperate attack on the TCRI building to disable to Dimension Portal to stop the Technodrome from being summoned, and Splinter elects to stay behind and doesn’t elaborate on why (context clues being that he’s really sure he just sent at least one and possibly all of his sons to their deaths and doesn’t want to watch that happen. You know… again). Fortunately, this winds up being a good idea since April immediately gets kidnapped by the Foot, who issue Splinter an ultimatum to save her, because Shredder is also tired of not fighting his greatest nemesis and wants to tick that off his to do list.

The Turtles fail to destroy the Dimension Portal (the weapon they were relying on to do that ran out of ammo because that giant Stone Warrior was still there and conventional weapons wouldn’t hurt it) so Leo decides to sacrifice his life and destroy the building to stop the Technodrome from arriving. He botches this both in the sense that he survives, and the Technodrome has already arrived. Looking way more like one of those giant Independence Day spaceships than a Big Eyeball Tank.

Splinter, meanwhile makes his way through the Foot fortress, single handedly dispatches the entire Foot Clan, as well as Bradford and Xever, without breaking a sweat. Or even with background music before confronting Shredder himself, who reveals he’s already handed April off to the Krang since she’s still important to their invasion plans, even though there’s a gargantuan warship in the sky right now turning the city to rubble and abducting people left and right.

On the Ship April is taken to the Krangs leader, who differentiates herself from the other Krang by being enormous and having a slightly different speech pattern and mouth. Also she puts a different emphasis on her name, who reveals that April is needed because “her brain patterns are uniquely attuned to this universe”, which I think means “the writers could not think of a reason for April to be important to the invasion”, and Krang Prime starts torturing her in order to get… her… brain waves?

The Turtles sneak on board the Drome, fight a ridiculous number of Krang, and eventually track down April and Krang Prime, saving the former and revealing that the latter is a giant brain in the tummy of a comparably giant robot (surprisingly, not a visual reference to Krangs Robot Body to be seen). Leo tries to sacrifice himself to save the day and destroy the Drome again, and again proves the foreshadowing of “At Least One Turtle Will Die” false by surviving. And in the close out we see that the Drome is also still active, just badly damaged.

Splinter meanwhile gets the upper hand on Shredder and manages to almost land a fatal blow on him when Karainsteps in to save her father, just as Shredder reveals that Karainis, in truth, Splinters daughter who he stole and raised as his own when he previously burned Splinters house down and killed his wife.

He still bears a grudge that Splinter “betrayed him” by marrying the girl he had a crush on. Which isn’t quite as bad as being the head of a murderous ninja crime syndicate but, like… Be Better, Shredder.

Anyway, Splinter really can’t bring himself to fight his daughter, and learning she was raised by the guy who tried real hard to kill him and incinerated his wife and just elects to leave, deeming today to be one full of personal disappointments (except for New York not being destroyed by a gargantuan alien warship, that’s a net positive all together).

Oh, and also the tracking chip on Aprils Dads Neck was finally discovered and destroyed, which is a big part of how the villains respective plans proceeded as well as they had up until now. I forgot Aprils Dad was a character for long stretches of this show.

 

[Octopus Prime]

And we’re finishing off season 1 of Fox with The Search for Splinter (Part 1 and 2)

After one whole episode of looking for their smashed up rat dad and finding nothing, the Turts decide to do some investigating more thorough than finding any assortment of random criminals and beating the hell out of them by tracking down one of those Blade looking guys and asking if they know anything about his disappearance on the basis that they last showed up when Splinter was hurt and all disappeared at the same time.

They do, by faking the return of the Shredder to lure one out, and they follow him back to his home; the Techno Cosmic Research Institute, or TCRI.

Oh, that’s a relevant name for the greater TMNT canon.

So the Turtles figure this is their best lead and also that it could shed some light on their origins. They almost say it could be the Secret of the Ooze, but they proved themselves once again to be cowards by being embarrassed of the franchise they’re attached to.

Anyway, with Casey acting as a distraction (smashing up the lobby with a baseball bat screaming to talk to a manager for bad customer service), April sneaks into the building and has a… ludicrously easy time finding a computer terminal to hack into to help the Turtles with their own, much deeper penetration into the TCRI building.

Casey demanding to speak to a manager while trying to return a toaster and smashing a room is definitely one of the moments that most stuck with me over the years.

As for the Turts, it turns out they didn’t need that much outside help anyway since most of the buildings defenses are much more passive than anticipated; lots of maze like repeating corridors and hologram walls than, like… gun turrets and the like.

One window apparently vents super heated plasma out of a window at regular intervals which you’d think the neighbours would complain about but that’s New York for ya, baby!

Eventually the Turtles make their way into the sub basement of the building where the art takes a turn for the Giger and everything goes all… flesh machine, and the buildings employees reveal themselves to be little fleshy tentacle monsters in robot bodies, wearing skin suits; the Utroms.

The Utroms, despite being freaky little guys, don’t seem to be overly hostile but are definitely panicked that a bunch of vigilante nuclear turtle men broke into their house and react accordingly; screaming and shooting lasers at them.

The Turtles flee, lost in the maze of gross biomechanics, and eventually find Splinter! Suspended, unconscious in a tube of slime!
Donny tries to get him out but just because he Does Machines, Giger-esque flesh computers have a bit of a learning curve, and besides, the machine seems to be keeping him alive and healing the wounds he got from being struck by lighting and fire and kicked off a high rise. So… maybe let him sleep in a bit?

This is also when the rest of the TCRI security shows up, and a fight breaks out and the Turtles eventually make their way to a weird platform, which activates despite the best efforts of the head of TCRI; Dr. Mordru, and… umm… completely disintegrates the turtles where they stand.

Well… shows over I guess?

 

[Daikaiju]

Best Utrom representation to date.

 

[Octopus Prime]

As a postmortem. I like the Fox series a lot more.

the Nick one is good, and if there were kids in the house watching the show as obsessively as I did when I was a kid, I would have no complaints. The animation is clean, the action is excellently rendered and the revival of the characters from the 80s cartoon are clever reinterpretations.it also has, by far, my favourite Splinter. And Jeffrey Combs!

On the other hand, not nearly as smitten with the turtles themselves. I like Leo’s arc of not actually being a leader and trying to work himself into the role, but Donnys thing is either being exasperated or being kind of creepy obsessed with April, which isn’t a great look, Raph is more bitter and rude and… Mikey is just a dope. Contrast to the Fox, where… well, Leo doesnt have a lot going on, Raph is about two seconds from murdering everything in his line of sight, Donny is more socially acceptable kind of nerd and Mikey is light hearted, but goal oriented. Also it has Casey, who acts as a combination of Raph and Mikey in being a violent lunatic partydude, and April who is a combination of Leo and Donny by being a science nerd girl boss.

On the other hand, the Fox series is the one that’s really embarrassed to be to a TMNT adaptation and it’s a running joke that they never let Mikey use any of his old catch phrases and, IIRC, whenever anything even close to a reference to the original cartoon comes up, it’s immediately dismissed as being idiotic. It’s taking the ”We’re you expecting yellow spandex?” thing from X-Men extended to a children’s cartoon designed to sell toys of a nuclear turtle man

 

[jpfriction]

Nick has Casey too. He sucks.

 

[Daikaiju]

We have to add a slot.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Okay, just going to focus on Fox, since… I like that series a more and dividing my focus wasn’t making me appreciate the Nick series as much as I could; felt like it was an impediment to The Good Stuff.

SO ANYWAY, season 2 kicks off with a 5-part Turtles In Space arc, starting with The Fugitoid

As the previous cliffhanger left off, the Turts were blasted by a giant laser and disintegrated. Luckily, as it turns out; they weren’t. It was actually a teleport array and they were blasted clear outside the galaxy to a planet the subtitles indicated is called “Dehumid”. Furthermore, they landed in an alleyway where they stood between a whole bunch of armed soldiers cornering a timid, silver robot; the titular Fugitoid.

The Turts immediately recognize the squad of soldiers aiming weapons at a cowering, defenseless guy as “the bad guys” and proceed to whip their asses (kind of surprising to immediately recognize the army as being uniformly The Bad Guys in a cartoon produced by Fox, in the early 00s), and the Fugitoid helps them escape, while providing some Necessary context because, even by the standards of vigilante nuclear turtle men, they’ve had an unusual day.

The robot was originally a scientist named Dr. Honeycutt who was supposed to be developing weapons for the tyrannical General Blancque, but mainly used his money to build tools with much more peaceful applications. Unfortunately one of them, a powerful teleportation device, had some pretty drastic military applications that Honeycutt didn’t anticipate (such as being able to teleport nuclear weapons inside unsuspecting cities, or planets). Honeycutt refused to actually share that knowledge when he realized what he built but, luckily, he was struck by lightning while grabbing his robot butler and it caused them to swap brains. It also caused an elderly man to be struck by a lightning bolt so… he dead.

Anyway, this is good for Honeycutt since the robot body is a lot sturdier than his frail old man body, and good for the general since it’s a hell of a lot easier to steal information from a CPU than from a guy who doesn’t want to tell you anything, so all he has to do is apprehend a clumsy robot with a nerd brain.

The Turtles hear this and think “Oh! Teleported! We need one of them!” and agree to help get Honeycutt away from the military in exchange for him letting them go back home.

But, added wrinkle, the second in command of Blancques army is actually a traitor working with the federations main enemy; The Triceraton Empire who also want the teleportal technology so they can secure their own place as the dominant military power in the galaxy.

Which brings us to The Trouble With Triceratons. Which continues with a lot of the Turtles and Fugitoid fleeing from soldiers, and more than a few Star Wars references, but now with the added trouble of there also being giant outer-space Dino-Men in the thick of things.

After a shoot out at a Mos Eisley Cantina complete with a Han Solo and Chewbacca expy, and a disguised Mikey getting hit on by an alien who sounds exactly like Raph, the Turtles manage to get out of the city, and hide in an abandoned silo in a farm outside of town.

Then Leonnotices that relatively few grain silos have cargo holds and airlocks in them. And then the silo takes off because it was actually the Triceraton ship disguised as a barn.

The silo looked exactly the same as all the futuristic buildings and vehicles everywhere else on the planet so I don’t know why they were surprised to learn it wasn’t a barn. Or why they thought it was.

The turtles are used to vigilante inner city crime with the occasional supervillain so spaceships and the like are a bit out of their weight class, and also this is an enemy ship now fleeing a military blockade so the Triceraton ship takes a few minor hits. Which would be fine except the room that got a hole blasted into it is the cargo bay the Turtles were hiding in, so now it has no air *or* gravity.

So, luckily, thats only a short term problem.

 

[Octopus Prime]

And the Turtles continue to be in space in Turtles In Space: The Big House and The Arena

So, as per the cliffhanger at the end of the last episode, the Turtles are left adrift in a cargo bay that’s experiencing explosive decompression in a Triceraton Ship. Luckily, part of their Ninja training involves breathing exercises just in case they get lost in space, so they’re able to survive a trip from one planet to another easily. Unfortunately, it turns out that Triceratons don’t breathe oxygen so when they arrive on the Triceraton home world (a series of chained together Asteroids with dome-cities, it’s pretty sick looking) they immediately asphyxiate anyway until they’re found by the guards, fixed with breathing masks, and hauled off to jail on the crime of being stowaways

Meanwhile, Honeycutt was also taken by the dinosaurs, but is having a much easier time of things as their Prime Leader wants the information he has on building teleportals and is really trying to suck up to him. This doesn’t work since… they’re giant dinosaur men with a very martial culture and should probably not be given the keys to a potential doomsday device.

Honeycutt, however, also lets it slip that the turtles are his friends so that gives the Prime Leader all the information he needs to know he has leverage and vows to kill the turtles unless Honeycutt builds The Portal.

Unfortunately he badly misjudged how good the Turtles are at… like… everything; they’re not in jail for an afternoon before they prepare and launch a breakout, making makeshift weapons and tools out of janitorial supplies and cooking supplies.

I feel like most prison cafeterias don’t use metal utensils for just this reason, but we got Raph yelling “SPOOOON!” while whacking people with spoons and a lovingly rendered fight scene of the yurts just going all Jackie Chan with improvised weapons, so I’m in no position to complain.

Anyway, the breakout goes great until they transition from unarmed guards to trained soldiers with guns, and the Turtles are instead thrown into a gladiatorial arena for some straight up public execution, and that means the story has turned into a Gladiator homage for an episode.

The Turtles immediately become crowd favorites since if there’s one thing they excel at, it’s beating ass into the ground, and when it’s against things that don’t look human enough for BS&P to raise an eyebrow, they do an even better job of it.

Naturally this leads to the Prime Leader forcing them into increasingly lopsided battles because his whole “threaten the Turtles to coerce his captive mad scientist” plan is really falling apart, but the Turtles’ fighting skill combined with the fact that they’re clearly the underdogs opposing the Prime Leaders oppressive regime makes some allies out of their fellow gladiators as well, including the guy who was trying to overthrow the Prime Leader since he was a duplicitous jackass instead of a Noble Warrior.

Anyway, the crowd reacts really badly to the Leader calling for the mass execution of the Turtles and their allies despite them beating the crap out of a bunch of monsters and a squad of elite soldiers and also calling out the Emperor specifically for being a big ol’ jerk, but that doesn’t stop a whole bunch of much more heavily armed soldiers barging in to quell the incipient uprising.

Meanwhile, General Blanque just learned that Honeycutt was kidnapped by the Triceratons and he’s bringing his whole armada to their Homeworld in order to get him back because, dammit, he wants a doomsday device.

I’m sure it will all end peacefully

 

[Daikaiju]

Anyway, the breakout goes great until they transition from unarmed guards to trained soldiers with guns, and the Turtles are instead thrown into a gladiatorial arena for some straight up public execution, and that means the story has turned into a Gladiator homage for an episode.

Nope. This is canon to the original Mirage comics. Also another reason this gambit fails for the Triceratons is Honeycutt will not bend. Despite the turtles being in jeopardy, he's fully aware that his and their possible deaths are a pittance against what giving either side the teleporter would cause.