I love Honeycutt
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The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Group Watch Thread
- Thread starter Octopus Prime
- Start date
As is proper.
What better way to wrap up a big multi-part arc with the Turtles in space dealing with aliens than by starting a big multi episode arc about Turtles in space dealing with aliens.
So Turtles in Space ends with The Triceraton Wars, which to be fair is more of a skirmish than an actual war. As per the end of the last episodes, the Turtles have taken the Triceraton Leader hostage and are using him to help them and Honeycutt escape the Triceraton Homeworld; ideally by having Honeycutt build his teleportal and hecking off back to Earth With them so nobody in this galaxy has any chance of capturing him again.
Honeycutt thinks this is a best case scenario plan, and counteroffers him just committing suicide to ensure nobody can use his knowledge. Everyone talks him down from it but the rest of the episode is all Honeycutt asking people to euthanize him. It’s… a wildass choice for a Saturday morning cartoon.
It’s also undercut by the Prime Leader being cartoonishly sneaky in trying to get away from them and also smacking himself when he realized “Break the robot and steal its brain” was on the table as an option and he could have saved himself a lot of trouble doing that instead of trying to coerce him.
Anyway the Turtles and company make their way to an escape craft with the entire Triceraton fleet in pursuit (now with Kill instead of Capture orders for Honeycutt) and we get some more Star Wars homages, and then the day is saved… by General Blanque and his armada showing up to recapture Honeycutt and shoot down the Triceratons on general principle.
The Turtles use the… umm… active war zone as a way to distract the two armies while Donny and Honeycutt try to build the Teleportal as quickly as possible, and then Leo segues into trying to broker for peace between the armies when they both realize they should work towards the same goal; blow up Honeycutt and salvage his remains.
He succeeds only in getting them more riled up at each other but agreeing to work together to kill the Turtles and Honeycutt and then just fight over the remains without distraction.
This isn’t nearly enough time to build a teleportal out of scrap iron and salvaged spaceship pieces, and the two armies on verge on the Turtles and Fugitoid and Honeycutt hands Leo a grenade and says “Do me a favor and kill us all *right now*” and even knowing there’s still, like, another hundred episodes I was left going “Okay… what’s going to happen now?”
And then a giant laser hits them from space instead…
Leading us to Secret Origins: Part 1
Yeah it was the same giant space laser that sent them to this Galaxy, the Utroms finally tracked them down and brought them back home to New York. And they are just tore up over this whole fiasco. Couldn’t be more
Embarrassed.
Furthermore, they also accidentally brought back a bunch of Federwtion and Tricerton troops, since precision aiming with a teleport laser being fired from one galaxy to another is a pretty big ask. They send most of them back except one Triceraton who gets lost in the confusion and slips into the sewers. I’m sure that won’t present any problems in the future. Also Honeycutt sticks around.
Anyway, the lead Utrom… whose name I kept forgetting (Mordu or Mordrid or something like that) is, again, just absolutely gutted about all this and decided that keeping the presence of slimy tentacle monsters in Terminator bodies a secret was probably not the best way to foster a sense of trust; so as a show of good faith he’s going to explain the corporate history of TCRI, and, as a show of good faith, bring out Splinter (who is now back to a picture of Nuclear Rat Man Health, as opposed to a smashed up sack of mouse bones) to confirm that, yes, these are the Good Guys.
And because the Utrom have a whole aesthetic, this means plugging the Turtles and Splinter into a Giger-y biomechanics flesh-pod and splashing their brains together, so they can see the Utrom history like a VR movie.
The Utrom, despite being nasty looking, are a whole species of real sweetie pies, except for one, Ch’rell, who was the most horrendous mass murderer the galaxy has ever known. He was finally apprehended and sentenced to… some manner of fate worse than death, but things went array.
Somehow Chrell broke out of his restraints and destroyed the Utrom ship, causing it to crash on the nearest inhabitable world; Earth. Specifically; Japan in the 11th century.
Their ship was absolutely totalled, so repair wasn’t an option, and Earth was extremely distant so rescue wasn’t coming; so, since Utroms live extremely long times, they decided to just wait around until human technology advanced to the point where MacGuyvering up intergalactic Travel became not completely impossible. And they used the salvaged bits of their ship to make humanoid exoskeletons so they could blend in a bit better with people who aren’t so accustomed to tiny alien tentacle monsters wobbling around.
Unfortunately, Chrell wasn’t killed in the crash and he steals one of the exoskeleton prototypes before disappearing.
Cut forward an unspecified number of years and the Utroms assimilated quickly; their robots look and move a lot more natural and things are going great… when their camp is suddenly attacked by Foot Ninjas, and what is unquestionably The Shredder, which is weird since this is definitely at least 800 years ago.
Meanwhile, outside the VR simulation Documentary, everyone in New York is kind of freaking out because the mysterious corporate office of TCRI has, twice in the same day, shot enormous lasers into space and even in TMNT New York, that’s something that elicits attention, so now there’s a huge military blockade around the building ready to bring it down in case things are about to get hairy.
Furthermore, Baxter Stockman is back! And now he’s… half of a severed head on a little spider robot. Which is quite a step down from the Metal Gear he was plugged into in his last appearance. He sneaks his way into the TCRI building and manages to make his way to the bio-mech pods the Turtles are in and hacks them so to disengage the safeties so now they *can* be hurt by the recordings, and also everyone in the recordings can notice them.
I know Baxter is a genius but this is a computer made of space meat and slime and it’s a prerecorded message so being able to hack it is wild.
Anyway, the Turtles suddenly find their weapons deleted form the simulation and also the original Shredder is staring them down and saying “Well… better kill these guys.”
So Turtles in Space ends with The Triceraton Wars, which to be fair is more of a skirmish than an actual war. As per the end of the last episodes, the Turtles have taken the Triceraton Leader hostage and are using him to help them and Honeycutt escape the Triceraton Homeworld; ideally by having Honeycutt build his teleportal and hecking off back to Earth With them so nobody in this galaxy has any chance of capturing him again.
Honeycutt thinks this is a best case scenario plan, and counteroffers him just committing suicide to ensure nobody can use his knowledge. Everyone talks him down from it but the rest of the episode is all Honeycutt asking people to euthanize him. It’s… a wildass choice for a Saturday morning cartoon.
It’s also undercut by the Prime Leader being cartoonishly sneaky in trying to get away from them and also smacking himself when he realized “Break the robot and steal its brain” was on the table as an option and he could have saved himself a lot of trouble doing that instead of trying to coerce him.
Anyway the Turtles and company make their way to an escape craft with the entire Triceraton fleet in pursuit (now with Kill instead of Capture orders for Honeycutt) and we get some more Star Wars homages, and then the day is saved… by General Blanque and his armada showing up to recapture Honeycutt and shoot down the Triceratons on general principle.
The Turtles use the… umm… active war zone as a way to distract the two armies while Donny and Honeycutt try to build the Teleportal as quickly as possible, and then Leo segues into trying to broker for peace between the armies when they both realize they should work towards the same goal; blow up Honeycutt and salvage his remains.
He succeeds only in getting them more riled up at each other but agreeing to work together to kill the Turtles and Honeycutt and then just fight over the remains without distraction.
This isn’t nearly enough time to build a teleportal out of scrap iron and salvaged spaceship pieces, and the two armies on verge on the Turtles and Fugitoid and Honeycutt hands Leo a grenade and says “Do me a favor and kill us all *right now*” and even knowing there’s still, like, another hundred episodes I was left going “Okay… what’s going to happen now?”
And then a giant laser hits them from space instead…
Leading us to Secret Origins: Part 1
Yeah it was the same giant space laser that sent them to this Galaxy, the Utroms finally tracked them down and brought them back home to New York. And they are just tore up over this whole fiasco. Couldn’t be more
Embarrassed.
Furthermore, they also accidentally brought back a bunch of Federwtion and Tricerton troops, since precision aiming with a teleport laser being fired from one galaxy to another is a pretty big ask. They send most of them back except one Triceraton who gets lost in the confusion and slips into the sewers. I’m sure that won’t present any problems in the future. Also Honeycutt sticks around.
Anyway, the lead Utrom… whose name I kept forgetting (Mordu or Mordrid or something like that) is, again, just absolutely gutted about all this and decided that keeping the presence of slimy tentacle monsters in Terminator bodies a secret was probably not the best way to foster a sense of trust; so as a show of good faith he’s going to explain the corporate history of TCRI, and, as a show of good faith, bring out Splinter (who is now back to a picture of Nuclear Rat Man Health, as opposed to a smashed up sack of mouse bones) to confirm that, yes, these are the Good Guys.
And because the Utrom have a whole aesthetic, this means plugging the Turtles and Splinter into a Giger-y biomechanics flesh-pod and splashing their brains together, so they can see the Utrom history like a VR movie.
The Utrom, despite being nasty looking, are a whole species of real sweetie pies, except for one, Ch’rell, who was the most horrendous mass murderer the galaxy has ever known. He was finally apprehended and sentenced to… some manner of fate worse than death, but things went array.
Somehow Chrell broke out of his restraints and destroyed the Utrom ship, causing it to crash on the nearest inhabitable world; Earth. Specifically; Japan in the 11th century.
Their ship was absolutely totalled, so repair wasn’t an option, and Earth was extremely distant so rescue wasn’t coming; so, since Utroms live extremely long times, they decided to just wait around until human technology advanced to the point where MacGuyvering up intergalactic Travel became not completely impossible. And they used the salvaged bits of their ship to make humanoid exoskeletons so they could blend in a bit better with people who aren’t so accustomed to tiny alien tentacle monsters wobbling around.
Unfortunately, Chrell wasn’t killed in the crash and he steals one of the exoskeleton prototypes before disappearing.
Cut forward an unspecified number of years and the Utroms assimilated quickly; their robots look and move a lot more natural and things are going great… when their camp is suddenly attacked by Foot Ninjas, and what is unquestionably The Shredder, which is weird since this is definitely at least 800 years ago.
Meanwhile, outside the VR simulation Documentary, everyone in New York is kind of freaking out because the mysterious corporate office of TCRI has, twice in the same day, shot enormous lasers into space and even in TMNT New York, that’s something that elicits attention, so now there’s a huge military blockade around the building ready to bring it down in case things are about to get hairy.
Furthermore, Baxter Stockman is back! And now he’s… half of a severed head on a little spider robot. Which is quite a step down from the Metal Gear he was plugged into in his last appearance. He sneaks his way into the TCRI building and manages to make his way to the bio-mech pods the Turtles are in and hacks them so to disengage the safeties so now they *can* be hurt by the recordings, and also everyone in the recordings can notice them.
I know Baxter is a genius but this is a computer made of space meat and slime and it’s a prerecorded message so being able to hack it is wild.
Anyway, the Turtles suddenly find their weapons deleted form the simulation and also the original Shredder is staring them down and saying “Well… better kill these guys.”
Secret Origins Part 2 is, it turns out, a speed run of the third Ninja Turtles movie; except it works considerably better. It also has a bunch of the regular voice affecting vague Asian accents because the shows casting budget can’t really afford more than the same dozen-ish people. So that kind of brings it down a bit.
Anyway, the Turtles are stuck with no weapons in a VR sim of Ancient Japan being attacked by the Foot and the forefather of the Shredder… but luckily the Turts are Really good at beating people up so this isn’t as lopsided as it appears. Plus we saw them fight an entire army of giant Dino-men warriors in the last arc so a bunch of people who are very good at martial arts feels like a step down.
Shredder thinks so too, so he orders a retreat when these weird nuclear turtle men start whupping on his elite troops, and decides to re-arm. And we see him forging the Tengu-Sword out of technology he salvaged from the crashed Utrom ship.
We also see him then summarily execute the blacksmiths he had forging the sword, but the BS&P folks were paying much closer attention now than they did in the first few episodes so they’re seen picking themselves up and groaning after Shredder blows them through a building with a huge blast of lightning.
Anyway, the Turts meet up with the Utroms after they save them from the Foot and they immediately become good friends with Mordu. Which translates to them also becoming good friends with the IRL Mordu because he’s *that nice* of a weird tentacle monster that he trusts his CG doppelgänger that represents what he was doing 800 years ago. The turtles also realize they’re not as trapped in the VR Sim as they thought since it apparently works on Matrix rules and they can just control it by sheer force of will; letting them escape the sim and also blowing Shredder off a cliff to what is assuredly his death.
…only for them to wake up in the Utrom headquarters again, with the present day Shredder, who is still real steamed that Leo decapitated him.
Which leads us to Secret Origins Part 3, where Shredder, the severed Head of Baxter Stockman, Hun and a whole whack of Foot Elite have infiltrated the TCRI building. Meanwhile the military is still, Ineffectively, Trying to break into the building to figure out why it’s constantly shooting giant space beams, and Casey and April are trying to get into the building slightly more coyly, by posing as a news crew. They best disguise they can manage is a bright yellow coveralls for her which completely fails to convince anyone she’s a reporter.
I usually don’t care for the jokes at the expense of the original cartoon but that one got a chuckle.
Anyway, regarding the Foot; they seem kind of surprised and unhappy that the Turtles are there, but they’re clearly a secondary priority; Shredder wants the Utrom dead and he very specifically wants Mordu dead, between that and his recovering from decapitation, the Turts to realize it wasn’t Shredders Great Great (etc) Grandpa they fought in the VR sim; it was the same guy and Shredder is apparently immortal.
Furthermore he has verbal control over Baxters nasty little Spider robot body and Baxter is really unhappy about that.
Shredder also reveals his plan was always to kill the Utroms on Earth after they finished their Transporter device to return to their homeworld once he found them, since, for one thing he wanted to really twist the knife on his getting revenge against them, and secondly because he wanted to go to their homeworld and murder the entire species by hand.
The Turtles oppose this partly on the grounds of now being friends with the l’il squids and mostly because they’re generally anti-genocide, and a fight breaks out; during which Shredder deploys a computer/regular virus that infects the whole of the TCRIs nasty biomechanical infrastructure; forcing the Utrom to set their entire base to implode to keep it from infecting and killing the rest of the city; and also causing them to speed up their time table to get the Utroms sent back to their homeworld ahead of schedule.
So they start a mass evacuation with the double ticking clock of the building dying and about to implode and also all the on site Foot and Shredder all trying to kill the Turtles personally. The tide is eventually turned when Honeycutt realizes he can change the sound of his voice and he immitates Shredder to start controlling Baxter.
One of the Utroms is also mentioned by name as “Krang” and everyone hates him.
Anyway, final battle between the Turtles and Shredder kicks off and they manage to beat him by sticking all their weapons through his armor while Donny fries him with a torn up electric cord and his crispy corpse falls to the ground still smoking…
And then Shredders chest breaks open and Ch’rell the Criminal Utrom crawls out of his torso! There never was an Oroku Saki, he was a nasty alien murderer all along.
Shredder is still dangerous as a little lump of tentacles and spite (even if he’s weirdly cute this way) but he’s still substantially less dangerous now that he’s not wearing several hundred pounds worth of knives, so they boot him across the room and hop into the Transporter themselves after everyone else has gone back to the Utrom homeworld, and teleport… across the street, just as the building collapses in on itself killing Shredder.
I mean… fourth times the charm, right?
So the Turtles reunite with April and Casey and happily go back home.
And Honeycutt went to the Utrom homeworld earning a happy ending for himself.
And a large reptilian figure was seen crawling out of the wreckage of the TCRI Building which is surely nothing to worry about
Anyway, the Turtles are stuck with no weapons in a VR sim of Ancient Japan being attacked by the Foot and the forefather of the Shredder… but luckily the Turts are Really good at beating people up so this isn’t as lopsided as it appears. Plus we saw them fight an entire army of giant Dino-men warriors in the last arc so a bunch of people who are very good at martial arts feels like a step down.
Shredder thinks so too, so he orders a retreat when these weird nuclear turtle men start whupping on his elite troops, and decides to re-arm. And we see him forging the Tengu-Sword out of technology he salvaged from the crashed Utrom ship.
We also see him then summarily execute the blacksmiths he had forging the sword, but the BS&P folks were paying much closer attention now than they did in the first few episodes so they’re seen picking themselves up and groaning after Shredder blows them through a building with a huge blast of lightning.
Anyway, the Turts meet up with the Utroms after they save them from the Foot and they immediately become good friends with Mordu. Which translates to them also becoming good friends with the IRL Mordu because he’s *that nice* of a weird tentacle monster that he trusts his CG doppelgänger that represents what he was doing 800 years ago. The turtles also realize they’re not as trapped in the VR Sim as they thought since it apparently works on Matrix rules and they can just control it by sheer force of will; letting them escape the sim and also blowing Shredder off a cliff to what is assuredly his death.
…only for them to wake up in the Utrom headquarters again, with the present day Shredder, who is still real steamed that Leo decapitated him.
Which leads us to Secret Origins Part 3, where Shredder, the severed Head of Baxter Stockman, Hun and a whole whack of Foot Elite have infiltrated the TCRI building. Meanwhile the military is still, Ineffectively, Trying to break into the building to figure out why it’s constantly shooting giant space beams, and Casey and April are trying to get into the building slightly more coyly, by posing as a news crew. They best disguise they can manage is a bright yellow coveralls for her which completely fails to convince anyone she’s a reporter.
I usually don’t care for the jokes at the expense of the original cartoon but that one got a chuckle.
Anyway, regarding the Foot; they seem kind of surprised and unhappy that the Turtles are there, but they’re clearly a secondary priority; Shredder wants the Utrom dead and he very specifically wants Mordu dead, between that and his recovering from decapitation, the Turts to realize it wasn’t Shredders Great Great (etc) Grandpa they fought in the VR sim; it was the same guy and Shredder is apparently immortal.
Furthermore he has verbal control over Baxters nasty little Spider robot body and Baxter is really unhappy about that.
Shredder also reveals his plan was always to kill the Utroms on Earth after they finished their Transporter device to return to their homeworld once he found them, since, for one thing he wanted to really twist the knife on his getting revenge against them, and secondly because he wanted to go to their homeworld and murder the entire species by hand.
The Turtles oppose this partly on the grounds of now being friends with the l’il squids and mostly because they’re generally anti-genocide, and a fight breaks out; during which Shredder deploys a computer/regular virus that infects the whole of the TCRIs nasty biomechanical infrastructure; forcing the Utrom to set their entire base to implode to keep it from infecting and killing the rest of the city; and also causing them to speed up their time table to get the Utroms sent back to their homeworld ahead of schedule.
So they start a mass evacuation with the double ticking clock of the building dying and about to implode and also all the on site Foot and Shredder all trying to kill the Turtles personally. The tide is eventually turned when Honeycutt realizes he can change the sound of his voice and he immitates Shredder to start controlling Baxter.
One of the Utroms is also mentioned by name as “Krang” and everyone hates him.
Anyway, final battle between the Turtles and Shredder kicks off and they manage to beat him by sticking all their weapons through his armor while Donny fries him with a torn up electric cord and his crispy corpse falls to the ground still smoking…
And then Shredders chest breaks open and Ch’rell the Criminal Utrom crawls out of his torso! There never was an Oroku Saki, he was a nasty alien murderer all along.
Shredder is still dangerous as a little lump of tentacles and spite (even if he’s weirdly cute this way) but he’s still substantially less dangerous now that he’s not wearing several hundred pounds worth of knives, so they boot him across the room and hop into the Transporter themselves after everyone else has gone back to the Utrom homeworld, and teleport… across the street, just as the building collapses in on itself killing Shredder.
I mean… fourth times the charm, right?
So the Turtles reunite with April and Casey and happily go back home.
And Honeycutt went to the Utrom homeworld earning a happy ending for himself.
And a large reptilian figure was seen crawling out of the wreckage of the TCRI Building which is surely nothing to worry about
Laird airing a grievence?
Okay, so Remembrances is a clip show so we can just skip right over that. The Turtles remember all the times they fought the Shredder and ultimately decide that being stripped of his armor and in an imploding building that left an empty crater probably didn’t kill him.
The Ultimate Ninja however is… not much more robust narratively, being a 20 minute fight scene, but it does set up one of the other Big Arcs in the series.
So after getting all jazzed up watching an old Western (with narrative parallels to this episode in fact!) the Turtles, Splunter, April and Casey all go out for ice cream. This is TMNT New York so I don’t think too hard about how the giant rat man and the nuclear turtles avoid detection doing this. But people also don’t notice the freak lightning storm that causes a magic super ninja to appear in the middle of the street like the opening of Terminator. This is the self-appointed titular Ultimate Ninja, and I do not know if he has an actual name. He has Classic Ninja Robes, Wolverine Claws, Spawn Cape, a dragon mask, and a real hankering to prove he’s the greatest warrior on the Earth by killing the current holder of “Greatest Warrior on Earth”; The Shredder.
But he’s dead, so he pivots over to Leonardo, who did outfight and decapitate Shredder that one time.
None of which surprises Splinter in the slightest; his reaction to a magical superninja from another world showing up to Bloodsport his son is an exasperated “Ugh, this guy”.
So everyone except Leo gets locked into a magical holding pen by a ghostly referee in a Kabuki mask (getting increasingly confused because, even by Ninja Turtle standards this is a weird day, while Splinter explains the granular rules of multiversal combat) while Leo 1v1s The Ultimate Ninja. He eventually wins because, while Ulti has the vast advantage in terms of weapons and experience, Leo is fighting on behalf of saving his friends and family as opposed to personal glory (hey! Just like that movie they were watching earlier). And because Ultimate Ninja is a sore loser, he then tries to kill everyone who witnessed him lose with a giant magic dragon summon attack.
At which point his father, an even taller man with a lion mask and king robes appears and blows up the dragon and apologizes to the Turtles and company for what an asshole his son is, and whisks them back to from whence they came. He also knows Splinter by name and Splinter is on a pretty casual friendly terms with him.
The King also mentions that his people bestowed ninjitsu on the people of Earth hundreds of years ago and were thought to be goblins because of it.
So the Turtles collectively ask “What the hell was all that?!?” And Splinter says “Ahhhh don’t worry about it.” Because we’re teeing up a later storyline
The Ultimate Ninja however is… not much more robust narratively, being a 20 minute fight scene, but it does set up one of the other Big Arcs in the series.
So after getting all jazzed up watching an old Western (with narrative parallels to this episode in fact!) the Turtles, Splunter, April and Casey all go out for ice cream. This is TMNT New York so I don’t think too hard about how the giant rat man and the nuclear turtles avoid detection doing this. But people also don’t notice the freak lightning storm that causes a magic super ninja to appear in the middle of the street like the opening of Terminator. This is the self-appointed titular Ultimate Ninja, and I do not know if he has an actual name. He has Classic Ninja Robes, Wolverine Claws, Spawn Cape, a dragon mask, and a real hankering to prove he’s the greatest warrior on the Earth by killing the current holder of “Greatest Warrior on Earth”; The Shredder.
But he’s dead, so he pivots over to Leonardo, who did outfight and decapitate Shredder that one time.
None of which surprises Splinter in the slightest; his reaction to a magical superninja from another world showing up to Bloodsport his son is an exasperated “Ugh, this guy”.
So everyone except Leo gets locked into a magical holding pen by a ghostly referee in a Kabuki mask (getting increasingly confused because, even by Ninja Turtle standards this is a weird day, while Splinter explains the granular rules of multiversal combat) while Leo 1v1s The Ultimate Ninja. He eventually wins because, while Ulti has the vast advantage in terms of weapons and experience, Leo is fighting on behalf of saving his friends and family as opposed to personal glory (hey! Just like that movie they were watching earlier). And because Ultimate Ninja is a sore loser, he then tries to kill everyone who witnessed him lose with a giant magic dragon summon attack.
At which point his father, an even taller man with a lion mask and king robes appears and blows up the dragon and apologizes to the Turtles and company for what an asshole his son is, and whisks them back to from whence they came. He also knows Splinter by name and Splinter is on a pretty casual friendly terms with him.
The King also mentions that his people bestowed ninjitsu on the people of Earth hundreds of years ago and were thought to be goblins because of it.
So the Turtles collectively ask “What the hell was all that?!?” And Splinter says “Ahhhh don’t worry about it.” Because we’re teeing up a later storyline
Modern Love or The Return of Nano (Paramount lists one title, the episode lists the other) is another filler episode. Remember Nano, the weird little trash Frankenstein nanomachine swarm that thought a conman was its dad and then the Turtles threw it in an incinerator? Well, it’s back. Turns out “fire and smushing” isn’t enough to kill a nanobot swarm. Moreover it’s spent the months since being squished and left for dead watching old Leave it to Beaver style sitcoms and decided that it wants a family, and that means reconnecting its father (aforesaid conman and thief) with its mother (the scientist lady who built Nano in the first place and immediately marked it for destruction when it developed any emotional attachment to anyway).
Naturally it does this by bashing down the prison walls to steal its dad and abducts its mother by turning its body into a huge people stealing vending machine golem, then forcing them to live out its Dennis the Menace dreams of a stable nuclear family.
The Turtles try to stop this partly out of Donny feeling somewhat obligated to be nice to machines and many because “trash monster is engineering prison breaks” seems like a TMNT kind of problem.
Also, it should be noted, the criminal and the scientist have *never* met each other before, do not like each other, and blame one another for the fact that their emotionally fragile mecha baby kidnapped them, and Nano reacts as one would expect a small child watching their parents fight would. Difference being that this small child is the size of a small building and can conjure mechanical saws and spikes when it’s upset. Nano eventually takes his forced family to Coney Island since, for one thing, that’s where Happy Family’s go and he wants his parents to be happy, and partly because that’s where the criminal stashed all his stolen goods… and being obscenely wealthy through crime is what makes *him* happy. This also interferes with Casey and Aprils working date, as Casey got a part time job repairing the rides at the park.
This is also when the Turtles catch up with them, and Nano remembers the last episode where they all teamed up to beat the crap out of him, set him on fire and squish him to death, so he’s really not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on being his friend, and a fight breaks out between the Turts and Nano, now a Kaiju made of broken rollercoasters, until Donny whips up an EMP strong enough to disable the nanomachines holding his body together; killing Nano and setting his captives free. Well… except the father who is immediately thrown back in jail. And April is given a reward for giving back the stolen loot Nano retrieved and now has enough money to rebuild her home that Shredder burned down a dozen or so episodes ago. And the scientist continued her goal of becoming a God Empress of an Emotionless Nanomachine Race?
What A Croc feels more consequential, narratively and has not one but two references to the original cartoon and neither are there to ridicule it! Wild, I know!
Mikey is helping Don test some SCUBA equipment he whipped up in his spare time (can’t… turtles breathe underwater?) which affords him the chance to explore the deep, submerged parts of the Sewers they’d never been in before. And immediately he finds a giant crocodile man in a lab coat; Leatherhead, working on an Utrom exoskeleton.
He isn’t Cajun, which is a big mark against it, but he does sound like someone doing a convincing enough Micheal Dorn impression that I can pretend he’s Worf.
The turtles are weirdly reluctant to accept Mikey’s reports of there being a giant nuclear crocodile man in the sewers considering… every word of how they identify themselves.
Anyway, Mikey goes back and finds Leatherhead again and, after a quick misunderstanding introductory fistfight with the other Turtles they quickly learn that he’s a very nice crocodile man, who just has a bit of an anger management problem that he’s pretty good at handling honestly. He’s more 90s Hank McCoy than Bruce Banner.
Leatherhead explains his origins which were, in fact, nearly the same as the turtles; he was a pet crocodile who got flushed down into the sewers, where he was found and adopted by some Utrom cleaning up from a Mutagen spill they accidentally flushed. He was a beloved pet at first, and then they upgraded him to “friend and coworker” when they realized the ooze also turned him into a super intelligent giant crocodile man.
He was, unfortunately in the basement when the military raided the TCRI building and the Utrom left Earth so he was left behind and presumed dead by his adopted family, but he actually slipped into the sewers to try to build his own Transmat so he could return to the Utrom home world and reunite with them.
It took the Utrom, like, 800 years to do that and that’s with the resources of a major corporation behind them so… slow going, but he’s at least had the help of another brilliant scientist who wants the same goal.
Who it turns out is Baxter Stockman, now a disembodied head in an Utrom skeleton which is at least a big step up from “disembodied head on spider legs”. Moreover, he’s been using Leatherheads expertise and the spare Exoskeleton parts laying around to build a weapon that can match and kill the turtles; the robot Ninja Turtle Metalhead.
This leads to a really well animated fight between the turtles and Metalhead, where they’re outmatched until they realize that he’s copying their moves so… just attack him all at once and swap around weapons and he can’t keep up with them.
Unfortunately Baxter also accidentally mentions working for Shredder in the past, which sets Leatherhead into a rage (never met the guy but he knows the Utrom hated him), and in that ensuing fight he winds up bringing down the roof of the underground lab; Leatherhead sacrifices his life to save the Turtles, realizing he was never going to get a chance to reunite with his family and he wanted to save his friends (he knew them for, five minutes, he is ludicrously quick to befriend people) and the Turtles leave slightly bummed that Leatherhead died and annoyed that Baxter did not.
Naturally it does this by bashing down the prison walls to steal its dad and abducts its mother by turning its body into a huge people stealing vending machine golem, then forcing them to live out its Dennis the Menace dreams of a stable nuclear family.
The Turtles try to stop this partly out of Donny feeling somewhat obligated to be nice to machines and many because “trash monster is engineering prison breaks” seems like a TMNT kind of problem.
Also, it should be noted, the criminal and the scientist have *never* met each other before, do not like each other, and blame one another for the fact that their emotionally fragile mecha baby kidnapped them, and Nano reacts as one would expect a small child watching their parents fight would. Difference being that this small child is the size of a small building and can conjure mechanical saws and spikes when it’s upset. Nano eventually takes his forced family to Coney Island since, for one thing, that’s where Happy Family’s go and he wants his parents to be happy, and partly because that’s where the criminal stashed all his stolen goods… and being obscenely wealthy through crime is what makes *him* happy. This also interferes with Casey and Aprils working date, as Casey got a part time job repairing the rides at the park.
This is also when the Turtles catch up with them, and Nano remembers the last episode where they all teamed up to beat the crap out of him, set him on fire and squish him to death, so he’s really not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on being his friend, and a fight breaks out between the Turts and Nano, now a Kaiju made of broken rollercoasters, until Donny whips up an EMP strong enough to disable the nanomachines holding his body together; killing Nano and setting his captives free. Well… except the father who is immediately thrown back in jail. And April is given a reward for giving back the stolen loot Nano retrieved and now has enough money to rebuild her home that Shredder burned down a dozen or so episodes ago. And the scientist continued her goal of becoming a God Empress of an Emotionless Nanomachine Race?
What A Croc feels more consequential, narratively and has not one but two references to the original cartoon and neither are there to ridicule it! Wild, I know!
Mikey is helping Don test some SCUBA equipment he whipped up in his spare time (can’t… turtles breathe underwater?) which affords him the chance to explore the deep, submerged parts of the Sewers they’d never been in before. And immediately he finds a giant crocodile man in a lab coat; Leatherhead, working on an Utrom exoskeleton.
He isn’t Cajun, which is a big mark against it, but he does sound like someone doing a convincing enough Micheal Dorn impression that I can pretend he’s Worf.
The turtles are weirdly reluctant to accept Mikey’s reports of there being a giant nuclear crocodile man in the sewers considering… every word of how they identify themselves.
Anyway, Mikey goes back and finds Leatherhead again and, after a quick misunderstanding introductory fistfight with the other Turtles they quickly learn that he’s a very nice crocodile man, who just has a bit of an anger management problem that he’s pretty good at handling honestly. He’s more 90s Hank McCoy than Bruce Banner.
Leatherhead explains his origins which were, in fact, nearly the same as the turtles; he was a pet crocodile who got flushed down into the sewers, where he was found and adopted by some Utrom cleaning up from a Mutagen spill they accidentally flushed. He was a beloved pet at first, and then they upgraded him to “friend and coworker” when they realized the ooze also turned him into a super intelligent giant crocodile man.
He was, unfortunately in the basement when the military raided the TCRI building and the Utrom left Earth so he was left behind and presumed dead by his adopted family, but he actually slipped into the sewers to try to build his own Transmat so he could return to the Utrom home world and reunite with them.
It took the Utrom, like, 800 years to do that and that’s with the resources of a major corporation behind them so… slow going, but he’s at least had the help of another brilliant scientist who wants the same goal.
Who it turns out is Baxter Stockman, now a disembodied head in an Utrom skeleton which is at least a big step up from “disembodied head on spider legs”. Moreover, he’s been using Leatherheads expertise and the spare Exoskeleton parts laying around to build a weapon that can match and kill the turtles; the robot Ninja Turtle Metalhead.
This leads to a really well animated fight between the turtles and Metalhead, where they’re outmatched until they realize that he’s copying their moves so… just attack him all at once and swap around weapons and he can’t keep up with them.
Unfortunately Baxter also accidentally mentions working for Shredder in the past, which sets Leatherhead into a rage (never met the guy but he knows the Utrom hated him), and in that ensuing fight he winds up bringing down the roof of the underground lab; Leatherhead sacrifices his life to save the Turtles, realizing he was never going to get a chance to reunite with his family and he wanted to save his friends (he knew them for, five minutes, he is ludicrously quick to befriend people) and the Turtles leave slightly bummed that Leatherhead died and annoyed that Baxter did not.
IMPORTANT UPDATE
www.seibertron.com
The TMNT Transformers Crossover is a Turtle Van that Transforms into your Favourite Turtle
We finally have a look at the TMNT/Transformers crossover figure and it turns out that it doesn't turn into any specific turtle, but into whichever one you want. The turtle van turns into a generic Ninja Turtle and then there are visor/bandana head access
www.seibertron.com
Return to the Underground kind of felt like another filler episode, but also one that felt like it was an interstitial chapter of a different arc. S’weird.
Anyway, remember that secret underground Cthulhu city the Turts found last season after dealing with subterranean monsters who were actually humans transformed by alien crystals, and how Donny vowed to find a cure for them but then got sidetracked because the his life got really complicated for a while? Well… we’re between arcs so time to deal with that.
Luckily Donny has figured out a cure for Crystal induced Cthulhu-disease (turns out if you emulsify those same crystals, they become anti crystals) and he and the trusts head on down to Secret Cthulhu City to spread the good news!
And then they receive bad news since, being that it took, like, 6 or eight months for the Turtles to remember they had a sidequest on their mission log, the monster people. Decided to take matters into their own hands for curing themselves and did a really bad job of it; destroying the crystal moon that hung above the city that kept them human-shaped and sane.
Luckily Donny also built a lava proof super drilling tank in his off time (Don… file a patent!) and working with former Cool Bug/Werewolf/Dragon/Lady, Quarry/Sydney he manages to salvage the moon from the lava pool beneath the city and returns everyone to human-shape and administers the cure, finally letting them return to the surface.
Also while wandering though the monster infested city they find the Lone Survivor of the original inhabitants of the city, still frozen in Crystal stasis, where he was left in the last time this story was visited… alongside dozens upon dozens of other similarly frozen alien figures, which causes the turtles to think him saying he was the last of his kind to be perhaps disingenuous.
More on that later I suppose. More importantly; City At War Part 1, which is the next big arc, and from the pacing and a weirdly out of place theme song, I think might have originally been intended to be a movie? More cinematic than most of the show certainly,
Anyway, percolating way in the background of a number of recent episodes is that the level of gang violence in the city has been steadily increasing since the most recent time Shredder was killed and now it’s hit its crisis point as the Purple Dragons (lead by Hun), the Mafia (lead by an arms dealer who turns out to be Baxter Stockman) and the remnants of The Foot (lead by Shredders second in command; Karai) have opted for a Warriors style all out gang war, fighting for territory now that Shredder no longer has a stranglehold on the city.
Leo takes this extremely personally and feels at fault since the last time Shredder died the Turtles were responsible for it (technically shredder did that himself, but they did stab him a whole bunch and electrocute him first) and decides he has to single-handedly bring peace to the city, by alternating between beating the absolute hell out of every criminal himself in a way that minimizes collateral damage, or else by saving aforesaid criminals when they start fighting among each other.
It’s a very confusing strategy that every other character is quick to point out doesn’t make a lick of sense, and most of the warring gangs also just remember Leo as “the nuclear turtle man who beats them up every week”, so they don’t appreciate him horning in on their private business so this quickly serves to “Every Single Criminal vs. Leo”.
Then it becomes “every single criminal versus the Rest of the Turtles” since they weren’t keen on watching their brother get killed to pieces by all the bad guys.
4 against Everyone doesn’t really go better than 1 against everyone, however and the Turtles are vastly outnumber and outgunned (they’re used to dealing with, like, two dozen guys and a mini-boss, tops) and then Baxter sends a friggin’ Metal Gear out to blow up the building they’re in, giving Eaph enough time for a snide “I told you so” before the four of them die in flames under a collapsing warehouse.
Shows over, go home.
Anyway, remember that secret underground Cthulhu city the Turts found last season after dealing with subterranean monsters who were actually humans transformed by alien crystals, and how Donny vowed to find a cure for them but then got sidetracked because the his life got really complicated for a while? Well… we’re between arcs so time to deal with that.
Luckily Donny has figured out a cure for Crystal induced Cthulhu-disease (turns out if you emulsify those same crystals, they become anti crystals) and he and the trusts head on down to Secret Cthulhu City to spread the good news!
And then they receive bad news since, being that it took, like, 6 or eight months for the Turtles to remember they had a sidequest on their mission log, the monster people. Decided to take matters into their own hands for curing themselves and did a really bad job of it; destroying the crystal moon that hung above the city that kept them human-shaped and sane.
Luckily Donny also built a lava proof super drilling tank in his off time (Don… file a patent!) and working with former Cool Bug/Werewolf/Dragon/Lady, Quarry/Sydney he manages to salvage the moon from the lava pool beneath the city and returns everyone to human-shape and administers the cure, finally letting them return to the surface.
Also while wandering though the monster infested city they find the Lone Survivor of the original inhabitants of the city, still frozen in Crystal stasis, where he was left in the last time this story was visited… alongside dozens upon dozens of other similarly frozen alien figures, which causes the turtles to think him saying he was the last of his kind to be perhaps disingenuous.
More on that later I suppose. More importantly; City At War Part 1, which is the next big arc, and from the pacing and a weirdly out of place theme song, I think might have originally been intended to be a movie? More cinematic than most of the show certainly,
Anyway, percolating way in the background of a number of recent episodes is that the level of gang violence in the city has been steadily increasing since the most recent time Shredder was killed and now it’s hit its crisis point as the Purple Dragons (lead by Hun), the Mafia (lead by an arms dealer who turns out to be Baxter Stockman) and the remnants of The Foot (lead by Shredders second in command; Karai) have opted for a Warriors style all out gang war, fighting for territory now that Shredder no longer has a stranglehold on the city.
Leo takes this extremely personally and feels at fault since the last time Shredder died the Turtles were responsible for it (technically shredder did that himself, but they did stab him a whole bunch and electrocute him first) and decides he has to single-handedly bring peace to the city, by alternating between beating the absolute hell out of every criminal himself in a way that minimizes collateral damage, or else by saving aforesaid criminals when they start fighting among each other.
It’s a very confusing strategy that every other character is quick to point out doesn’t make a lick of sense, and most of the warring gangs also just remember Leo as “the nuclear turtle man who beats them up every week”, so they don’t appreciate him horning in on their private business so this quickly serves to “Every Single Criminal vs. Leo”.
Then it becomes “every single criminal versus the Rest of the Turtles” since they weren’t keen on watching their brother get killed to pieces by all the bad guys.
4 against Everyone doesn’t really go better than 1 against everyone, however and the Turtles are vastly outnumber and outgunned (they’re used to dealing with, like, two dozen guys and a mini-boss, tops) and then Baxter sends a friggin’ Metal Gear out to blow up the building they’re in, giving Eaph enough time for a snide “I told you so” before the four of them die in flames under a collapsing warehouse.
Shows over, go home.
Also important to note; when Donny is attacked by, like, 20 Foot Ninja, he tries his damndest to do that “spin around a pole and kick everyone around you in a circle” thing from Matrix Reloaded, and immediately falls flat on his ass because that’s not how physics works.
Then Raph makes fun of him
Then Raph makes fun of him
Okay, City At War part 2 and 3 are, again, pretty much two straight episodes of Dudes Punchin’ Dudes. Except that a lady gets in on the Dude Punchin’ this time as well.
Turns out the Turtles had a hole in a wall they could easily escape that collapsing building they spent the last cliffhanger trapped underneath, so that’s good news. However, Baxter’s deployed several more Metal Gears to fight them since he has, by this point, learned that you can’t really rely on an exploding building to kill these guys. So the Turts spend most of the episode trying to evade/destroy them while the collateral damage to the city reaches a new level.
Also, weirdly, Raph is really frustrated that Leo has lead them down a path that ends with him having simply oodles of Generic Bad Guys to beat the holy hell out of, and he decides to just say “For this reason I’m out” and leaves the rest of the team and sit out the gang war. Luckily, Casey notices his buddies are at the epicenter of a Streets of Fire-esque ridiculous escalation of gang warfare and acts as a ringer.
This is also about when Karai, the leader of the Japanese branch of the Foot arrives in New York hoping to fill void that the Shredder left But, luckily, unlike the other three factions who are tearing New York to shreds fighting for territory, she actually seems to be relatively benevolent and offers to work with the Turtles to bring a relatively peaceful end to the war.
Seems that the New York and Japan branches of the Foot have pretty different standards of morality and “Rampant Murder and Revenge” was more Shredders thing, not hers; she agrees that if the Turtles help her win the war she’ll nullify the blood vendetta the rest of the Foot Clan declared on them for killing Shredder, and restrict the Dragons to lower tier inner city crime. The mob she’ll presumably just wipe out since it’s not like they accomplish much in a setting that has ninja criminal organizations lead by a cyborg alien.
The Turtles agree since that’s basically a best case scenario for them, and they agree to help her first by having Kauai put on Shredders armor and giving her a voice modulator to trick everyone into thinking she’s him, back from the dead; then lure the leaders of the three gangs into the same place and kill them all in order to take control personally.
This might be ethically shaky, but, well, it’s the Purple Dragons, Mafia and Foot Clan, so… grading on a curve there.
Unfortunately the deception doesn’t work great since the Mafia had largely the same idea, the Foot Remnants see through the deception and, while Hun apparently has a specific grudge against Karai, he respects that she’s the co-leader of the Foot Clan and also his bosses daughter, leading to a schism between the Purple Dragons loyal to Hun and the ones who still want to carve up the city for their own personal fiefdoms, so now there’s FIVE groups all geared up for a final battle in the remains of the Foot headquarters and who are also all electing to have a bazooka-duel over it.
Luckily this is when Raph has a change of heart and brings Splinter with him so the Turts and friends can help cement Karai as leader and heir of Shredders empire, and leave half the Dragons and all the mafia extremely bazooka’d, and the rest of the Foot admit that, yeah, Karai is clearly worthy of replacing Shredder. Also Hun gets kicked off the roof of the building because… that’s what you do with that guy at this point.
And, as thanks, Karai does indeed confirm that she will make sure the Foot do not seek revenge on the Turtles for the three times they killed him. And Raph begrudgingly admits that while he still feels the Turtles have no blame in the outbreak of catastrophic gang violence that resulted form them killing Shredder this time, he has to admit that this was by far the best possible outcome this story could have had.
….riiiiight up to epilogue where we find Karai setting in to her new digs as Leader of the Foot Clan and her first order of business being watching over the freshly recovered Shredder who announced that he just can’t wait to get right back to murdering the hell out of some Ninja Turtles, and Karai thinking “Oh… this is…. An issue”
Turns out the Turtles had a hole in a wall they could easily escape that collapsing building they spent the last cliffhanger trapped underneath, so that’s good news. However, Baxter’s deployed several more Metal Gears to fight them since he has, by this point, learned that you can’t really rely on an exploding building to kill these guys. So the Turts spend most of the episode trying to evade/destroy them while the collateral damage to the city reaches a new level.
Also, weirdly, Raph is really frustrated that Leo has lead them down a path that ends with him having simply oodles of Generic Bad Guys to beat the holy hell out of, and he decides to just say “For this reason I’m out” and leaves the rest of the team and sit out the gang war. Luckily, Casey notices his buddies are at the epicenter of a Streets of Fire-esque ridiculous escalation of gang warfare and acts as a ringer.
This is also about when Karai, the leader of the Japanese branch of the Foot arrives in New York hoping to fill void that the Shredder left But, luckily, unlike the other three factions who are tearing New York to shreds fighting for territory, she actually seems to be relatively benevolent and offers to work with the Turtles to bring a relatively peaceful end to the war.
Seems that the New York and Japan branches of the Foot have pretty different standards of morality and “Rampant Murder and Revenge” was more Shredders thing, not hers; she agrees that if the Turtles help her win the war she’ll nullify the blood vendetta the rest of the Foot Clan declared on them for killing Shredder, and restrict the Dragons to lower tier inner city crime. The mob she’ll presumably just wipe out since it’s not like they accomplish much in a setting that has ninja criminal organizations lead by a cyborg alien.
The Turtles agree since that’s basically a best case scenario for them, and they agree to help her first by having Kauai put on Shredders armor and giving her a voice modulator to trick everyone into thinking she’s him, back from the dead; then lure the leaders of the three gangs into the same place and kill them all in order to take control personally.
This might be ethically shaky, but, well, it’s the Purple Dragons, Mafia and Foot Clan, so… grading on a curve there.
Unfortunately the deception doesn’t work great since the Mafia had largely the same idea, the Foot Remnants see through the deception and, while Hun apparently has a specific grudge against Karai, he respects that she’s the co-leader of the Foot Clan and also his bosses daughter, leading to a schism between the Purple Dragons loyal to Hun and the ones who still want to carve up the city for their own personal fiefdoms, so now there’s FIVE groups all geared up for a final battle in the remains of the Foot headquarters and who are also all electing to have a bazooka-duel over it.
Luckily this is when Raph has a change of heart and brings Splinter with him so the Turts and friends can help cement Karai as leader and heir of Shredders empire, and leave half the Dragons and all the mafia extremely bazooka’d, and the rest of the Foot admit that, yeah, Karai is clearly worthy of replacing Shredder. Also Hun gets kicked off the roof of the building because… that’s what you do with that guy at this point.
And, as thanks, Karai does indeed confirm that she will make sure the Foot do not seek revenge on the Turtles for the three times they killed him. And Raph begrudgingly admits that while he still feels the Turtles have no blame in the outbreak of catastrophic gang violence that resulted form them killing Shredder this time, he has to admit that this was by far the best possible outcome this story could have had.
….riiiiight up to epilogue where we find Karai setting in to her new digs as Leader of the Foot Clan and her first order of business being watching over the freshly recovered Shredder who announced that he just can’t wait to get right back to murdering the hell out of some Ninja Turtles, and Karai thinking “Oh… this is…. An issue”
Okay, two more filler episodes of such wildly varying quality that I’m kind of tempted to go back and figure out the creative teams on these.
The first, and weaker, is Junklantis, bringing back… probably the least compelling Original Character made for this show. Remember The Garbage Man? The guy who looked like Mojo from X-Men except trash and also he was building a garbage fortress in the middle of the New York bay using homeless people as conscripted labour? Well… he’s back and doing basically the same thing but without the enforced slavery and with more murder.
So Don and Mikey are out testing the submarine he built when they stumble upon a sub aquatic death fortress patrolled by giant crab and octopus robots.
Only in New York.
Anyway, they get captured since… that’s a pretty understandably confusing occurrence and they find out that apparently the Garbage Man didn’t drown when he was chucked into the river in his last appearance, and he spent the down time building an aqua base instead.
The only explanation for this being him saying “You threw me in *this* river”, which wasn’t much of an explanation at all. And he’s also been sinking all the freighters and cruise ships that travel through the bay in order to recycle their scrap into More Sea Fortress.
He’s sunk over 15 boats *in the middle of the bay* by this point as per a news report so… I mean… weird that nobody noticed the *GIANT AQUAFORTRESS* that’s killing people with cyberkrakens.
Anyway, there’s a fight, and a Submarine duel between Donny’s ship and one of the sea monster robots and Garbage Man gets blown up at the bottom of the bay and… I lay even-odds that he survived.
The Golden Puck, however, is The Good Kind of Bonkers and it’s what I want from a TMNT filler episode. It’s also a Casey centric episode, I do not think this is a coincidence.
So Casey has invited the Turtles to the final game of his new All Time Favorite Sport; Super Slam Hockey. Which appears to be like regular Hockey except played on a Roller Derby course and, as per the name, *way* more violent than either.
The episode seems to imply there’s a national league of this game but also that it’s played on secret arenas like it’s a death match cage fight tournament. But the important thing is that it’s the final match and to the champion team goes an entire fleet of snowmobiles and also The Golden Puck, a golden statue commissioned by the King of Holland in the 17th century that’s considered to be the worlds oldest Hockey Trophy.
We haven’t reached the weird part of the episode yet.
Casey barely has time to extol the importance of the statue (well, he does, he says “it was made a long time ago by some old Timey guy” and leaves it at that) when the rink gets attacked.
By Cowboys.
In military helicopters.
Who want to steal a hockey trophy.
And we’re off to the races.
The Turtles reaction is “well cowboy crime ain’t Ninja/Mutant crime so… this ain’t our circus”, and furthermore they’re extremely conspicuous and attacked a bunch of innocent people with helicopters and just stole a hockey trophy so… let the cops handle this one, maybe?
But Casey says “No, the sanctity of Hockey is at stake!” And basically whines until the turtles agree to help him chase down a bunch of cowboys.
Which they do pretty easily because, again, helicopter cowboys. This ain’t the Thomas Crown Affair.
So they track the cowboys down to a seedy hotel where they’re going to do a handoff selling the hockey trophy to their employer; a big rich Texan guy who reveals why he wanted the Puck stolen; because the NHL wouldn’t let him have a hockey team because of his criminal history of hiring people to steal or murder for him even though he’s very rich and wants a hockey team.
So the Turtles steal the Puck back during this, and, correctly, point out that they’ve recovered the stolen merchandise and have an admission from the guy who orchestrated quite a few crimes up to and including “exploding a hockey rink with Helicopters” so they really have no possible reason to remain concerned with this story; this is, like, precisely the situation the cops are for, even in the world of TMNT, where the only viable form of public safety is “hope nuclear turtles are standing nearby”.
But nope, it’s a Casey episode so he decides to use the Puck to lure the cowboys and Rich Texan back to the Arena so he can beat them all up personally using Sports Themed Violence.
And the Turtles go along with it because it’s much easier to just clean up after Casey’s bad ideas than discourage him from pursuing them.
Anyway, this bad, bad plan works to its intended goal and Casey + Turtles beat the crap out of some cowboys until they’re sufficiently unconscious and Casey reaffirms his love of Hockey.
And an important lesson was learned by all.
The first, and weaker, is Junklantis, bringing back… probably the least compelling Original Character made for this show. Remember The Garbage Man? The guy who looked like Mojo from X-Men except trash and also he was building a garbage fortress in the middle of the New York bay using homeless people as conscripted labour? Well… he’s back and doing basically the same thing but without the enforced slavery and with more murder.
So Don and Mikey are out testing the submarine he built when they stumble upon a sub aquatic death fortress patrolled by giant crab and octopus robots.
Only in New York.
Anyway, they get captured since… that’s a pretty understandably confusing occurrence and they find out that apparently the Garbage Man didn’t drown when he was chucked into the river in his last appearance, and he spent the down time building an aqua base instead.
The only explanation for this being him saying “You threw me in *this* river”, which wasn’t much of an explanation at all. And he’s also been sinking all the freighters and cruise ships that travel through the bay in order to recycle their scrap into More Sea Fortress.
He’s sunk over 15 boats *in the middle of the bay* by this point as per a news report so… I mean… weird that nobody noticed the *GIANT AQUAFORTRESS* that’s killing people with cyberkrakens.
Anyway, there’s a fight, and a Submarine duel between Donny’s ship and one of the sea monster robots and Garbage Man gets blown up at the bottom of the bay and… I lay even-odds that he survived.
The Golden Puck, however, is The Good Kind of Bonkers and it’s what I want from a TMNT filler episode. It’s also a Casey centric episode, I do not think this is a coincidence.
So Casey has invited the Turtles to the final game of his new All Time Favorite Sport; Super Slam Hockey. Which appears to be like regular Hockey except played on a Roller Derby course and, as per the name, *way* more violent than either.
The episode seems to imply there’s a national league of this game but also that it’s played on secret arenas like it’s a death match cage fight tournament. But the important thing is that it’s the final match and to the champion team goes an entire fleet of snowmobiles and also The Golden Puck, a golden statue commissioned by the King of Holland in the 17th century that’s considered to be the worlds oldest Hockey Trophy.
We haven’t reached the weird part of the episode yet.
Casey barely has time to extol the importance of the statue (well, he does, he says “it was made a long time ago by some old Timey guy” and leaves it at that) when the rink gets attacked.
By Cowboys.
In military helicopters.
Who want to steal a hockey trophy.
And we’re off to the races.
The Turtles reaction is “well cowboy crime ain’t Ninja/Mutant crime so… this ain’t our circus”, and furthermore they’re extremely conspicuous and attacked a bunch of innocent people with helicopters and just stole a hockey trophy so… let the cops handle this one, maybe?
But Casey says “No, the sanctity of Hockey is at stake!” And basically whines until the turtles agree to help him chase down a bunch of cowboys.
Which they do pretty easily because, again, helicopter cowboys. This ain’t the Thomas Crown Affair.
So they track the cowboys down to a seedy hotel where they’re going to do a handoff selling the hockey trophy to their employer; a big rich Texan guy who reveals why he wanted the Puck stolen; because the NHL wouldn’t let him have a hockey team because of his criminal history of hiring people to steal or murder for him even though he’s very rich and wants a hockey team.
So the Turtles steal the Puck back during this, and, correctly, point out that they’ve recovered the stolen merchandise and have an admission from the guy who orchestrated quite a few crimes up to and including “exploding a hockey rink with Helicopters” so they really have no possible reason to remain concerned with this story; this is, like, precisely the situation the cops are for, even in the world of TMNT, where the only viable form of public safety is “hope nuclear turtles are standing nearby”.
But nope, it’s a Casey episode so he decides to use the Puck to lure the cowboys and Rich Texan back to the Arena so he can beat them all up personally using Sports Themed Violence.
And the Turtles go along with it because it’s much easier to just clean up after Casey’s bad ideas than discourage him from pursuing them.
Anyway, this bad, bad plan works to its intended goal and Casey + Turtles beat the crap out of some cowboys until they’re sufficiently unconscious and Casey reaffirms his love of Hockey.
And an important lesson was learned by all.
I do not have enough time in my life to rewatch beloved TMNT seasons, but this thread did inspire me to play through a pile of TMNT beat 'em ups. And since there were so damn many, my corresponding assessment of them took for-freakin-ever, publishing now in August. But I figured I would link it here because the whole thing was 100% inspired by enjoying this thread.
Here's a history of Krangin'.
Here's a history of Krangin'.