Cowabunga? The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Forgot to Be Fun

The franchise's latest reboot is also the latest victim of the comic movie industrial complex.
If you did not happen to come of age in the 1990s, here are the main things to know about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: They are, first of all, teenagers who are also mutants—the result of exposure to a mutagen ooze—who are also ninjas who are also turtles. They are named after artists from the Italian Renaissance (Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael). They are led by a rat who is also a mutant-ninja and whose name is Splinter. They live in a sewer. They eat pizza. They fight a villain named Shredder, who is also a ninja. In the '90s, at the height of their real-world popularity, the Turtles went on a music tour. It was called the "Coming Out of Their Shells Tour," and it included songs like "Cowabunga!" and "Follow Your Heart." It did not, however, include the theme song from the Turtles' first cartoon, which declared, "They're the world's most fearsome fighting team / They're heroes in a half shell, and they're green."

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are ridiculous, is what I'm saying, and that is the source of their charm. They may be Comic Heroes in the most literal sense of the term—they were created in book form, by the artists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, in 1984, and swiftly converted into action figures, video games, cartoon series, and, now, five (5!) films—but they are not Superman. They are not Batman. They are not even, mutant status aside, X-Men. They do not, like their fellow heroes, traffic in metaphor; they do not speak, symbolically, to The Way We Live Now; they do not seem to experience dark nights and/or Dark Knights of the soul.

Eastman and Laird initially intended their quirky quartet to be satire: The original TMNT comic book was a fusion-y parody of Cerebus, Daredevil, New Mutants, and Ronin. And each new interpretation of the TMNT idea has kept true to this spirit of camp. The 1991 live-action version of the TMNT movie—the wonderful terribleness of which was pretty well revealed in its title, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze—featured the film debut of Vanilla Ice. Who also sang the movie's theme song. Which featured the indelible refrain "go ninja!—go ninja!—GO." Which is all just to reiterate the thing that is pretty well revealed in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' own title: that they are, above all, mutant ninja turtles. They are sublimely absurd. This is the whole point.