Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of My Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We are your two no longer teenage but still mutant Trivia Turtles. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan run Talk and Jordan. Today we're gonna be talking about a franchise that occupied a and still does a massive space in my heart, as I'm sure it does for any number of people of our age group. We are talking about the teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We're talking about the comic. We're talking about the TV show. We're talking about the movie, the first one. We may touch on the action figures. I think the comic was the only one of these that I didn't have my hands on as a kid, because, as it's as well well as we'll talk about, they were both scarce and very violent. Um. I had a boatload of the action figures. I played the arcade games, Shouts to Turtles and Time, and I rewatched that first movie endlessly and the second one too, with Vanilla Ice wrapping Go Ninja Go Ninja Go. You know you didn't see that one. That's great, it's great, but we're not going to talk about that movie though. Um what about you, Bud, You're gonna get a lot of blank stairs. Yeah. You don't strike me as a Turtle kind of guy, no, you know, I was more of a Thomas the Tank Engine kind of guy around this time of my life. Yeah, I completely and utterly missed this. Um. It felt vaguely offensive to my Italian relatives. It's my one and only takeaway from the teenage Ninja Turtles as a kid. Yeah, I wish I could add anything to this at all. Until speaking with you, I had no idea if this was primarily a movie property, a TV show property, a video game property, or comic property or what. Um. Yeah, for all my collecting habits, I was never a comics guy and not really an action figure kid either, And I don't know everything about it. Just seemed to like Goofy to me. It's the show is Goofy. The first movie is actually, I think a little bit deeper than most people give it credit for. There's like actual character beats. The fight scenes are a little more like not violent, but they do have a little bit more teeth in them because they cost corrected it on the second movie, and it just becomes like three Stooges fight scenes. I mean, that was what my understanding is. That started off with a very violent adult comic, then went to a very kid friendly TV show so that they could make action figures to tie in for this this very kid friendly TV show, and then they made a movie based on the TV show that then kind of reverted back to being super dark and scary, and some people, as we'll talk about, or kind of upset about this. Yeah. So, now that you've basically given away the entire narrative arc of this episode, thanks folks for listening. Um So, from the Marvel Comics connection to the Turtles, to the strange, roundabout role of l a stand up comedy in getting the film made, to the mind boggling live music or that the Turtles undertook in their prime years, will say, here's everything you didn't know about the teenage mutant Ninja Turtles. Sorry. Two artists, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, were struggling New England comic book writers when Eastman one night happened to sketch a turtle wearing a mask and armed with a set of nun chucks in November of night. Here's a question, how many joints do you think we required to lead up to the point where he's sketching a turtle wearing a mask, armed with numbchucks? No comment. In May of two thousand twelve, that original drawing of the turtles sold at auction for seventy one thousand nearly seventy two thousand dollars. You know what I have to say about that, right? Sure do belongs in the museum there it is. Pete drew a cooler one, Eastman told The Eastern Told the Week In Then, of course I had to top his sketch, so I drew four of them standing in dramatic post that was in pencil, but Pete inked it and added teenage mutant to the ninja turtle part. We were just pissing our pants that night, to be honest, saying this is the dumbest thing ever. It's just like small Boy mad libs. Yeah, exactly. The pair's comics imprint, Mirage Studios, was founded with money from a tax refund that they got and alone from Eastman's uncle and Laird was so moved by this gesture that he would later found the Zeric Foundation, which for twenty years awarded self publishing grants to comic book creators as well as qualified charitable and nonprofit organizations. He gave back. In other words, they called it mirage because, in Eastman's word, there wasn't an actual studio, only kitchen tables and couches with lapboards. In May of four, Laird and Kevin Eastman self published the first black and white issue of Teenage Muting Ninja Turtles at an initial print run of three thousand, and they flushed out the concept based on a number of other titles and influences from around this time, Marvel's The New Mutants, which you say as a spiritual descendant of X Men, which featured teenage mutants, Uh They're Serebus, which starred an anthropomorphic art vark that occasionally cosplayed as Cone of the Barbarian, and Frank Miller's Ronan and Daredevil, which melded nightmarish, taxi driver esque visions of New York with Ninja's and samurai's. Yeah, Frank Miller might be one of the most um New York hating comic book artists. He apparently was mugged here like twice when he first moved here to work on comics, never got over it, and so like since City, the Dark Knight returns like all of his big pioneering comic book works, portray the Big City as like a dystopian hellhole, can be directly traced back to the time that he was mugged. In fact, speaking of Daredevil, the Turtle's origin story is an explicit nod to that hero Marvel Hero, which is the story of a young boy who gains superpowered senses except for sight, after being blinded by a bunch of toxic goo that falls off a truck bottom. Like Alex Back, we should totally do Alex mac it would be good. Eastman laired reason that at least some of that goo must have filtered down into the sewer and had an effect on some of his denizens. I mean to quote Dr Evil. I don't know animals, but do turtles live in the sewer? It's it's it's possible a few of them, maybe the turtle's mentor the mutated rats Splinter who yes, rats live in sewers. Maybe the rat was going to eat the turtles and then when they got all cute, he was like, I can't eat you. Now you're my adopted offspring. We're riffing, we're reaching for stuff here. Cute or dangerous. Yeah, there's another number of Daredevil references. So Splinter the rat Mentor is a riff on the guy who trains Daredevil to master his powers, who is known simply as Stick and the Turtles foes the Ninja Clan the foot as a logical counterpoint to the hand, which is the Ninja clan the Daredevil battles in Miller's run on the title. I find it funny that Big Bad the Shredder, meanwhile, has no such marvel analog. Eastman literally just looked at a cheese grater and thought that it could be weaponized again, how many joints here? Exactly? We're gonna make our villain this big cheese grater. It's just gonna be a cheese graters. Have you ever really looked at a cheese grater? Man, like you can? Really you really hurt someone with one of these? Who's the mutated rat Mentor in your life? Robert Plant, It's got to be somebody scrappier than that, Oh, Tim Armstrong from Rancid Yeah thats um. The pair initially wanted to give their creation some authentically Japanese names, but Laird said they simply couldn't think of any not big to sal with Fu and A fans, and I probably hadn't seen any number of Kurosawa Samurai samurai movies, and uh, simply one with the four Renaissance artists they were most familiar with. Aided by one of the Laird's art history books, The color coding of the characters Raphael red, Leonardo blue, Donna tell A purple, Michelangelo orange came via the animated series, as the original comic book was in black and white, so they were differentiated in the comic only by their weapons. Raphael has size, Leonardo has swords, Donna Tella has a bow staff, Michelangelo has nun chucks. They also initially misspelled Michelangelo's name, using the Anglo spelling of Michael rather than the Italian spelling without the A. Wasn't Donna Tello originally supposed to be Jean Lorenzo Bernini an tony one. I think they're supposed to be a A fifth one too named. I swear it was something like Kirby. Oh maybe because they were big Jack Kirby nerds. Who is a Marvel And I think it's the River DC but one of the towering figures of you know, mid century American comics. Anyway, we do not have the time or the space to get into the cast of characters that sprawled from the comics to the show to the toys. But there's one hilarious one that I really want to highlight. Shredder created an answer to the Turtles, a team called the punk Frogs, and they are named after Shredder's personal heroes, at Til of a Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, and rest mutant Uh. Two of them in the cartoon are voiced by Maurice la Marsh a k A. The Brain from Pinking, the Brain beloved by this podcast for his Orson Welles impression. But for some reason, Atil of the Frogs speaks like Marlon Brando in The Godfather and mocklybse Now. So, I don't know why I threw that in there, just thought it was funny. The comics were a big hit right off the bat, and while it might seem counterintuitive, the alternative comics scene of the time was rather bullish on black and white. You know you think of comics is brightly colored things. Not so at the time. Gilbert and Jamie hernandez is Love and Rockets, the aforementioned Cerebus and Yusagi yo Jimbo featuring an anthropomorphic samurai rabbit. We're all black and white. They were all hits. Incredibly, Usaga yu Jimbo had nothing to do with their turtles, despite both of them being martial artists anthropomorphic animals, but they would have crossover issues. I think I had his action figure um because tmnts initial run was so limited and the market was so hot. Within months, the issues were selling it up to fifty times their initial value, and obviously the success of the title inspired a rush of copycats like and I swear I'm not making these up, adolescent radioactive black belt Hamsters, preteen Dirty Jean kung Fu Kangaroos, and adult thermonuclear Samurai Elephants, although that last title eventually morphed into the much cleaner title of power packaderms um that Kangaroo one is funny because actually written by a woman named Lee Mars, who was a true, really pioneering feminist underground artists. I think that one was written as a parody capitalism is a disease. But did you know that in the UK the local sensors are I guess, super sensitive to the inherent violence of teenage mutan ninja turtles, so they changed their name to teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. And I guess since nunchucks and other change sticks were banned in the UK, every scene from the first season of the show that showed nunchucks were either cut or they did the Batman thing where they replaced the shots with stills containing words like a biff and she's great. So that's why by season four of the show, Michelangelo started using a turtle shell grappling hook, and by season five he stopped carrying nunchucks entirely. And while we're on the topic of teenage mut ninja turtles in the UK, let's talk about how they caused an environmental crisis, shall we please? So fans across the Pond began buying red eared sliders, which are a type of turtle in droves, only to realize that turtles in real life are not as dynamic and active as the ones in the show. So as a result, dissatisfied customers released turtles into the wild, which caused the serious theological problem that continues to this day. It's an invasive species. Baby yeah, I think it's like one of the most um But getting back to happier times. In six the success of the comic books puts Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the radar of a New York licensing agent named Mark Freedman. And Freedman was in the process of founding his own licensing company, Surge Licensing, and it previously handled the licensing of Hanna Barbara's Library of Characters. And he said, I was at a low point in my licensing careers, as him talking to The New York Times in then someone told me about a teenage mutant turtle. I was looking for a property, but I thought it was a joke. I just want to read that in Clintoneyes Food Voice. I was at a low point. Someone told me at a teenage mutant ninja turtle. Stairs manfully off into the distance. So this Freeman guy pitched the idea of licensing the turtles to Eastman and Layard, the creators of Teenage munt Ninja Turtles as a toy line initially, and they ainked a hundred and fifty thou dollar deal with Playmates Toys to start a line after being rejected by a number of toy companies. Sort of a theme for this The teenage Shockingly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a tough sell for toymakers, television networks, and film studios um But however, Playmates, as we touched on the top of the episode, insisted that a cartoon series for teenage muting Na Turtles be produced so that they could make the toys as sort of a tie in brand. And this tracks with trends of the time. This was the era in which very kind of adult film properties were being marketed with toy lines and animated series. You have g I. Joe and Transformers, but you also have the animated series based on Rambo and Robo Cop And you say there are toy lines around this time based on the alien and Predator characters, along with Swamp Thing, which, despite the cheesy live action movies in the eighties, is a comic in which the main love interest has hallucinogenic sex with the titular sentient mass of plant life. Un familiar, I'll take your word for it. In the same run of comics, that same character is later raped by her dead uncle who's possessing her husband at the time. Point is swamp things should have been marketed to children, and I had a lot of those action figures and watched that cartoon. They also made a cartoon series and action figure line about the Toxic Avenger. Toxic Avenger is a movie made by Trauma, who are famously like one of the goryoust film studios of all time. It's just this whole Wild West era, Like you know, I remember those alien and predator action figures. I had a bunch of of them. I should not have been watching those movies at that age anyway. Playmates partners with the animation studio Mirracami Wolf Swenson, who made this Toxic Avenger cartoon, and they begin developing the series. Many of the Turtle signatures like heroes and a half shell and turtle power came from these initial brainstorming sessions. And it is important to note here that the original comics were super super violent, and they moved away from this tone for the show because there it's a toy tie in. Even the movie was too violent for the Playmates people and they refused to make tie in toys for the first movie. I guess I mean like even in the original cut of the first Teenage mut Ninja Turtles Movies, they had a kid get beaten to death by Tatsu. Yeah, before the m p a A insisted they add sounds that the kid breathing a voice off screens saying oh, he's gonna be alright. The A d r that in It's so weird. Uh, here we go. Teenage Mutant Ninja talent grab bag of voice actors involved in the show, Cam Clark voice Leonardo. He also voiced the lead character Kannada in the English dub of the groundbreaking Japanese anime Akira, and the bad guy in the similarly groundbreaking video game Metal Gear Solid. Oh yeah, that for somebody was not into like that many violent games and stuff as a kid. I remember Metal Del Solid Varia, probably because it was the only PlayStation game that was sort of like gold nye. Yeah, I don't want a golden eye. Barry Gordon, the voice of Donna Tello, was in The Girl Can't Help It in ninety six. What's like, that's like the ground zero of rock movies, with like Jane Mansfield and Little Richard, and I think like Clive mcfadder for a guy doing the voice of an animated turtle. This man had a career in almost every classic television show ever, Dick Van Dyke Show, Jack Benny, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Leave It to Beaver, Dennis the Menace, The Don Rickles Show, and The Bob Crane Show. Before he became a prolific voice actor and the longest serving head of the screen Actors. Get Wow, We'll tie me up and beat me with a tripod, Folks. If you want to google Bob Crane, do that, but not in your work computer. Robert Paulson voiced Raphael, but he would switch to Donna Tello for the two thousand twelve cartoon. That guy was Pinky and Pinky in the Brain, and he was Yao the Animaniac, and Carl and Jimmy Neutron, and he played the Jim Carey roll. In the short lived Mask Animated series, he was Hoggie and Johnny Quest. He played Arthur in the Tick. He was also in Biker Mice from Mars, and he was in Chippendale and Dark Wink Duck and Fraggle Rock. I just love the fact that there were like two dozen voice actors who did every single show for like two decades. Who was um, what the hell is his name? Billy West? Billy West. Everybody didn't Doug he did Ren and Stimpy did Philip K. Fry and Futurama, The Red Eminem Townsend Coleman, who played Michelangelo, was the voice of the Tick a Car Tune series. I also watched Spoon. He was also in Fraggle Rock, and he was in the teen Wolf animated series, which I did not know was that. And he was in Fern golly oh, yeah, I don't remember, but he's in Fernal. Yeah. I looked it up and I wasn't familiar with the character, so I lost interest. James Avery, uncle Phil from Fresh Prince played Shredder, and then the guy who took over that role from him, Jim Cummings, was Winnie the Frigging Pooh and Tigger and dark Wing Duck, and he took over Scars song be prepared in The Lion King when Jeremy Irons developed voice problems trying to sing it. Wow, these are champions, all insane. All of the voice actors performed their roles together in the same room to preserve chemistry. And that was the thing I was really rare, right, like one of the few exceptions where the Simpsons and I think we talked about on Beauty and the Beast too, because they did the same thing with Bell and the Beast. It's something that Fred Wolfe took so seriously. He told voice actors that if someone couldn't make it to a recording session and they would be replaced. And that's why some of the characters have alternative voice actors listed in their credits, because if they had a time conflict, they were just cast the voice of someone else. Um. Despite that bit of production related callousness, the voice of April O'Neill, Rene Jacobs, said it did create the intended atmosphere of camaraderie. She said, we played off each other. There was a lot of ad libbing as you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages, and now, folks, we must get into the little segment I like to call teenage mutant ninja slang um because while we're at it, where the hell does Cowabunga come from? I'm so glad you asked Jordan's Well, it actually comes from the nineteen fifties children's show classic Howdy Dooty, and it's said by the um problematic problematic character Chief thunder Thud as a sign of frustration. His friend was Chief Featherman. But what do you expect? This was the show that popularized the term peanut gallery. That's where all the kids sat off screen. But how do you do? He was like the kids show of the fifties. It's like a huge deal, has an absolutely horrifying character. Please, if you've never if you're not familiar, if you don't know what a Howdy duty is, you don't need to find out, and especially if you're afraid of clowns or rentral accustomies. Yeah yeah, yeah. Somehow it got adopted by surfers in the following decade, and in Paul Mike Federi's book Weird Word Origins Uh, he points to the sixties TV show Gidget as an influence. I guess one of the characters we yell Cowabunga as he ran his surfboard into the water, uh teenagering Ninta. Turtles writer David Wise has claimed that he came up with making the word Cowabungo Michael Angelo's catchphrase as of the first episode, when Michael Angelo surfs over an object because he had a memory of a similar scene Charles M. Schultz drew in Peanuts with Snoopy, and animator Fred Wolfe has claimed that it was actually his suggestion to make it a catchphrase, and Michelangelo voice actor Townsend Coleman has apparently claimed that he was the one who invented this. He said he just improvised it. Uh So. The jury is still out on why Cowabunga entered the teenage muting into Turtle universe. But the coda to all this is that Teenage Mutina Turtle creators Eastman and Layard were sued for five million dollars by Buffalo Bob Smith, the host of Howdy Duty, because he claimed that they stole his line Cowabunga. And I guess they settled for fifty thou dollars, so not not the five million, Yeah, not Buffalo Bob wanted. So I guess Buffalo Bub made this word up wholesale man, that's what you're saying. Yeah, I think he was trying to do some kind of racist, like Native American like sounding word. So writer David Wise had just finished working on Transformers and he was actually hoping for some downtime when he got the call to do T M N T. As a self professed comics freak, he owned the first seven issues of the comic, and he took the job on the spot. But that said, he was not the animation studio's first choice. That would be Chuck Lori, who went on to create two of the most profitable sitcoms of all time, Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang. Theory Lori, who at the time was a bit of a tune smith, a bit of a song and dance kind of Broadway Danny Rose sort of character. Uh. He wrote Debbie Harry's track French Kissing in the USA. What Chuck Lorie wrote the teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Teenage Mute. He wrote that partner Dennis Brown, not the reggae singer Dennis Brown, sadly enough, and hold onto your hats because this is one of those truth is Stranger than Fiction moments. The show runners original choice for the theme song were the actual Turtles, as in the Happy Together sixties pop band The Turtles. Um and Lori said in two thousand twelve in an interview. I wanted to do the theme song for the Turtles the show the minute I heard about it, but the original Turtles were given the job. If I recall correctly, they were a legit group. They were deep in the whole Laurel Canyon scene, and when the Turtles split in the late sixties, the two man guys, Mark Bollman and Howard Kalin joined Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention and they also made some great stuff under the name Flow and Eddie. I think they were tight with Keith Moon too, so these guys were like deep in the same and warn Zevon some songs for him for them, and they helped him out get his start. However, the band bailed on the job, and the show's producer went back to Lorie saying, you have forty eight hours ago. He and Brown banged it out in afternoon and booked an l A studio from twelve am to eight am one night because it was the cheapest time block available and their budget for the demo is two thousand dollars. He also said they submitted the demo with all of these ad libs that like Heroes and a Half show Turtle Power. Those were ad libs that they put on the demo. That demo ended up being taken as the master version that the production used, So that's why all that stuff is in there. Oh, I love it. Writer Wise found the task of characterizing the grim indistinct turtles from the comics challenging, so he took a very literal approach, with each one embodying one word from the title, inspired by other classic forsomes like the Marx Brothers and the Beatles. I I want to I have to say, Okay, teenage, Sure I get that one. Being the kind of goofy dumb one mutant. I don't know how you illustrate that, but maybe kind of being weirdo Ninja. Okay, being a really good fighter turtle. Well, how much would it suck to be the turtle who's defining characteristic? I cut this, But now that you're forcing my hand, I'll explain. Teenage was Michaelangelo because he was the un serious goofy one mutant. He simply took the idea of being a sci fi sort of influenced term and made Dona Tello the mutant because he was the tech guy, constantly inventing new science fiction fantastical Ninja was Um Leonardo because he had the two swords and he was the best fighter, and he was the leader. And Turtles was Raphael. And this is a bit of a stretch, because he said we needed a character who was in on the joke, who found all of this to be as absurd as the audience would, and so it was constantly cracking wise at it. So all of Raphael's meta winks at the camera and sort of sarcastic remarks about how absurd the whole show is. That was where that came from. Um, now that I've read all that high falutine garbage, I have more high falutine comparisons to make. Um in his mind and why is his mind? Each one embodied one word from the title, and then they were also inspired by classic pop culture foursomes like the Marx Brothers and the Beatles. Raphael was grout show marks the wise acre, Leonardo is Zeppo Marks, the serious one, Donna Tello is the Chico of the group, the schemer who's not as smart as he thinks he is, and Michael Angelo is Harpo. Now for the Beatles, he had Raphael's John Donna Tello is George, Leonardo is Paul, and Michael Angelo's Ringo. So I'd like you to to debate that. Okay, yeah, I mean, as the resident Beatles guy, I have to say it's my duty to inform you that the Marks Beatles comparisons they don't really correlate. Leonardo Zeppo the serious one, but he's also Paul. Paul is not the serious one. George is the serious one, so they don't they don't correlate. I think. I mean it's a flawed premise because the Beatles and the Marx Brothers don't have How do you feel about Michael Angelo is ringo? Um? I I don't know the Turtles well enough. Well, Harpo was the silent one. Harpo was as the Marks brother was, the was the silent one, right. He walked around with a bicycle horn. I don't know, dude, you're making me that you're going we get way too far into stuff. I don't remember what was the one with the with the crazy curly hair. I assume wig And never spoke and the would walk around with a horn, and he was in the Isle of Lucy episode when Lucy thinks that she's looking at a mirror and they're like mimicking each other's movements. So he was a very gifted physical comedian. Always in the trench coat like Ringo in a Hard Day's Night. That one works fine, Uh, Raphael John Wise Acre like Rouchow, that works. Yeah, it's the Leonardo Paul George connection that throws me. I'm sorry, I just went into a fugue state where you're doing that. Um Apparently his inspirations for Michael Angelo. He said Michael Angelo was the Sid Vicious of the Turtles. Said Vicious was a violent, garbage human. So I don't know that that tracks. But he said Sid Vicious couldn't play or sing, but he epitomized punk. Michael Angelo epitomizes what the Turtles are about. Another model, which I believe much more, was Jesspica Golie from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Sean Penn's stoner character doesn't the kid in the Teenagement Ninja Turtles movie. I think his name is Danny always wear a syneditious T shirt. Sure it does. So that's a good connection. Um Wise really was crucial in shaping the show. He created the big bad character Kran for the show because Krang was an alien that meant that the Turtles could then beat up robots instead of viciously decapitating human ninjas like they did in the comics. Um he created the character of April O'Neill as sort of a lowest lane information conduit for the Turtles to get their news, because she's a reporter and her look was inspired by Fujiko Mine, a thief who occasionally posed as a news reporter on the anime Loopine the Third. These people stole a lot from Japan, but not names because they couldn't think of anything. So this wise guy, the writer, he's not thrilled about his experience on the teenage Meeting Ninja Turtle show, and it does seem like he kind of got a bad deal because after the show moved syndication to CBS, he basically became a show runner and was writing everything himself without help. It was a job, he said. I saw no benefits from it. I had no licensing money. The more successful it was, the more scripts I had the right for years that covered my bills. It was nice to see it gets successful, but there was a discomfort of knowing that you're the one guy who's not getting Rich. I should have created my own thing. Yeah, I mean, I feel bad from Eastman because of what here here. Eastman and Laird created them, but me and Playmates and Fred Wolfe made them popular. As what he said, I put a lot of myself into that show. Again, he takes credit for Calabunga, the pizzas that was me. He also takes credit for that all the stuff that everyone loves about them, that was me. But everyone else got rich pizza, pizza, that was was me. That's really funny. Um. Incidentally, neither Eastman or Layered were happy about the direction the TV show took. Eastman said in interview for The Comic Journal, there's some stuff we really don't like, and there's some stuff that we wish we hadn't said yes to stuff that they wanted to do, but we said, we'll always have our black and white comics that tell the kind of stories we want to tell. And Laird wrote on his blog in March, had I, again speaking solely for myself and not for Kevin, been making the key creative decisions for that first animated series, it would have been very different. Among other things, that would likely have been no moronic henchmen like Bebob and rock Steady, the Shredder would have been seriously malevolent. April would not have been a reporter and constantly need to be rescued by the Turtles. The Turtles would not have been so ridiculously obsessed with pizza, and the Shredder would not have had as one of this business as a restaurant called Ninja Pizza. And the show would have not had a joke or a gag every five seconds. Um. I also think it's interesting that Laird and East been sort of drifted apart. They really hadn't spent much time together since ninete so like right when the movies start, you know, that's probably what around the third movie when quality starts taking a dive. Um. Yeah, so it sounds like they had a split, which may or may not have been acrimonious, but anyway, the toys hit the market in the summer of after the show debuted in December of eight seven, right around my birthday. For the next nine years, Playmates produced around four hundred teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures, as well as dozens of vehicles and play sets, and for the first four years of that stretch, about one point one billion dollars worth of toys were sold, good Lord, making teenage Muting Ninja Turtles the number three top selling toy figures ever at the time, behind only G I Joe and Star Wars. I absolutely don't have much to say about the toys, and apparently neither do you, but they are an interesting bit of synergy. Wise, the writer said that while playmates were mostly hands off regarding the show, they would occasionally come to him with some new gadget or vehicle or villain to work into the show to correspond with a toy launch, which is funny. Yeah, it is like the next episode has to be about the garbage swat van that we're creating for you can you said he was mostly fine with all of these because it did take some of the weight off of him to try and you know, come up with new stuff. But except for one. Playmates asked him to include a garbage launching toilet catapult in an episode, which he called the dumbest thing I had ever seen. So he resolved that when it did appear in the show, it never worked correctly. It would always go wrong and blow up in their faces. I heard that garbage launching toilet Catapult was the prototype name for Twitter. That was a good one. It's not on the off top of your head. Yeah. Nice um teenage mutant ninja movie at Long last Week. Come to the meat of the story in the show is a success, But superhero movies were considered box office poison following the massive flop of Howard the Duck, interest shocking the me. I didn't realize that superhero movies were ever considered box office poison given the time. Well, because this is in the extremely specific window when Howard the Duck flopped hugely, and I think Masters of the Universe was also kind of a flop around this time, and then um uh, Tim Burton's Batman comes out of eighty nine, and that's kind of what bings because you also we'd had like the three Superman sequels which all got here. Um So anyway, the most serious interest that Eastman and Laird had received was from b movie king Roger Corman, who pitched This is Wild, pitched Sam Kinison Gallagher, Billy Crystal, and bobcat gold Thwait wearing green paint and shells. Eastman told the Ring and he Eastman called it a very hilarious treatment and concept he is wrong drunk Dawn Draper voice. It's three amigas, but it's four and there we want to get the guy who does the voices and the guy who hits stuff with the watermelon, and it will be turtles and the guy who does Muhamad Ali in a questionable but nonetheless not inaccurate impression. But and Sam Kennison, Yeah, I mean Roger Corman is still alive. Too late? Well, I guess Sam Kennison is not so not too late. But Gary Proper, a surfer and Gallagher's road manager at the time, thought the Turtles had potential, and he teamed up with Kim Dawson, who was producing Gallagher's comedy specials at Showtime. So yes, the genesis of this movie has its roots in the people directly connected to watermelon smashing comic Gallagher. Proper literally found a copy of Ninja Turtles on a Gallagher tour stop in Detroit. So they bring in a stand up comic turn screenwriter named Bobby Herbeck, who was then writing a film for Golden Harvest. The act Honeck Hong Kong Kung Fu Flick Studio. We uh ran a bit on in the Bruce Lee episode last time. Tom Gray, Golden Harvests, then head of production, told Bobby to kick Rocks, but Herbeck persisted for three or four months. Gray told the Hollywood Reporter for the oral history of the film her back to the ringer. He just kept turning down on the picture. He said, finish the movie I'm paying you for. He wouldn't stop calling the project the ninja pinin Turtles. He said, don't bring me this. Don't I have to switch into the cigar chomping producer voice. He said, don't bug me with this Ninja pinin turtle. Herbs eventually engine pision. Yeah. Eventually he realized that they could make this movie for Peanuts in Hong Kong, and Raymond Chow, head of Golden Harvest, Green lit it with a budget of three milk, not not much. The continual through line for the making of this film is that most of the adults just thought they were bad for trying, and then they would like consult with their kids or their friends who had kids, and the children would begin levitating off the ground with their eyes glowing and um that convinced them. Talks to have Fox distribute the picture broke down weeks before shooting and New Line Cinema stepped in at the actual eleventh hour. They were headed into pre production without a U S distributor. UM New Line was still kind of the proverbial new kids on the block. It was referred to in industry circles, perhaps derisively as the house that Freddie built, because their first release was Nightmary Elm Street and and all of its sequels throughout the eighties basically built that studio from the ground up. But still in some ways this was a shoe string production. UM. Except for some establishing shots, none of it is filmed in New York, and for example, Dominoes is in the film because they needed free pizza. Even so, the director, Steve Barren says they ran out of money with like ten to twelve pages of script left to shoot and had to make it work in the editing bay with the when who would go on to become Quentin Tarantino's longtime editor, Sally manky good for her man, working with Quentin Tarantino must qualify you for the sainthood. Her back flies to Northampton, Massachusetts to meet with Eastman and Laird, which did not go well. He said, I thought I'm there for a month, Max. This is the thhr I was wrong. It was six to eight weeks. Never saw two guys who disagreed so much. Peter, from the beginning, he didn't think much of me as a writer. I was a Hollywood type infringing on his artistic chops and characters. But eventually they reach a rapper proche Mall and Herbeck flies to London to meet with director Steve Barron, who was then a hot shot music video director, coming off some technologically advanced clips for the time, like Michael Jackson's Billy Jean with the sidewalks that light up has Take on Me, which combined you know, by hand animation with filmed elements, and dire Strait's Money for Nothing, which you will remember has some embarrassing computer animation, but still very groundbreaking. First time. Here's a question, and I've seen some comments of people talking about our Roger Rabbit episode. We know a lot about animation, requesting that we have animation experts on next time we do a show on that. Oh no, do we heard you? Oh no, no, no, just just they just thought we could get more into the weeds with that. But so I want to ask you, now, do you think that this, uh, this Steve Barron guy had any conversations with the who framed Rodger Rabbit people because of the ah take on the video that blended live action and animation in a really you know, non Mary Poppins. That question, that's a great question because he he is, he's London based and they did and they did Roger Rabbit in London. That is a great question. Maybe it seems plausible to me. UM. But crucially, Jim Henson's Muppet Shop would be handling the turtles because Baron had worked with them for Henson's TV show The Storyteller, and they wanted the turtles to be able to do backflips and fight. And so the budget for the Henson's alone was going to come in at three million, which was originally what had been budgeted for the whole film. UM. Eventually the film's total price tag balloon to thirteen million. Henson Loves Steve producer Simon Felds told t R the Creature Shop had never lent their name to an outside project, and I don't think they ever did again. Oh yeah, we'll get more on that later. But I don't think Jim Henson was happy with the result. Of the Teenage Muntina Total Movie. While working on storyteller, Henson had told Baron on each show, I figured, we're going to have to invent one new technology to make each show work. On Turtles, I've got to invent nine. Because the actors had to be able to fight in their costumes. They weren't able to use exterior wires or cables to move the faces. Um, which is what the easiest solution probably would have been. UM. So there were actually two sets of Turtle costumes. One were dubbed the Action Turtles that didn't have any electronics in them, and one for all of the dialogue scenes that use a state of the art control system called pupper Techtronics that involved a single puppeteer manipulating a joystick for the character's eyes on electronic glove to work the motion of the jaws, and a headset with infrared trackers tracking the puppeteers face to work the lamps. Yeah, I heard these. I think just the masks alone has something like fifteen separate pieces. I mean, it makes it. We were talking about this in the Never Ending Story episode with foul Core and the rock Biter puppets having to have like twenty people just to operate the face, one person for an eyebrow. Even so, it's yeah, it's all these partially animatronic, partially you know, puppeteer systems are incredibly difficult. I was gonna make a joke about these masks being reused for the Dinosaurs TV show in the early nineties, but then I did a little more research and apparently the teenage muting digiturtal masks in the first movie were reused for a TV show, um and extremely obscure one. The turtle heads were reportedly repurposed for an Irish children's TV show called The More Begs which ran from which providing the heads for the show's main characters, Molly and Rosa and the disguised with fur. But it's pretty easy to tell that these were at one point Leonardo and Dona Tella. Um so any any uh fans from Yeah, there you go. But yeah, these whole costumes, they were so incredibly complex. The mechanics and cooling systems for all this machinery was inside each turtle shell, which is pretty ingenious, and the entire thing had to be cast to each individual actor's body and the actor inside. Raphael got a name of Josh Paius said that the Jim Henson team told them after the casting process that they kept us in that plaster longer than they needed to to see if we would freak out, which was basically a way to test them because being in these costumes would be kind of claustrophobic. Um. Josh pay Us later described the experience in the costume as quote like being in Grand Central Station at rush hour with a tin can over your head. And aside from the martial arts training, you know, general and leapons specific, they also had to have extensive rehearsal work alongside the puppeteer responsible for their individual turtles so they could learn their facial movements and time it to the dialogue. I read it took two people to operate the face, and pay Us is the only actor who both provided the voice and was also in the suit. Brian Tocci of Revenge of the Nerds and Police Academy Fame voice Leonardo Corey Feldman did Donna Tello and Robbie Reese. Best known to me as cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch was Michelangelo That's Insane and Kevin Clash, who puppeteered Elmo for decades was Splinter. He was the guy who let go of out of sexual deuse allegations. Um, so these guys all got to play bit parts outside of the costumes in the movie. For example, Josh Paius doubled as a passenger in the back of a cab after f A l jumps in the hood. Um. Leif Tilden, who played Donna Tello, explained of discover America's Leif Ericson reference in There for You Pretty Folks leaf sing on Uh. He explained of his loan run in with Feldman. I went up to him at the premiere and I said, Hey, I play the character. You did the voice too, and he just totally dissed me. He didn't want to deal with me whatsoever. It was around the time he got busted for cocaine in the backseat of his convertible or something. All I remember was walking by him, surrounded by cameras, professing his innocence to cocaine right out signed that Ninja Turtles premiere. Kids are Walking by Corey. Feldman only got a reports for the voiceover gig, so maybe that's why he was in a or the cocaine crash. But yeah, I guess producers basically gives them like, yeah, this is gonna be like a random obscure art movie. Maybe it'll make some money on VHS sales, but that's not true. And then he didn't come back for the second Teenage Ninja Turtles movie, but I think they got him back for the third at a time when I think he could have used the probably uh speaking of real life stars, and I guess in this case, I used the term star loosely. Let's do a little fantasy casting for the character of Casey Jones, a non costume dude played by a guy I've never heard of, Alias Cotis. First of all, how dare you? Elias Cotas is one of my favorite character actors. He's the bad guy in Fallen Again, um or the first bad guy in Fallen opposite Denzel Washington. He's been in just a ton of stuff, and my favorite name is. I interviewed Chris Maloney once, and Chris Maloney and Elias Koteis for a time, I'm looked very similar and they would just get confused between each other. And Chris Maloney told me that one time he was filming for Law and Order in Grand Central Station, and someone came up to him with a copy of uh, The Thin Red Line, which is a movie that Elias Cotaius stars in, and asked him to sign it, and so he just signed it Chris Maloney. But yeah, who else was supposed to take the role of my beloved Elias Scotus. Johnny Depp was considered, as was Keanu Reeves, Christian Slater, Lou Diamond Phillips famous for playing Richie Vallen's and my beloved La Bamba Milia Estevez, Ki for Sutherland, Jason Patrick, who I think was Keiper Sutherland's best friend, and then when keep for Sutherland cheated on Julia Roberts and their engagement broke up, she started dating Jason Patrick. Good for him. Uh yeah, it's from Our Hook episode. Brian Austin Green, Alex Winter, Gary Daniels, I don't know, and River Phoenix. Oh and while we're on random casting bits, Tosha shiro Obata, the guy who plays Tatsu, the Shredders second in command, was actually literally the deadliest man on the set. He created his own style of Japanese swordsmanship called shin kendo, which is taught um in apparently dojo's worldwide, and he wrote a book about samurai swordsmanship called Crimson Steel, which in whips. Damn. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. But now we must arrive at the grueling conditions. This movie was shot under. Yes, they started shooting in North Carolina in July and seventy pounds suits. Again, North Carolina in July, seventy pounds suits. Here's pay us on that extremely uncomfortable process. Quote. We would suit up from toe up to the neck. Then the head would go on. Then they would glue the head to the body so that it was all seamless. Then you were in there from morning to lunch break. We would each lose at least five pounds, just presumably through sweat. We would just freak out and you would hear one of us go take the hat off, take the hat off, take off your blood Michael, Yeah, your blood was literally boiling. And then they would shoot compressed air in our faces. Eventually they made a little air conditioned bubble that we would go into, and one of the stunt men later said they needed to drink a gallon of water per day to keep hydrated inside the hot suit, which would probably have the unintended side effect of having to then removed suit to go to the bachan imagine. Also, they were sculpted of latex, which is not famously water friendly substance. And so since obviously a good number of scenes take place in a sewer, there was a fair amount of falling. Um. The opening scene of them just walking through the sewer took something like eight or nine hours and nearly forty takes because they just kept falling. Magic. And I guess the sewers also caused a problem because the suits were so huge that they couldn't fit in normal size man holes, so they had to make larger, custom sized ones. And I guess they had this plan to make like an underground like for the sewer, to make like an underground room that was like eight Like they're just gonna dig eight feet into the ground. But then when they got the five ft it all sort of flooding and like collapsing it on itself. Man, they couldn't even relax all the way in these things. Um. Stephen Baron said, we built them these little horses like sawhorses to sit on that was the only comfortable position in which they could rest. Rather than take the head off and then spend half an hour putting it back on, they would go into these resting positions on these jury rigged seats, and he said it was sort of like a Damien Hirst exhibition. And these suits were so cumbersome that they obviously impeded the actor's movements, so they actually had to shoot them moving at a slower frame rate and then speed it up in post production to make it seem like they were moving at a normal speed. Another fun thing to picture is that since they were filming close to the Wilmington's airport, the radio frequencies the technology used would get crossed with the airport a la spinal tap, so they would just start spouting airport jargon randomly, whereas Baron colorfully explains, suddenly Michaelangelo's mouth would get crazy like spinning, and his eyes would just go dead, and his lids would just shut random parts. You would just have them be too possessed. Essentially. Oh, I love that. Speaking of onset stuff, I guess the farmhouse where the turtles hide out is actually located in the city of Northampton. Massachusetts, where the Turtles creators, Kevin Laird and Peter Eastman first Matt and I think where they were living when they created them, So that was cool. It's also cool for me as a Massachusetts Yeah, I figured to go out there. Sometimes. It's cool. Time we have our obligatory Robin Williams is the best moment. Judith Hoge, who plays April, was finishing a movie called Cadillac Man with Robin Williams at the time and doing pre pro on Turtles at the same time, so she'd fly out from the Cadillac Man set on Friday to do pre pro on Turtles, and at some point Robin was like, man, you've been banging out of here, like about out of hell. What are you? Where are you going? And she was a little embarrassed to actually tell him because it's I'm doing a movie called Teenage Mute Ninja Turtles, right. But it turns out Robin was a huge fan of the comics and owned all of them, which, as you remember, it was an expensive proposition at the time, and she said he lost his mind when she told him. It was so excited for her to be in the movie. I guess lenter some of the earlier Rarer comic books that she used as research to get into the character. Of course he loved this. He did this saunters Zola after the after the video game, like this makes total sense. I love that. Also considered for the role of April early on, at least with Jennifer Beale's Morrissa Tomay, Sandra Bullock, the Cole Kitman, Melanie Griffith, Sean young Larian broco Winona Ryder, and Brooks Shields. And this gets us into probably one of my favorite anecdotes about the production of this movie. Apparently, the Henson family were super into bowling, and Jim Henson was. He was a keggler. He was very good at bowling, and there was a local bowling alley that I guess flipped their operating hours to accommodate the shoot, so that the cast and crew would wander in in the early morning hours after shooting all night, and Jim Henson would literally be the last person in this bowling alley and someone would have to remind him that he needed to sleep before shooting resumed in the evening. Because he was passionate about bowling and passionate about teenage muting Ninja Turtles, I guess, But despite his apparent enthusiasm during the production, Henson later said he was dissatisfied with the final film due to the violent overtones, calling it quote excessive, pointless and not his style and making this even sadder, I'm pretty sure this was Jim Henson's last major film project. Teenage Mueting Ninja Turtle Movie was released just two months before he died. I think things got weird when the film's sequel included a tribute to Jim Henson, and Henson's kids were said to consider the credit inappropriate due to his mixed feelings about working on the original anyway. On a related note, director Steve Baron was fired by the studio towards the end of the production because they thought his vision was too dark. I guess Sally Menki was fired too. The final cut of the movie was not made by the director, and the tone of the theatrical versions changed significantly from what he had in mind. Some jokes were added to please the kids who only knew the turtles in the cartoon, and some of the more serious scenes were axed and a mostly deleted scenes. There was Michaelangelo suffering from depression following Splinter's kidnapping, and also a sequence where Leonardo engages in intense Rocky style training as he prepares to a Van Draffael's beating at the hands of the foot Plan. And there's also a great deleted scene at the very end of the movie which you can see on YouTube, after the turtles have defeated Shredder and are celebrating on the rooftop. April Danny had to a comic book publisher to pitch an idea about walking, talking, fighting turtles, and the publisher rejects the idea, thinking that it's too outlandish, too farfetched, and then pan over to see the turtles watching all this medium funny. Um. Nobody thought this movie was going to be a hit. In both of those oral histories, Baron talks about running into Tony Scott, director of Top Gun, in New York and telling him what he was working on, and Tony being like oh and just walking away. Uh. In March, they did some early screenings with executives from playmates, who Eastman said thought it was the worst movie they'd ever seen. They felt like it was something that was going to kill the toy line. But of course the second they screened it for kids, the test scores went through the roof. Baron said at the time they were of the mind that they'd have a good opening weekend at seven mill, and then the film opened at twenty five mill, breaking the all time non holiday, non summer record. Then the second week it did another nineteen million. It subsequently picked up the record as the highest grossing independent film of all time, which it would hold until the Blair Witch Project. Something like two million thirteen mill budget. Man, that's why wow. So then they had the Turtles do stuff like Regis and Kathie Lee and photo shoots for People magazine and costume. But the best story about this time comes down to Barbara Walters. Barbara Walters at the time is famous for doing these interviews. They got very tiary. She would probe people about all the sad and their lives, and they know everyone would start crying on Barbou's show. So they wanted to rig Donna Tello's head up to cry. And the Henson shop had a little squeeze pump that was going to send water out of the eye holes in the costume. But it mauth functioned and shot out a out of water and so the guy in the suit had to pretend that he was having like a full on hysterical breakdown, subsequently spraying water all over Barbara Walters, which I think it is. She was not happy about it. Now we must talk about coming out of their shells a k a. The live action musical tour heavily underwritten by Pizza Hut, in which the turtles play instruments, sing, fight, and dance on stage. Also thread or Raps. This was the work of theater nerds and musicians named Bob Bijean and Godfrey Nelson, who actually came up with this idea independently of the movie or show. Someone had given Beijan a Beijean, I don't know, I'm sorry, Buddy, a copy of one of the comics, and he and Nelson just started writing songs around it of their own volition as a sort of gritty Sesame on Ice kind of deal. They wanted something that parents could take their kids to and not feel completely put out as they would by seeing Sesame Street on Ice. Um. They literally cold called Eastman and Laird and went to Massachusetts to pitch them two months before the movie opened in theaters, and the creators gave they okay, they said, you want to do a musical in Turtle, sure, we don't give it. But they couldn't turn up the fifti k for licensing, so they cold called another guy, a producer named Stephen Lieber, who had been instrumental in bringing the Moscow Circus to the US. Once he ponied up the fifty k, they then cold called the marketing department for Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, and Dominoes to try and get the money to underwrite this thing. Now by this point the movie had come out, so this wasn't quite as hard of a sale. So Pizza Hut went in for it for a big way, Maybe to offset the fact that Domino's got the product placement in the movie. Maybe they were like playing a little catch up there. Yeah, that makes sense. What kind of pizza house for you as a kid? We Domino's did, Little Caesar did Little Caesars, and then Papa John's later because they had the garlic sauce. We were a Domino's household. Pizza Hut bought three million records up front, buying it before we'd even really done the master recordings. They bought them on the demos. They bought three million records at three dollars a piece, Badan told, Beijian told Game Spot last year. They also committed to at the time an astronomical twenty million dollar advertising campaign and a broadcast of a primetime television commercial. So they record this record in New York and Los Angeles with producer Keith Forcey, who recorded Billie Idol and co wrote Don't You Forget About Me with Simple Minds, and they ready a live pay per view broadcast from Radio City Music Hall just the notion that these guys of their own volition wrote a bunch of songs cold called every party involved, like this thing was like written in the stars. They also secure appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, during which it is heavily implied that April and the Turtles have had sex. It's a weird interview, you can see it. And they also to sing the national anthem at a Yankees game. Yeah, the whole April thing is kind of weird. There was an episode I think called April Fools where she shows up in a gown and not her trademark yellow Ranko and for some reason and they basically can't call her so yeah, this all scans. There's a lot of Turtles April themed pouring out there. I'm just telling you, is it worse there? Is it better or worse than hexas than the hexas fur Gully couldn't say. It depends on your personal preference definition a better or worse. One thing that the show is frequently remembered for is that the turtles are wearing denim vests with sweatshirts tied around their waists, and that they're conspicuously missing their shells. And this was because two of the turtle actors had passed out midway through the first in costume run of the two hour show due to the stress of dancing and fighting in these costumes. So they just act the shell part of it and gave them this grunge look. Um. They also nearly torched the Radio City curtain in front of the f d N Yuh Beijian said, we were doing it would run through and final dress rehearsal in front of the fire marshals with all the pyrotechnics and everything, which entailed sewer lids shooting off the stage and the turtles being raised up on elevators through them. There were too many fireworks in one of them, and the sewer lid catches on fire and goes through the ceiling where the big red Radio City Music Hall curtain is and the fringe of it starts to catch fire. That was very auspicious right before opening anyway. This also launched with a two hour making of documentary which you can still see. The soundtrack album is still out there toward for forty dates, and while I cannot find the sales figures, it clearly lives on in the hearts and minds of the internet because one of the songs has been reissued as a limited press for record store Days, and uh A toy company produced a line of action figures based on how they are dressed in the stage show. There's even a group of fans that cause play as the band to perform all of the music at conventions, and they have solicited the original costumes in which to do so. Such is the power of the Turtles. We've reached the end, Cowabunga. But I want to go out on a Henson quote that Tilden remembers from shooting in North Carolina, and he says Henson told him, if you want to be fascinating, be fascinated. If you're fascinated, you are in a state of fascination. You will then be fascinating. Your art will be fascinating, and that's great. I just think that there's a really nice spirit of wonder and yeah, fascination that that runs through this franchise. People were captivated by this in a way that it seems impossible on paper. They're teenage mutant ninja turtles. It seems ridiculous on paper, and yet it spawned this incredibly durable and resonant for a lot of people franchise because of the love that went into it at nearly every level, and it's outside of the graphic novel, the movies and cartoon show. It reminds me the Muppets man that the Turtles aren't really cruel or edgy, at least not in anything more than like a sort of generous PG kind of way. I think the worst thing any one of them does in the movie is just yelled damn, really loud damn from a rooftop. There's just like it's such a sweet, goofy, little kid energy to them. And despite it's becoming this multi tentacle, many million of dollar media arm I just think that musical is just the most indicative way of how the spirit of this franchise takes hold of people. Two guys of their own volition decided to write a bunch of songs about the Ninja Turtles and cold called it and and got all these people, got all this money, got Pizza Hut on board, and launched a nationwide tour just because of how much they loved it. I mean, if that's not follow your bliss, I don't know what is. Folks. Thank you for listening, and I wanna say it with me now, cowabung. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and I have Jordan run Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,