- by Owen Morton
You all know the story. Or, if you don’t, I’m going to tell you, so you’ll know what I’m gibbering on about for the rest of this article. The story to which I refer is, of course, that of where the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles sprang from.
The obvious answer is that they came from the completely deranged minds of some people who work at the offices of whichever cartoon company it is that made the Turtles. (It has just come as something of a surprise that I do not immediately know which company this was: maybe I’m not as sad as I sometimes think I am.) This would, of course, be the correct answer, were we dealing in reality. However, as the content of this website should display quite prominently, reality is somewhere I only go at the weekends, and not even usually then.
Therefore, the origin of the Turtles must be somewhere quite excitingly different. The cartoon company (it’s really going to bug me now until I remember who it was) tried – in the video ‘How It All Began’ – to explain away why a band of four giant ninja turtles would live with an equally oversized rat in the sewers beneath New York City, and regularly do battle with a pink brain called Krang in a robotic body from Dimension X, and his minions. Unfortunately, it is a relatively difficult thing to explain, if you want to be in any way believed, and – though, admittedly, I did fall for it back in my youth – sadly, it just doesn’t hold water with me.
‘How It All Began’ has a needlessly complex plot, involving (as I remember it, since I haven’t watched the thing in at least ten years) Krang the baddy brain inventing something called mutagen (which, worryingly, hasn’t been underlined by the Microsoft Word spellchecker that I love so much), and then carelessly spilling it down a drain in New York City. (Exactly what he was doing in New York City at the time was most probably left completely unexplained.) The mutagen then came into contact with a sewer rat and mutated him into some kind of human-rat hybrid with an odd predilection for becoming a ninja. The story then continues thus: a boy goes to the pet shop, buys four turtles and then accidentally drops them down the drain. (Can you see where this is going yet?) These turtles then also come into contact with the mutagen, and become the heroes that we all know and love. They were found by the rat, who had named himself Splinter, for no obvious reason, who took them in, trained them as ninjas, and named them after Renaissance painters, for reasons known best to himself.
In the meantime, Krang had used the rest of his mutagen to create himself some really helpful servants: a mutated warthog called Bebop and a mutated rhino called Rocksteady. (I might be wrong there; it could be that the mutagen in the sewers came into contact with a warthog and a rhino who happened to be down there – it would make about as much sense as the rest of this programme does.) Logic would also suggest that he created Shredder from somewhere, but as Shredder is fairly likely to be human – though absolutely insane – the mutagen didn’t have anything to do with it. And thus the battle lines were drawn: the ultimate war between good and evil was to be fought between four giant turtles and a rat on the side of good, and a giant brain, an insane human, a giant warthog and a miniature rhino on the side of evil. (Think about it: Rocksteady must be miniature, since he’s the same size as all the other characters, roughly, but a rhino would be way bigger than the rest of them, surely. I’ll bet Rocksteady gets the piss taken loads when he goes to see other rhinos: he’s well small compared to them.) It doesn’t really look promising for either side, does it?
Okay, that’s the official story. Since that backstory takes up – at a guess – about 10 minutes of the video’s promised 50 minutes, the rest of the tape is filled with a pointless adventure about the Turtles getting shrunk to probably about their original size, and having to weather such worries as a tidal wave in the sewers. It also includes the line, spoken by Michelangelo, which I remember most about Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles: “Now I know what an anchovy feels like on my pizza!” I don’t know why it is that I remember this so much. I just do.
So, anyway, yes, that’s the official story. Now both you and me know that something that stupid couldn’t possibly be true. So there must be some other explanation. How did all these bizarre creatures come into being? Well, if you think about it carefully – which I assure you, I have done, honestly – you will soon come to the conclusion that the Turtles – as such – did not actually exist at all. And neither did Splinter, Bebop or Rocksteady. (Krang is slightly more difficult to explain away using the theory I’m now about to expound, given that he speaks out of his stomach, which isn’t a generally recognised ability for anybody, so I’m just going to ignore him.) What the Turtles is really all about is a bunch of nutters who dress up as turtles, rats, warthogs or rhinos, and then have fights. Shredder is actually what he appears to be: an idiot human in a long cape, while the others (Krang excepted, because we’re ignoring him) are just nitwits in stupid costumes, who are fighting one another for no obvious reason. Maybe the baddies really believe they are from Dimension X. Maybe the goodies really think they’re protecting the world. Or maybe they’re all just being silly.
Which is what I think this article is becoming.