Issue 09: The (original) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies

Join us as Jessika takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of the 1990s Ninja Turtle movies. Come for the stories about Jim Henson, stay for the ragging on Corey Feldman.

We will not be discussing the Michael Bay abominations.

Episode 9 Transcription

[00:00:00] Jessika: God, am I wheezy on my microphone right now?
Hello. Welcome to Ten Cent Takes the podcast where we serve comics knowledge on the half shell, one issue at a time. My name is Jessika Frazier and I'm joined by my cohost, the righteous reader, Mike Thompson.
Hello? 
Mike: Hello.
Jessika: Well, the purpose of our podcast is to study comic books in ways that are both fun and informative. We want to look at their coolest, weirdest and silliest moments, as well as examine how they're woven into the larger fabric of pop culture and history. Today, we're going to be discussing movies from a genre that is very near and dear to my heart, the Teenage Mutant Ninja [00:01:00] Turtles.Now we won’t be doing a deep dive into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, but stay tuned for a future episode. We are going to be talking about the live action, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle films from the nineties, the drama leading up to the making of the films, the ingenuity, and detailed involved in the filming itself, along with the casting crew and some of their recollections and anecdotes.But before we do Mike, what is a one cool thing you've read or watched lately?
Mike: well, I know what we have both been watching actually. And I feel like, uh, maybe you need to start off this 
conversation. 
Jessika: So, yeah, cause I, I see that you have written the same thing as I, as we do have a shared file here. 
Well, I watched the first few episodes of MODOK, which just came out this year and it is witty and wonderful. 
Mike: I think it came out like a week ago. 
Jessika: Oh, sweet.
Mike: Yeah, like it's real [00:02:00] fresh. 
Jessika: Well, thank you to my friend who was like, we need to watch this because you'll really enjoy it. And in fact I did. So, and now that I have my head sort of out of turtle world, I'll be able to watch a little bit more. But for those of you who haven't seen it yet, it follows a blundering Marvel villain with a big head and a super tiny body named MODOK. He flies around on this little hover in this little hover situation. It's very funny. And it follows his evil ventures and how they bleed into his family life in the suburbs, and it is produced by a variety of people. One of whom is Seth green and the show does have a very, a robot chicken vibe to it. It's done in Claymation and can get pretty violent and graphic,  in a Claymation kind of way. But I wouldn't say it's a kid show. I also got a star-studded cast Patton Oswalt is in it. Amy Garcia, Ben Schwartz -whom I loved in Parks and Rec- John Hamm, Nathan Fillion, Whoopie shows up. There's a ton of people.I'm only four episodes in out [00:03:00] of the ten, that comprise season one, but I'm super looking forward to laughing my way through the remaining six potentially tonight.
Mike: I'm not going to spoil it for you, but Alan Tudyk shows up in a role where he sounds almost exactly like Joker from Harley Quinn. It’s great.
Jessika: Oh, I'm so excited.  So what did you think about it?
Mike: We loved it. So Sarah and I wound up bingeing it last Friday when we didn't have the kids, because we knew it was not a friendly show,  as you get the warning at the very beginning, talking about how this is a mature show and it is not, not for small children. I think we binged all of it in one night because you know, it was only 10 episodes and they're half hour.  So we didn't know  much about it. Other than I'd seen a promo image for it. I had seen a bunch of nerds getting mad about it online, but I also knew that Patton Oswalt was involved. So I was already sold because anything that man touches I will consume. We wound up just being blown out of the water. And it's so funny while also [00:04:00] being weirdly faithful to Marvel Comics lore and in a weird twist,  we wound up adopting a dog two days later. And, it was very unexpected. It was a very spur of the moment thing where we saw this dog online and then decided to apply for him. And we got him and I didn't think this was actually going to fly, but Sarah agreed to it, much to her chagrin I'm sure later on, but we named him MODOG. So MODOG stands for Miniature Organism Designed Only for Gnawing because he's a puppy and he's chewing on everything as puppies do. We call him Mo for short, there's a graphic designer at my company who immediately whipped up an image of him MODOK's doomsday chair. So it's his face, but then MODOK's body. It's great. And I've shared it everywhere. And now I have a new life goal where I want to have Patton Oswalt meet my dog and then sign a printing of that graphic.So. Patton Oswalt, future friend of the podcast, please hit us up. 
Jessika: That was a really cute picture. [00:05:00] I literally LOL'd when I saw it.
Mike:It was very good. It's also been turned into a Slack emoji in our work slack. And as a result, it's just getting spammed by everybody on my team. 
Jessika:  Deservedly so. 
Nowonto our main topic, which is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle films. First, I want to give a shout out to the resources I used in my research of these films. IMDB.com, movie web.com. There was a whole  interview with the cast and crew of the making of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle films from the Hollywood reporter.com. Turtlepediafandom.com, which is very well organized and has tons of information with resources cited and the film, The Definitive History of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which is basically the history told through compiled interviews of [00:06:00] those involved in making this amazing franchise.
So these live action films, I don't know about you. I absolutely remember watching these as a kid, although I didn't realize that until I started watching them again and was immediately able to recall every scene from the first film. And we were also very much, and I've said this before on the podcast, we were very much a teenage mutant ninja turtle household.So it makes total sense that we would have watched that at some point, probably numerous times. I presume you also watched them as a kid. What was your experience with the films?
Mike: I mean, I was born in the early eighties, I was very much that target demographic for the Turtles. My mom actually took me to see the first movie, I think four times. 
Jessika: Oh, wow. 
Mike: I think I mentioned in that Saturday Morning Cartoon episode, that the last time she just sat in the lobby and read a book
Jessika: I still love that story.
Mike: Yeah,  which, f you ever meet my mom, that, that checks out. She's like, meh, he'll be fine.
He'll be [00:07:00] fine. What's the worst that could happen. Letting my eight-year-old go into a movie theater alone. But yeah,  I saw both sequels in the theater too. I think I saw The Secret of the Ooze twice. And then the third one was fine. I mean, we got it on video and I remember watching it a bunch of times with my siblings because they were pretty young and we would just pop it on because it was something that could entertain all of us, but it wasn't one of those things that we needed to see over and over again in the movie theater, as opposed to the other ones.I had so many of the action figures when I was a kid and I was just addicted to the cartoon for like longer than it was cool. 
Jessika: Hard same. Very much so. 
Mike: But I weirdly wasn't really into the comics. The Ninja Turtle comics were just never something that I was all that curious about. I was already into Marvel and DC and Image and all that stuff. 
Jessika: Yeah. Very nice. I'm going to get into production, actors and success of each of the films along with some other fun facts. [00:08:00] But first, can you please give me a brief overview of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle film?
Mike: Sure. So Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is  the proverbial superhero origin movie. It's set in a New York that's still rocking the grit of the eighties, and it's also showing a bit more urban decay than we're used to. This New York is in the throes of a crime wave due to the Foot Clan, which has been recruiting wayward teens, and eventually training them to be ninjas of all things. I don't quite understand how you go from recruiting teens to just  commit petty burglaries and then rewarding them with a giant warehouse full of video arcade cabinets and skateboarding ramps and graffiti walls. And regular or menthol cigarettes as was demonstrated in the scene that we get to see a very young Sam Rockwell selling the Foot Clan to teenagers.The movie introduces us to the Ninja Turtles, their leaders Splinter, the vigilante Casey Jones, [00:09:00] and TV reporter April O'Neil, as they all deal with the crime wave in their own ways. But then they eventually work together to defeat Shredder and his army. 
Jessika: Yeah. That totally sums it up. What did you think of the film overall on the rewatch?
Mike: Honestly, I was surprised by how well it's aged. it's not like the current crop of superhero movies where those are clearly meant to be watched by adults who are fans of the franchise. And then also make it accessible to kids. This was clearly meant to be a kids movie that was tolerable for their parents who got dragged to the theater. It's a lot darker and grittier than I remembered. And a lot of those elements really went over my head as a kid. The Turtles and Splinter themselves, I also think are really impressive, which isn't surprising since the costumes and puppetry were handled by the Jim Henson company. I mean, when you hire the best you get the best. But yeah, most kids during this era had really only been exposed [00:10:00] to the cartoon. So it's a little weird at how serious they went with the overall tone and storyline. My only real complaint was how kind of janky Shredder's costume was, but he actually doesn't show up that much. It's  like he's wearing, do you remember those like weird sequined , evening dresses that were all the rage in the late eighties, early nineties?
Jessika: Oh, yes. The ones with the shoulder pads?
Mike: Yeah, it kind of looks like someone took the fabric from that and then attached Shredder's blades and shoulder pads. And it's also the wrong color. It's red. They really needed to give him a cape and a belt and I would have been way more okay with that. But it's fine. 
Jessika: Yeah. 
Mike: What about you? How do you feel about it? 
Jessika: I think it held up pretty well on the rewatch. Like you said, it was super fun. As fun as I remember it. And I really liked April's role in the film, which was kind of, I would say edgy for like the nineties. She's independent. She lives alone, although her boss has absolutely [00:11:00] no boundaries.
He just fucking shows up there with his kid and the kid's fucking stealing things from her. Like screw that, don't bring your kid here.
Mike: She lives in this weird shithole of an apartment, too. Which doesn't make sense to me because she's apparently  a really well-respected and popular TV journalist. 
Jessika: Mike we're women. We can't both have success and nice things 
Mike: I'm sorry. 
Jessika: That would be really threatening to the patriarchy. I really dig that she follows stories regardless of what others may advise her she should do. Like, she's not about doing fluff pieces. She's just like, no, let's do this thing. And at, one point she's almost mugged and she doesn't tell her boss because why, why, why, why should she, like, nothing happened really? And when he asks her about it, she has this like “for what” attitude, which I'm like, yeah, exactly. For what? Like, why should I, I'm not going to call my boss and be like, “I tripped on the [00:12:00] sidewalk and sprained my ankle.” I don't know. It didn't make any sense. So
Mike: That producer really was, he was really there as an excuse to introduce the character of his son. That was really the only purpose that he was there for. 
Jessika: Yeah, he popped in and out. He wasn't doing much with that. Yeah. Also the animatronics were surprisingly great. I know it's Jim Henson, but like  the nineties were a really good decade for, good animatronics between like that and Jurassic Park.You know, very, very good. So their movements were just really convincing. And we'll get into, part of why that is, in just a couple of minutes when I talk about the animatronics and the costumes.
Mike: Yeah. I'm really excited to talk about that actually. 
Jessika: So picture this: It's 1989 and comic book movies were not wildly popular after a couple of recent superhero flops. Their turtles were initially [00:13:00] discovered by Gary Proper, who was a road manager for the comic Gallagher. He had previously worked with Kim Dawson and got her on board as producer.
And they signed on Bobby Herbeck as the writer. This was kind of cool because during the writing process, there was a lot of back and forth between Herbeck and the original writers, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird to ensure that the movie was staying true to the comic and, per an interview I read, it was definitely a longer process than Herbeck  had initially thought it would be.
Mike:  That makes sense because to be completely honest, the movie feels like a pretty faithful adaptation of the tone of the original comic, which was very over the top and gritty and violent. 
Jessika: Yeah, absolutely. And I, I do like that. They went back and checked instead of just said, okay, well we have the rights and we're going to run and do what we want to do with this. 
So now that they had a script, they had to find funding and a studio and a way to make the Turtles come to [00:14:00] life. So they pitched the idea all around Hollywood. All three of them were incredibly enthusiastic, but the studios were super wary after the recent comic book related box office failures.
Mike: So out of curiosity, which movies were those that failed? 
Jessika: Howard the Duck?
Mike: Oh yeah.
Jessika: Yeah. And so it didn't do well. And there was another one before that, too, although it doesn't say on here, but Howard the Duck was the big one that people were like, yikes, we're going to go ahead and back off.
Mike: That was George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. And they thought they had like the next star wars and ET their hands.
Jessika: I've never even heard of it.
Mike: Oh, oh, we should totally do a retrospective on it at some point.  It's based on a Marvel comics character who is a anthropomorphic duck.  They  had a full animatronic suit. 
It's like, you know, Ninja Turtle-quality animatronics, and puppetry. It had all sorts of talent involved with it. And it was one of the biggest box office bombs. So that makes a lot of sense actually, because that'd be the closest [00:15:00] thing where you're talking about anthropomorphic comic characters.
Jessika: I'm getting flashes of like a big duck costume. So I may have even seen flashes of it in my life, 
Mike: It's a weird movie. It's real weird.  Leah Thompson, you know, the mom from Back to the Future is in it and this was like at the height of her popularity too. 
Jessika: Oh no poor Leah. 
Mike: It's real uncomfortable. There's a whole scene where she's in bed with Howard in lingerie. 
Jessika: Ew, with the duck?. 
Mike: It's, very weird 
Jessika: I don't like it. 
Mike: And very uncomfortable.
Jessika: It's weird enough having these teenage, like teenage, they are supposed to be fun. Fact, they're supposed to be 15 during this, that they're all like  over April. It's like, Ooh. Like she is definitely a full adult, a full adult, like you are 15 years old and you're, a turtle! Like… 
Mike: And that's unfortunately, [00:16:00] something that's carried on. I feel like the one thing that they don't actually ever do a very good job of adapting is the teenage aspect.  I have hope for what we have coming in the future. We'll talk about that later. 
Jessika: Yeah, yeah. 
Mike: But yeah. 
Jessika: Ugh. So they pitched the idea all around Hollywood.  After those comic book related box office failures, after months of persistent nudging, they finally wore down Tom Gray, who was the head of production for Golden Harvest and got approval to light the project with a $3 million budget.
And apparently they already had another couple of million  already floating around, like, yeah, no problem. Just, but we need more.
Mike: They were already huge, and the funny thing is this is very much like how they actually got their first pitch for getting the action figures made where their agent was driving around with this giant turtle.  I think Playmates was the last toy manufacturer that was actually willing to talk to them and they agreed to it, but they had been making pitches right and left [00:17:00] and no one had picked them up. 
Jessika: it was just, it sounded like such a whole thing that they were just like, Fox! How about you? How about blah, blah, blah. And everybody was like, whoa, whoa, you need to leave like exit through where you came from, because we don't want anything you have to tell us. 
Mike: Don't even take the main exit, go out the servant's exit.
Jessika: Yeah, we don't want to see you leave. Just do it. can teleport. That'd be great. 
Mike: We don't want any association with you or your trash. Get out . 
Jessika: Oh no. So they hired Steve Barron as director. 
Mike: Right.
Jessika: Barron  wanted to make sure that the teenage mutant ninja turtles were a hybrid of the lighter animated series, along with the darker vibe of the comics, which is why there is that kind of middle point. It is a little darker, but it's maybe not as dark as the comics and that's intentional. They did want to make it family friendly because the comics really aren't, they're very violent. They're very graphic. You can put a dark spin on things and still make it [00:18:00] family friendly. Barron had also worked with Jim Henson on a previous project and knew Henson's  Creature Shop would make the Turtles more fully believable on screen. Now, the issue was that this was 1990. Jim Henson was arguably the biggest name in the animatronics game, which of course meant his services were not going to be cheap. This edition would be $6 million, which of course was far over their budget. They also had to convince Henson to actually take part in the film because he was concerned that it was too violent for what his puppets should portray and might be a risky move due to his younger fanbase. Took some sweet talking from Barron -which seems to be kind of the name of the game for the Turtles- but Henson finally agreed to assist. And this was the first and what is thought to be the last time that Henson lent out the name to use in this way?  Yeah.  They [00:19:00] had to get another studio involved because they just simply did not have enough money. 
Mike: Right. 
Jessika: And finally signed on with Fox for a larger budget. Which also fell through. I read an interview that said within 10 days of when they were supposed to start filming, they still didn't have the funding. 
Mike: Wow. 
Jessika: So they were cutting it incredibly close. I mean, it had literally everything else. 
Mike: Come to think of it. I mean, yeah, that's wild. And then also - given the time that this came out- this has gotta be one of the last films that Jim Henson was personally involved with  before he died. 
Jessika: Yeah. Actually we'll get into that. We will. Yeah. And not even on this, this part of it, but we'll we'll we'll we'll get there. We'll get there. Yeah. New Line Cinema eventually came through and signed on to produce. But offered significantly less money than the 6 million that had been proposed. Golden Harvest owner, Raymond Chow, agreed to fund the remainder of the expenses, whatever those were.
Mike: Okay. I mean, that was a great bet for him.
[00:20:00] Jessika: Okay. Yeah, absolutely. Shoot. So this is wild. We were talking about Jim Henson. Let's talk about the costumes because those things were awesome. There were actually two sets of costumes for each turtle, one for the animatronics, s