TMNT Sarah Michelle Gellar

TMNT

Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kevin Smith, Patrick Stewart

“Today we are bidding on a child. He is a strong and hearty youngster and should make you all kinds of money over the next few years. What will you give me for him? McDonalds, Wendys, KFC, and Taco Bell, what do you bid?” Near them stand the junk food kingpins with their chips, candies, pops, sugary cereals, and those wares missing any nutritional value. Like crack dealers giving out free samples to school kids, these big boys know they need to hook them early because children start developing brand loyalty at the age of 2. The vast majority of ads that children will see on television will come from these big companies, and they aren’t selling apples, peaches, and bananas. Ninety-five percent of the over 10,000 food commercials that children will see this year are for foods high in sugar and/or fat. Ninety-eight percent of these ads are for nonnutritive yummies. Kids will influence roughly 72 percent of the food and beverage purchases in the household. If junior whines and cries enough, mommy and daddy will buy them what they want. Each year, these little ankle biters (7-12) will spend $2.5 billion of their own money on your snacks and beverages, and when they get to teenagers, that is when you reap the real lion’s share. Teenagers will spend $13 billion in fast-food restaurants alone this year. Once you have them working in your fields, when they get older, they will give birth to kids, who they will take to your restaurant and consume your snacks. Next are the toy manufacturers whose useless crap will clutter the family’s hall and rooms. They will spend more time with your children in the form of advertising each week than good old mom and dad. If you don’t believe me do a little math. The average child will spend 11,000 hours at school and 22,000 in front of the television. The average hour-long show has about 16 minutes of commercials. That works out to 352,000 minutes or roughly 5,867 hours. Now let us compare this with the estimated 39 minutes a week that the average parents spend in meaningful conservation with the kiddies. That works out to 608.4 hours of quality time. Now who are they going to listen to, the one who spends 4,400 hours with them or the dope who spends 608.4 hours with them? Even Patty Hearst went through less brainwashing.

It is why I love the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. No cartoon has ever made shilling corporate crap so much fun. Not only did we get the 8 minutes of commercials, but the entire show was one long half-an-hour commercial. There were, of course, the action figures and other toys with the turtles’ likeness on them. Then there was the useless junk to send junior off to school with – the backpacks, Pez dispensers, notebooks, video games, pencils, skateboards, and clothes. But they did the one thing that rival cartoon shill He-Man could not do: the food tie-ins. They chowed down on their cereal, had their Pizza Crunchabungas, their Hostess Ninja Turtles’ Pudding Pies, and their Royal OOZE Gelatin Desserts. Parents across the country got to take their wee one to music concerts featuring the Turtles and be happy that these Milly Vanilly actors in turtle costumes had enough time in between songs and saving April O’Neil from being kidnapped by Shredder, to enjoy several slices of Pizza Hut pizza, the same company who, surprisingly, was also sponsoring the tour. I wonder what subliminal message they were trying to communicate with a song like Pizza Power and the empty Pizza Hut boxes that were featured on their posters, audio cassettes, and VHS tapes. If you missed the message during their concert tour, you could have caught it at their stage show at Disney-MGM Studios theme park in Orlando where they emerged from their Turtle Party Wagon and did their “ninja dance” to “Pizza Power!” (As a side note, parents can thank Ronald Reagan for this, as his administration relaxed the rules against these commercials in cartoon form. Shove one more piece of pizza in your mouth for the Gipper.)

Three feature films (who could forget Vanilla Ice rapping with these reptiles), countless video games, a daily comic strip that ended in 1996, a concert tour, theme park ride, and an animated series that has been a constant presence on television since December 10, 1987, not bad for a mom-and-pop, independent black-and-white, violent comic book put out in 1984 by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird as a parody of Marvel Comic’s extremely popular New Mutants and Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Ronin. (Meant as a one-shot, only 3,000 copies of the first issue were published. As the Turtles grew in popularity and lost their violent edge to appeal to children, they, in turn, were the subjects of numerous parodies including Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung Fu Kangaroos and Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters.) Now a good rule of thumb is when some product or company’s market share is going down, or is wearing out its welcome, they try to be cool and appeal to teenagers by using acronyms. Hence, New Kids On The Block became NKOTB, Kentucky Fried Chicken, KFC, McDonalds, Mickey Ds, and the Turtles are now TMNT.

For those of you who have lived in a cave, the Turtles are four anthropomorphic turtles who live in the sewers of Manhattan. They have been trained by their sensei and adopted father, a rat named Splinter (a parody of Stick from Daredevil). They are named after famous painters – Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello. (A female turtle named Venus de Milo was added in 1997 to increase the female audience. She has since disappeared to the same place that Chuck Cunningham was sent and is never referred to.) Even though they are crime fighters, they are still teenagers who love pizza. They are joined in their adventures by humans April O’Neil and Casey Jones, a hockey mask wearing vigilante who uses sporting goods as weapons. Their biggest enemy is Shredder, a masked ninja master and his Foot Clan (a parody of the Hand in Daredevil). What makes this fourth live action movie different is the actors in suits have been replaced with computer-generated imagery. Imagine a manga-style Shrek. The plot you ask? To sell pizza, video games, lunch boxes to fat kids in TMNT t-shirts of course. God, I wonder if they have any TMNT Prozac.

Verdict: Cool looking but it is the Turtles for God sake.