By [ad_1]
Welcome to Adventure(s) Time’s 144th installment, a look at animated heroes of the past. This week, we’re revisiting the 2003’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles revamp, commonly known as TMNT, and its connection to the earliest comics from Mirage Studios. And if you have any suggestions for the future, let me hear them. Just contact me on Twitter.
Airing on April 12, 2003, and April 19, 2003, the two-part “The Shredder Strikes” was written by Michael Ryan and directed by Chuck Patton. The story features this canon’s first confrontation between the Turtles and their arch-rival, the Shredder. TMNT treated Shredder as a behind-the-scenes manipulator for much of the season, building suspense for his inevitable fight against the Turtles (now in the 11th and 12th episodes), a clever play against audience expectations.
The story opens with the Turtles training, each boasting his chosen weapon is the best ninja tool. Leonardo wins thee sparring match, but is humbled by Master Splinter’s lesson that a weapon is only as good as the ninja who wields it. Agitated by Splinter’s words, Leonardo heads to the rooftops to calm down, muttering that Splinter just doesn’t understand how cool his katanas are.
From there, Leonardo is drawn into a battle with numerous soldiers of the Foot Clan. This is inspired by 1986’s Leonardo Micro-Series from Mirage (reprinted a few years back, in color, by IDW Publishing), which opened with Leo stalking the rooftops before being ambushed by the Foot. The sequence was later adapted for 1990s’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles feature film, but with the hotheaded Raphael taking Leonardo’s place.
The Christmas setting, unfortunately, wasn’t used in either adaptation. The comic also features Leonardo in an all-out battle with the Foot, while the cartoon merely has the Foot Clan taking on Leo as a test to prove his mettle. He’s then presented to Oroku Saki, Shredder’s civilian identity, who gifts Leo with a finely crafted katana forged in the 16th century. He allows Leonardo to leave, with an invitation to join Saki in the future. Splinter learns of Leonardo’s meeting and is finally prompted to reveal the secrets of his past to the Turtles.
An earlier episode, “Attack of the Mousers,” featured an origin for the Turtles themselves (also quite loyal to the story told in the first Mirage comic). This time, we learn the backstory behind Splinter and Shredder’s rivalry. Splinter was once the pet rat of ninja master Hamato Yoshi. He explains how Shredder and his henchman Hun tortured and killed his master after Yoshi refused to provide information on a shadowy force (still kept a mystery to the audience). Splinter escaped through the window, after clawing Hun’s face, scars he carries to this day.
Hun was invention of the animated series, but many of these detail are present in the first Mirage issue. One element’s missing, however. In the original canon, Saki’s older brother Nagi was obsessed with Yoshi’s wife, Tang Shen. Yoshi killed Nagi in retaliation for his murder of Tang Shen, leading Saki to grow up hating Yoshi, and later him after he moved to New York. 1Published in 1984, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 established Splinter has trained his students to one day extract vengeance on Saki, now a Foot leader known as the Shredder.
Leo (now embarrassed for even considering Shredder’s offer) and his brothers then return to Saki’s warehouse. The sword is returned to Saki, who orders his minions to attack. The battle is seemingly finished, until Saki returns in his Shredder armor, declaring the Turtles now his enemy.
That leads into the second part, which features a surprising amount of action for a Saturday morning cartoon. The episode opens with the Turtles facing Shredder on a rooftop… and concludes with the Turtles facing Shredder on a different rooftop.
How are the 15 minutes in the middle filled? One way is to establish Michelangelo as injured early in the fight, shuffled off into a subplot with Donatello, who attempts to get his brother medical aid. Splinter, meanwhile, discovers his pupils have left home without permission, and goes off into the city to prevent them from confronting Shredder. (Which inverts Splinter’s motivations from Mirage’s first TMNT comic.) There’s also an extended comedy bit where Splinter can’t seem to understand how to use the remote to the Turtles’ Battle Shell vehicle. This doesn’t exactly fit the episode’s tone, but it seems like something that appeased a network that wanted to keep things kid-friendly.
Another bit has Leonardo encountering a shadowy ninja while searching for his brothers. The mystery man calls himself a Guardian, who decides Leo is okay with him if Leo’s now opposing Shredder. He then disappears. This is frustrating perhaps in the context of the episode, but ties into an ongoing mystery from the opening season.
The cast is reunited by the end, finding a new rooftop to have another confrontation with the evil Shredder. This is another allusion to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1, which was also homaged in the 1990 TMNT film’s climax. With Splinter’s help, Shredder instigates his own downfall by inadvertently causing a water tower to collapse on top of him. He’s washed off the roof, then has the tower’s remains fall atop him when he tries to stand.
Confident they’ve won, the Turtles return home with Splinter, unaware Shredder’s hand has just emerged from the wreckage of the water tower. This evokes the second live-action film, in which Shredder’s raised dramatically from rubble after his seeming defeat. The Mirage comic also had Shredder fall off the roof during the battle’s climax… but then blown up by the grenade he’d revealed during his fight with the Turtles.
CONTINUITY NOTES
The long-running Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series that began in 1987 established Hamato Yoshi as Splinter himself, of course (following his exposure to mutagen and close proximity to sewer rats). This isn’t loyal to the original canon, but as that show was the general public’s introduction to the characters, to many Yoshi and Splinter will always be one and the same.
PETER LAIRD WANTED CASEY JONES & APRIL O’NEIL CAMEOS
TMNT co-creator Peter Laird archived on his blog the notes he gave producers when these scripts were coming in. In Part One, he was concerned about Raphael acting out of character in one scene. In Part Two, he had issues with Splinter’s reaction to discovering the Turtles were missing, and pitched working in cameos from Casey Jones and April O’Neil. He’s also adamant about picking typos out of the scripts.
SHREDDER’S SCI-FI TWIST: ‘HE’S LIKE THE SHREDDINATOR OR SOMETHING!’
Some TMNT fans weren’t happy with the show’s upcoming Shredder reveal (teased in these episodes). It adds a sci-fi twist to the villain, something Eastman and Laird weren’t even considering when they created Shredder. Of course, they also had no plans for Shredder to appear in future comics; the Turtles weren’t even supposed to appear in a second comic! The runaway success of the self-published issue first inspired Eastman and Laird to continue with the book. And after treating the first issue as a Frank Miller homage, the series had to evolve as the months went on.
Within a few issues, the Turtles were traveling to outer space, other dimension and the distant past (along the way, running into Fugitoid, the character Eastman and Laird were trying to pitch before TMNT blew up). The street-level, grindhouse element of the Turtles will always be vital to the concept — but the creators established early on that the Turtles aren’t limited to that specific setting.
The show’s idea of planting seeds from the very beginning, hinting at a larger space drama behind the scenes of all these ninja battles, is at the very least defensible. And even if you’re dreading the upcoming sci-fi material, it’s not a real distraction from the main story. The focus remains on Splinter and Shredder’s feud, and far more fights than you’d expect to see on Saturday morning. Regarding animated adaptations of the Splinter/Shredder origin, this is the best fans ever received.
About The Author
[ad_2]
