Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a 1990 American superhero action comedy film directed by Steve Barron, based on the comic book characters of the same name. Released on March 30, 1990, the film presents the origin story of Splinter and the Turtles, their meeting April O'Neil and Casey Jones, and their first confrontation with Shredder and his Foot Clan. It stars Judith Hoag, Elias Koteas, and the voices of Brian Tochi, Robbie Rist, Corey Feldman, and Josh Pais as the four title characters. The turtle costumes were developed by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and was one of the last projects that Henson was involved in prior to his death.
When the New York City Police Department is unable to stop a severe crime wave caused by the Foot Clan, four mutated turtles -- Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael -- come forth to save the city. Under the leadership of mutated rat, Splinter, and together with their new-found allies April O'Neil and Casey Jones, they fight back and take the battle to The Shredder. The film kept very close to the dark feel of the original comics, and is a direct adaptation of the comic book storyline involving the defeat of Shredder, with several elements also taken from the 1987 TV series that was airing at the time, such as April being a news reporter, and the turtles having different-colored masks, as opposed to the uniform red masks of the comic.
The film became the highest-grossing independent film of all time, the ninth-highest-grossing film worldwide of 1990, and the most successful film in the series until the 2014 reboot. It was followed by two sequels, The Secret of the Ooze in 1991 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III in 1993.
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Plot
As a crime wave rises in New York City, news reporter April O'Neil covers the mysterious Foot Clan, a gang of ninjas plaguing the city. April's coverage gains the attention of the Shredder, leader of the Foot, who orders her silenced. She is attacked by the Foot in a subway and knocked unconscious. Raphael (who has been following April to retrieve a sai he had lost in a previous battle) emerges from the shadows and easily fights off the Foot. He carries April back to the Turtles' hideout, unaware that one of the Foot is following him. Splinter then recounts to an astonished April their origins: once ordinary animals living in the sewer, they were mutated into intelligent, human-sized creatures by a discarded canister of toxic waste. The Turtles escort April back home. Upon their return to the sewers, the Turtles find their home ransacked and Splinter kidnapped. With nowhere else to go, the four distraught Turtles return to April's apartment and spend the night there.
Meanwhile, the Foot Clan continues to grow, incorporating a number of delinquent teens into their ranks. One of these teens is Danny Pennington, the son of April's supervisor Charles Pennington, who is arrested for robbery. After bailing Danny out of jail, Charles stops by April's apartment, where Danny incidentally catches a glimpse of one of the Turtles in hiding. He then reports back to Shredder, who has been searching for the Turtles.
At April's apartment, Leo and Raph get into a heated argument. Raph goes to the roof, where the Foot ambush him. Comatose, he's thrown through April's skylight, and the Turtles scramble to defend themselves from the Foot. Things look bleak until the arrival of Casey Jones, who helps them fight off the remaining Foot warriors. However, the building catches fire during the melee, and the Turtles are forced to retreat.
They retreat to a farm that belongs to April's family, and Casey informs her that she was fired from her job after hearing an answering machine message shortly before the escape. Raph eventually recovers from his coma, and the Turtles train together vigorously while April and Casey fall in love. At one point, Leo manages to make contact with Splinter through meditation, and after the Turtles witness him in a shared vision, they decide to return to New York to find and rescue him.
Despite being a member of the Foot Clan, Danny has secretly been taking counsel from Splinter, who shares with him the story of his master Hamato Yoshi's murder by a rival ninja named Oroku Saki. Splinter explains that during the struggle, Splinter's cage was broken and he lunged at Saki's face, clawing and biting him in vengeance for his master. Saki, bleeding and enraged, sliced off part of his ear with a katana. When Danny learns Shredder intends to have Splinter killed, he and Casey set him free from captivity.
Although the Foot were set to ambush the Turtles in the sewers upon their return, the Turtles manage to turn the tables on them. The fight escalates into the streets above and eventually onto a rooftop, where the Turtles finally face off against Shredder, but prove to be no match for him. Leo eventually scores a hit with his ninjato, but is ultimately disarmed and pinned to the ground. Before Shredder can finish Leo off, Splinter appears and challenges him to a fight. Splinter names Shredder as Oroku Saki, and Saki removes his mask and touches his scar, remembering how Splinter gave it to him. Saki then charges Splinter who, using Michelangelo's nunchaku, ensnares the Shredder's yari, leaving him to dangle precariously over the roof's edge. Shredder throws a tanto from his belt, but when Splinter reaches up to catch it, his grip is released and Saki falls into the back of a garbage truck. Casey pulls the lever to activate the compactor, crushing the Shredder. As the police arrive on the scene, the teens inform them on where all the stolen goods can be found. Reunited with Splinter, the Turtles watch as April and Casey share a kiss.
Maps Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990 film)
Cast
Live-action actors
- Judith Hoag as April O'Neil, a reporter for Channel 3 News
- Elias Koteas as Casey Jones, a street-wise vigilante and former ice hockey player who becomes an ally of the Turtles
- Michael Turney as Danny Pennington, Charles's teenage son and a member of The Foot
- Jay Patterson as Charles Pennington, April's boss
- Raymond Serra as Chief Sterns, the Police Chief of New York City
- James Saito as Oroku Saki / The Shredder, the founder of a network of runaways-turned-thieves and the main antagonist of the film.
- Toshishiro Obata as Tatsu, Shredder's second-in-command
- Sam Rockwell as Head Thug
Skeet Ulrich and Scott Wolf appear, uncredited, as members of the Foot.
Voice cast
- Josh Pais as Raphael, the rebellious and angry Turtle
- Robbie Rist as Michelangelo, the fun-loving, party Turtle
- Brian Tochi as Leonardo, the leader of the Turtles and the closest to Splinter
- Corey Feldman as Donatello, the brains of the Turtles
- Kevin Clash as Splinter, the Turtles' master.
- David McCharen as Oroku Saki / The Shredder
- Michael McConnohie as Tatsu
Puppeteers
- David Greenaway as Raphael (facial assistant)
- Josh Pais as Raphael (in-suit performer)
- Mak Wilson as Michelangelo (facial assistant)
- Michelan Sisti as Michaelangelo (in-suit performer)
- David Rudman as Donatello (facial assistant)
- Leif Tilden as Donatello (in-suit performer)
- Ernie Reyes, Jr. as Donatello in-suit martial arts stunt double
- Martin P. Robinson as Leonardo (facial assistant)
- David Forman as Leonardo (in-suit performer)
- Kevin Clash as Splinter (puppeteer)
- Rickey Boyd as Splinter (facial assistant)
- Robert Tygner as Splinter (assistant puppeteer)
NOTE: All four actors who played the in-suit Turtles also appeared in cameos as minor characters, with David Forman (Leonardo) as a gang member, Michelan Sisti (Michaelangelo) as a pizza delivery man, Leif Tilden (Donatello) as a messenger of The Foot and Josh Pais (Raphael) as a passenger in a taxi. Pais was the only actor to portray a Turtle on screen and provide his voice.
Production
The film's budget was $13.5 million. Much of the production took place in North Carolina, with a couple of location shoots in New York City during the summer of 1989 to capture famous landmark areas, such as Times Square, the Empire State Building, and the Hudson River. Filming in North Carolina took place at the North Carolina Film Studios, where New York rooftop sets were created. Production designer Roy Forge Smith and his art director, Gary Wissner, went to New York City four months prior to filming and took still photographs of rooftops and other various locations. While in NYC, Smith and Wissner were allowed to explore an abandoned Brooklyn subway line, as they could not gain access to a city sewer, but the structure of the subway had the same principle as a sewer. They also went to a water tunnel which had large pipes running through it.
After design sketches were created, the construction team used the studios' backlot to create some of the sets. There were problems with the manholes that led to the Turtles' home, in that an eight-foot square room had to be constructed beneath them, but found water at about five-feet, and thus had to pour concrete into the underground rooms to keep the water out. In order to make the sewer authentic, a tide-mark was given, and it was covered with brick, plaster and stucco paint to give the walls a realistic look. The Turtles themselves were created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in London. Jim Henson said that the creatures were the most advanced that he had ever worked with. The creatures were first made out of fiberglass, and then remolded out of clay. They were produced as molds to cast the whole body in foam rubber latex. The work at the Shop was completed within 18 weeks.
Many major studios, such as Walt Disney Pictures, Columbia Pictures, MGM/UA, Orion Pictures, Paramount (whose parent company Viacom would acquire the TMNT property in 2009), and Warner Bros. turned down the film for distribution; they were worried that despite the popularity of the cartoon and the toy line, the film could potentially be a box office disappointment, like Masters of the Universe was just a couple years prior. The film finally found distribution roughly halfway through the initial production, via the then small and independent production company New Line Cinema, which at that point had been known for distributing low budget B movies and arthouse fare.
Marketing
Live Entertainment Inc. announced that the film would go to VHS via its Family Home Entertainment label on October 4, 1990. The suggested price was $24.99 per cassette. Pizza Hut engaged in a $20 million marketing campaign tied into the film (despite the fact that Domino's Pizza was used as product placement in the film itself). Items included advertising in print, radio and television, and several rebate coupons.
Alternate versions
The UK version removed Eastern fighting weapons like the nunchaku, using alternate shots of Michaelangelo in order to conceal his nunchaku weapon, or omitting the show-off duel between Michaelangelo and a member of the Foot clan. Also, the scene of Shredder in the garbage shred was heavily edited and the Turtle Power song was edited to change the word 'ninja' to 'hero' as per the UK TV series. The unedited version was released on DVD in 2004 in the UK.
The German theatrical voice-dubbed version is identical to the UK version, i.e. it omits the usage of the nunchaku. Furthermore, the German dubbing audio track contains several "cartoon-like" sounds in order to soften the violence of the fight scenes. Although the German dub of the film was released with unedited pictures on DVD, the German dub audio version with the "funny noises" was still kept, because they were permanently merged into the German voice-dubbing audio.
Reception
On the film's initial release, Owen Gleiberman, writing for Entertainment Weekly, gave the movie an F rating, finding that none of the four turtles or Splinter had any personality, and felt that a young audience might enjoy the film, noting that the reviewer might have "gone for it too had I been raised on Nintendo games and the robotic animation that passes for entertainment on today's Saturday-morning TV." Kim Newman wrote in the Monthly Film Bulletin that he found the characters reminiscent of the early '70s Godzilla film series, describing the turtles as "loveable monsters in baggy foam rubber suits" who "befriended lost children and smashed things up in orgies of destruction that somehow never hurt anyone," and that the Turtles "drop the occasional teenage buzzword but are never remotely convincing as teenagers, mutants, ninjas or turtles, leaving them stranded on the screen as big green Muppets with different coloured headbands." Variety, the New York Times, and the Monthly Film Bulletin all noted the Asian villains of the film; Variety described "overtones of racism in its use of Oriental villains", while the Times' Janet Maslin stated "The story's villainous types are Asian, and the film plays the yellow-peril aspects of this to the hilt." Newman noted a racist joke in April O'Neil's response to the Foot Clan, "What's the matter, did I fall behind on my Sony payments?", finding that the film expressed a "resentment of Japan's economic strength even while the film is plundering Japan's popular culture." Roger Ebert commented that there is "no racism" in the film.
Maslin of The New York Times criticized the cinematography, stating that it was so "poorly photographed that the red-masked turtle looks almost exactly like the orange-masked one." Variety described the film as "visually rough around the edges... sometimes sluggish in its plotting" Ebert stated that the "most interesting part of the film for a non-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fan is the production design", which he described as a "low-rent version of Batman or Metropolis."
Both Gleiberman and Maslin praised the work of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, with Maslin stating "without which there would have been no film at all". Variety praised the film's tongue-in-cheek humor and the "amusingly outlandish" martial arts sequences. Ebert concluded that the film is "nowhere near as bad as it might have been, and probably is the best possible Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie. It supplies, in other words, more or less what Turtle fans will expect."
The film has received a 40% rating on the rotten tomatoes rating aggregator website, making it the highest rated film in the series.
Box office
The film opened in North America on March 30, 1990, coming in at #1 at the box office over the weekend, with more than $25 million. The film turned out to be a huge success at the box office, eventually making over $135 million in North America, and over $66 million outside North America, for a worldwide total of over $200 million, making it the ninth highest-grossing film of 1990 worldwide. The film was also nominated for awards by The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films.
Home release
In 1990, the film was released to VHS and reached No. 4 in the home video market. The film was released to DVD in Region 1 on September 3, 2002; it includes only minor special features, such as a trailer and interactive menus. The film was also released in the MiniDVD format.
On August 11, 2009, the film was included in a special 25th anniversary box set (25th anniversary of the original comic book, not the movie), released to both DVD and Blu-Ray formats. It also contained Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, and 2007's animated release, TMNT. No additional features, other than theatical trailers, were included.
In Germany, however, a "Special Edition" was released on March 12, 2010 with additional features, including an audio commentary by director Steve Barron, an alternate ending, and alternate takes from the original German release, where Michelangelo's nunchaku had been edited out.
Warner Home Video released the film along with Secret of the Ooze and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III as part of a "Triple Feature" on Blu-ray in June 2012, minus the fourth film TMNT. Warner Home Video released the film separately on Blu-ray on December 18, 2012.
Soundtrack
Legacy
Following the huge success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the box office, several sequels were created. A year later, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze was released in theaters, and was a commercial success. In 1993, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III was released in theaters, to a smaller box office take. After a 14-year absence from theaters, a fourth film, TMNT, was released in 2007, though unlike the first three, this was a CGI animated film. Seven years later, a reboot, also with the title Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, was released in 2014, and a sequel titled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows was released in theaters on June 3, 2016.
References
External links
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on IMDb
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at AllMovie
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at Box Office Mojo
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at Rotten Tomatoes
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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