Cowabunga! Why the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are still alive and kicking 40 years on

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, slated for release on August 2, joins a long line of screen adaptations of the comic-book series launched in 1984. (Screen grab/Paramount Pictures)

And just like that, New York’s favourite foursome is back in our lives. We’re not referring to the girls with shoe obsessions and boyfriend baggage (of Sex and the City), but the pizza-loving boys named after Italian Renaissance artists who wield nun chucks, fling ninja stars, live in sewers and have the chops to save the world.

There’s a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie flipping into theatres this year, and for hardcore fans, there are a few things to be excited about. One, it’s an animation which is arguably the form in which the Turtles have had maximum impact on the big screen. Two, “permanent teenager” Seth Rogen is producing it.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, slated for release on August 2, joins a long line of screen adaptations of the comic-book IP. The original TMNT comic books were created almost 40 years ago, by the independent comic book creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.

First released in 1984, TNMT was born as a parody of the popular comic book themes of the time—they were “inspired” by tales of vigilante superheroes with a predilection for Eastern martial arts (such as Daredevil), the rising cultural obsession with adolescence evidenced in New Teen Titans, the mutants of the X-Men series and the funny-animal tradition in comic books such as Howard the Duck (who made a fleeting appearance in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie).

TNMT introduced four anthropomorphic turtles into the rapidly expanding world of comic book mutants rampaging through New York. The eldest and most disciplined Leonardo, the tech whiz Donatello, the super-fast and super-fun Michelangelo, and the hot-headed and beefy Raphael—all trained in martial arts by the mutant rat of a ninja master.

Their arch nemesis: Shredder, a masked leader of a criminal ninja clan called The Foot (a direct riff on the Daredevil ninja clan called The Hand). There was also the beloved April, who assists the turtles on their crime-fighting adventures, and Casey Morgan, variously a journalist and lab assistant, smitten with her. What’s not to love about this world in which amphibious boys run amok underground trying the save the day?

Releasing on a limited run of 3,000 copies, printed in black and white on cheap paper, TNMT quickly accrued a reputation on the comic book circuit. In 1987, the first screen adaptation in the form an animated TV series produced by Playmates Toys turned up, and spawned the TNMT toys empire—which, by the early 1990s, became the third best-selling toy figures series of the time, behind GI Joe and Star Wars.

The animated TV series was really a cartoon, toning down the darkness and violence of the original comic books, and introducing catchphrases like Michelangelo’s “Cowabunga!” and “Tough rocks, pal”—informing a generation’s slang in much the same way that Archie Comics did. In 1989, Nintendo took the turtles into the video game universe, and sold a whopping four million copies, making it one of the best-selling NES games of all time.

Every adaptation of TNMT came with its own lore; and that is just as true for the first live-action movie. The first Turtles film became the fourth-biggest commercial success of 1990, but getting it made came with all sorts of challenges, including “infighting among the filmmakers, the cutting-edge animatronics developed by the iconic Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to power the Turtle costumes often broke down, and the young cast’s tolerance for physical and mental exhaustion tested daily,” as an article in The Ringer summarized.

“Still, a mixture of technical wizardry, a clever director who cut his teeth making classic music videos [Steve Barron], and a group of indefatigable actors saved Ninja Turtles from being a typical kids’ schlockfest—and that translated at the box office.” The idea of ninjitsu-trained turtles wasn’t about to get old anytime soon.

Indeed, most of those early adaptations only fleshed out these endearing characters further, while being a heady mix of action, comedy, drama and science fiction, with that special superhero magic we all know too well now thrown in. But most of all, TNMT stood tall for its spirit of camaraderie, loyalty and teamwork in a landscape of lone, traumatized (if not downright haunted) vigilantes.

The 1990s were very much the era of the Turtles—there was even a stage musical, featuring the Turtles as a rock band. At the turn of the millennium, Eastman and Laird slowly began to divest their interest in the franchise, eventually selling the whole property to Viacom in 2009. What followed was years of attempts at cashing in on the turtles’ massive popularity through new animated and live-action series (one produced by Hollywood’s erstwhile master of action Michael Bay) and reboots, without much success.

Bay’s 2012 reboot, the turtles’ fandom will tell you, was doomed right from the start despite starring such actors as Megan Fox (Transformers). Or maybe that was one reason for its downfall, which had already begun when Bay announced that the Turtles would belong to an alien race in his film. This triggered the internet to no end; and the casting of William Fichtner (Prison Break) as the Japanese Shredder added fuel to fire.

According to Deadline Hollywood, there is a third live-action reboot produced by Michael Bay in development, but the new Seth Rogen one has definitely caught the attention of the fandom. For one, it returns to the origin story and focuses on the ‘Teenage’ part of TMNT. “We found a way to make it deeply personal," Rogen told AV Club in a recent interview, about what he calls a coming-of-age film. "We're putting a lot of our own feelings — of awkwardness and insecurity and a desire to belong and be accepted and all that — into the movie.”

“As a lifelong fan of Ninja Turtles, weirdly [that] was always the part that stuck out to me the most," said Rogen to Collider, of his starry film whose cast includes Jackie Chan as Splinter, Ayo Edebiri as April, John Cena as Rocksteady, Ice Cube as Superfly, Rose Byrne as Leatherhead, Paul Rudd as Mondo Gecko, Hannibal Buress as Genesis Frog and Post Malone as Ray Fillet. They join a batch of teenagers debuting in the lead roles.

Focusing on the ‘teen’ aspect makes a lot of business sense as well—Never Have I Ever to Euphoria, Hollywood has certainly been bending over backwards lately to mine Gen Z’s limited attention spans for massive profit. Rogen, 40, is an Xennial; which means he witnessed that first flush of Turtle domination on pop culture firsthand.

Like fellow Xennial Greta Gerwig, and somewhat younger Margot Robbie, who are both reckoning (at some level) with a mainstay of their own childhoods in Barbie, Rogen is also parlaying a personal obsession for a hit with a whole new audience. Take your bets: The animation on Mutant Mayhem certainly has us going “Booyakasha!”