I've never seen such tiny pizzas.
This must be how that
McDonald Crump dude got to be a multi- bazillionaire.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I have fond memories of wearing my Michelangelo shirt to school,
slurping down four turtle pies worth of puddin power, tornado
kicking off a lunch table and screaming surfer lingo like a goddamn poser.
Those are all symptoms of late stage turtle mania, by the way.
I could have died.
The turtles have been a favorite of sticky fingered
latchkey kids for over three decades, but they actually started out
as hardboiled, brutal comic book assassins.
Bandido busted
Mike always bashes the bad guys.
Old habits die hard, and every so often they accidentally get back to their
fucked up roots.
I'm talking about the cartoon villain
who may have predicted the rise of fascism in America.
That unpatriotic dude
Shredder's international quest
for MILFs and the subtle blowjob joke that the Turtles told on Oprah
Not me Oprah Oprah
This is the new Canonball.
I don't want to get into it,
but I lost my old lifeguard job and had to move back into my mom's place.
It's not that I can't swim
I just think
a please would be nice if you're asking me to swim out into a riptide.
We all got stuff going on anyway.
It's no secret that a lot of Ninja Turtles canon exists
mainly to sell choking hazards to toddlers.
The toy company Playmate is the whole reason the original animated
series exists.
So the cartoons were just a slurry of colors and karate chops
designed to milk money out of confused and exhausted boomer parents.
Right. I mean, just look at the bad guys.
A blob of cheese named Pizza Face, a basketball playing
giraffe named Half Court. Donald Goddamn Trump. Yeah man
There were no less than four
Ninja Turtles villains based on this fucking guy, Obama.
The first Trump monster was Fenton Q. Hackenbrush
A shady real estate developer who enlists an army of blue collar laborers
and executive lackeys to go out and crime things up on his behalf.
Well, what crimes do you know?
Eh embezzlement.
Oh, this episode is actually one big mutants as immigrants allegory.
What are you, some kind of foreigner?
As a matter of fact
I am. Hackenbrush wants to turn public opinion
against mutants, thereby harnessing grievance for personal gain.
So when he bumps into the angry and dimwitted Slash, he gets right to work
January 6thing him convincing him to mount an attack on a symbol of democracy.
The Freedom Bell, the city's most beloved landmark.
Just go there and smash it and smash everything you can on your way there.
Now, this lumpy bag of ham is Donald J.
Lofty Hackenbrush's boss.
When Hack fails in his attempt to fly garbage into outer space,
Lofty very publicly threatens to beat his ass with a cane.
He even coins Trump's signature phrase.
Person.
Woman. Man.
Camera.
Not that one. This one.
And you are fired.
14 years before The Apprentice aired.
They also made him look awfully similar to this fucking guy.
No, sorry, dude.
I'm not up on my eccentric billionaires.
That's Donald's father, Fred Trump, The man who handed him his career and
as Lofty did to Hackenbrush, castigated him for his failures
while shielding him from any real consequences.
Now McDonald Crump is the fat necked, over tanned goofball
ass hat we all thought was Trump's final form in the nineties.
Crump licensed his name to a cheap pizza joint that the Turtles fucking hate.
I've never seen such a tiny pizzas
chinziest chain of pizza parlors in the world, Ripoff
City and is actually just a front to get people to go to his birthday party,
which is like kind of the whole vibe of Mar a Lago.
If McDonald Crump is the doofus who descended the golden escalator in 2015,
this guy, AJ Howard, is the maniac who actually became president.
It's no surprise that this dude also hates mutants, a.k.a.
immigrants. And why is business down?
Because this city is crawling with mutants.
And enlists the help of a violent sociopath to clean up the city.
Mutants are the problem
and Dirk Savage is the solution.
Durk Savage is basically Stephen Miller.
If he'd been doused with radioactive ooze as an infant instead of Nair.
[grunts] AJ Howard even convinces half the city
to wear his fascist fashion accessory a Down with Mutants bracelet.
That's just a slightly more on the nose MAGA hat.
Having literally branded themselves, even his most casual supporters
find that they're compelled to do his evil bidding.
I must obey the will of A.J.
Howard.
This episode came out in 1987, but let's not dwell on bummers.
I promised to tell you about the time Rafael made a blowjob
joke on daytime television. And I'm a man of my word.
I've been trying to talk her into an interspecies relationships for months now.
If you're not familiar.
Coming Out of Their Shells is a legitimately pretty rad
rock opera, a live stage show that was performed all over the world.
It's nearly 90 minutes of Butt Rock songs about surfing and
doo doo the healing power of pizza and skipping stones
punctuated by some A-plus crowd work from the guy in the Shredder suit.
Shut up, you imbecilic little spew noise.
He is having the time of his life.
Is that your mom?
How would you like a one way ticket to my technic drome? To promote it
the guys who operated the Turtles went on a media blitz,
staying in character as they chatted with the likes of Oprah and Regis
and Kathie Lee.
Now, the characters were operated
by a team of two people, one guy ad libbing lines from backstage
and another guy in the suit trying to anticipate what was being said.
So when Oprah in a room full of little kids, decided to ask
Is there anything like romantic or anything?
But just based on body language, I don't think the guy in the rap suit
expected to hear this coming out of his own mouth.
The biggest problem is she can't hold her breath long enough, you know.
And to be fair, I'm not actually 100% sure
whether that was an oral sex joke or a traditional sex joke.
I'm sure DeviantArt could clear that up.
The real victim here is poor April, the only party involved who had to suffer
through that ordeal with a straight face.
This franchise does have a complicated history with its Aprils,
but that's a story for another day.
And the good thing about these guys is that they're not black or white.
They're green.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a vintage 1991 turtle pie in the microwave
that should be just about ready.
Wow. That is not supposed to be crunchy.
Anyway, thanks for watching this episode of the new Canonball pop in the comments
and let me know if there's more sensual Turtles canon and I should look into.
Or if you have any expired branded pastries you'd be willing
to part with.
Well, maybe I would eat healthier if the nearest cute doble
was in 25 minutes away.
You'll live in a food desert, Mom.
Welcome to the new cannonball. Look.
I don't want to get into it,
but I lost my old lifeguard job and had to move back into my mom's place.
Okay. It's not that I can't swim.
It's that I'm not going to swim
into a rip tide if you can't be bothered to ask nicely.
We all got stuff going on, kid.
Whatever.
This is actually really good news for us.
I'm back here in my basement where all the magic happened.
This chair.
This is where I became a man.
Not like second base. Even better.
This is where I beat the dam level.
Anyway, with all this free time on my hands.
I've been able to plumb the depths of one of my all time favorite pop culture
comfort foods that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Expired Pop Tarts.
Despite calls to put myself out there and apply for jobs,
I've chosen instead to withdraw further inside my own world
like the noble turtle and indulge in nostalgia.
I've unearthed some absolutely turtle shit, bits of canon and pop culture
history that almost definitely won't show up in Seth Rogan's new movie,
like the Turtles tag team Blowjob Joke on Oprah.
The time Jim Henson
almost killed the guy and the absurd pieces of official merchandise
that range from the oddly sexual to the enthusiastically racist.
This is Cannonball, The Ninja Turtles.
Comic books were kind of a non-consensual collab with Marvel,
Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, but the lucky comic book nerds
who turned an inside joke into many hundreds of millions of dollars.
They set up their own indie
comic book company in 1983, perhaps to convince their mothers
that this is a legitimate career and not a hobby.
They called it Mirage Studios because, well, there was no studio.
They were working on another comic called Fugit Toit late one night
and just kind of doodling some random nonsense to make each other laugh.
And that's when Eastman drew up.
For all intents and purposes, $1,000,000 bill.
This is the first rendering of a ninja turtle in the history of the planet.
As far as we know,
Eastman said we were pissing our pants that night, and within three years
they'd be pissing their pants all the way to the bank.
They quickly decided to make an entire comic book out of these bad
as Doofus is 1984 as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Number one was more horror comedy than Saturday morning cartoon,
featuring the turtle slicing Gali through waves of very human foot clansmen.
It actually wasn't until the toy company Playmates wanted to sell some turtle toys
to four year olds that they softened up and became the tubular clowns
we know and love for most people coming up with the back story as the hard part.
But these two guys opted to borrow a few elements
from one of their favorite characters.
Eagle eyed comic nerds may notice a few subtle similarities
between the Ninja Turtles and Marvel's Daredevil.
Daredevil has a sensei named Stick.
The Turtles have a rat dad named Splinter.
Daredevil fights a ninja warrior called the Hand.
The Turtles fight the foot.
Bullseye stabs Elektra through the chest on a rooftop.
Leo stabs Shredder through the chest and throws him off a rooftop
with a live grenade.
In fact, Daredevil and the Ninja Turtles technically exist in the same universe.
Daredevil got his powers when he saved a blind dude crossing the street.
Now, Eastman and Laird made the executive decision that that very scene
had a pretty consequential epilog that canister of radioactive material
that brained daredevil
went on to clank around the sewers and Cupid's ooze under four baby turtles.
Don't give me that look.
You saw worse in 96.
Ed Video's initially, Marvel could not have cared less.
Frank Miller, a visionary, said
If these guys could draw better, they'd be a real threat.
Well, a couple of years
and several millions of dollars later, Marvel sprang into action and produced
this embarrassing spoof called Power Pachyderms.
It was a dumb and unoriginal
that they pretended it was actually an X-Men self-parody the whole time.
Nothing to see here, just a little inside joke.
The lesson Marvel learned was Don't be cute, be litigious.
The lesson we can learn is plagiarism doesn't pay.
Except when it does, huh?
I guess we can't learn anything from this.
But the nineties movie trilogy, there's a lot we can learn from that one.
These movies were a masterclass in patience, in fighting for creative
integrity, in ditching established canon for sweet, sweet cash.
More on that later.
First, let's talk about how 1990s Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles probably should never have existed.
After the humiliating failures of Superman four and Howard the Duck in the late
eighties, the film industry wasn't too keen on superheroes or puppets.
This did not bode well for a superhero puppet movie, but that didn't matter.
This was a passion project championed by one Gary proper, an Ex-pro surfer
and the professional manager of Gallagher and Carrot Top.
If you can find a more 80 sentence
in all of Ninja Turtles canon, I'll eat my hair hat proper.
Couldn't get anyone in Hollywood to take him seriously,
but he eventually found a Hong Kong based studio
who thought they could throw, quote, four of our Chinese stuntmen
in rubber suits and make the movie for, quote, peanuts.
As people who talk like that often are.
They were dead wrong about almost all of that.
The movie would take twice as many peanuts as they'd expected,
and they locked in the funding less than ten days before shooting began.
They filmed not in Hong Kong, but primarily in sweltering North Carolina,
thanks to lax union rules and instead of one guy in a cheap suit.
Each individual turtle
would be manned by a team of three or four highly trained specialists.
I think the only goal they actually achieved was mistreating
underpaid Chinese stuntmen instead of settling for dumpy Time Square
mascot costumes.
Proper somehow managed to get Jim Henson to bring the Turtles to life
for all the incredible things Henson did for your childhood.
He almost murdered the turtles.
That's right.
Jim Henson is the real life shredder.
His high tech contraptions, while incredibly impressive, seem
designed specifically to inflict pain.
The actors would be glued
inside of these Daft Punk helmets and immediately started cooking alive.
They would take turns begging for water breaks, screaming.
Take the head off, fucking take it off.
And that's a direct quote.
All that sweat was corroding the electronics and damaging the rubber
causing malfunctions
that forced them to ceaselessly retake the most mundane interactions.
I can't think of anything less tubular, possibly
because of the gallons of blood, sweat and tears poured into it.
The first movie was an absolute banger, but 1990 is
the Secret of the Use was a cynical cash grab from the start.
Instead of bringing fan favorite crane to life,
they stuck with Shredder thinking they could spin them off as their own.
Freddy Krueger.
And just because they didn't own the merchandizing rights
to bebop and Rocksteady, they had the Henson Company
whip up these turds at a spare parts lying around the creature shop.
By the third movie in 1993, they'd cut ties with the Henson's
entirely, giving the job to the lowest bidder.
This new company thought they could reverse engineer Henson's masterpieces
by skimming over magazine articles about the making of the first movies
and how that worked out for them. Not great.
So yeah, New Line
Cinema took a few liberties with the canon during their scant three year reign.
The original cartoon, on the other hand, had nine years
and 193 episodes to let their freak flag fly.
It's no secret that the cartoon existed specifically to sell toys to kids,
and they therefore made their villains as colorful, creative
and fucked up as possible.
So who is your favorite weird ass Turtles villain?
Was it scumbag pizza face?
Half court?
How about Donald Goddamn Trump? Yemen.
There were no less than four Ninja Turtles villains based on Donald Trump.
They serve as a reminder of what an all time shit
bird he already was in the nineties and a harbinger of the dangerous fascist
he would become.
Specifically, I'm convinced that the Ninja Turtles animated
series predicted January 6th.
Hear me out.
The first Trump character is fainting.
Q Hack and brush the man who wants to convert the city's sewers
into high end condos like some kind of luxury catacombs.
Right off the bat, he gleefully allows his army of blue collar workers
to absorb concussions from our heroes to turn public opinion against the turtles.
He has his phalanx of executive lackeys stage a poorly planned false flag attack.
The episode is also the first appearance of Slash, the angry, confused mutant
turtle created by bebop and Rocksteady Hack and Rush bumps into this guy really
driving home the mutants as immigrants allegory and gets to work on that.
Most Trumpian of projects harnessing grievance for personal gain.
Even decades ago, it was clear that Trump had a knack for convincing the angry
and the dimwitted to mount an attack on a symbol of democracy.
Trump Number two is Donald J. Lofty.
This crotchety old shitbag pops up from time to time
as more of a necessary evil than an outright villain.
Lofty is hack and brush his boss, a penny pinching,
self-aggrandizing, phallus obsessed real estate mogul.
After the Turtles thwart hack and brushes plan to fly garbage to outer space.
Lofty nearly beats his ass
with a cane on top of a tower in full view of the gathered media.
He even coins Trump's signature catchphrase.
Not that one.
This one, 14 years before The Apprentice aired and in a deliberately
Freudian twist, they made him look awfully similar to this fucking guy.
That's the real Donald's father, Fred Trump, the man who handed him his career.
And as lofty did the hack and brush castigated him
for his failures while shielding him from any actual consequences.
MC Donald Trump is the harmless
goofball asshat we all thought was Trump's final form in the nineties.
He's an impossibly rich businessman, but he's dressed like a pirate.
The whole episode sporting a fake tan that's uncomfortably close to blackface
and wearing a giant buckle that looks like some kind of Q And on sash in a nod
to Trump steaks, Trump water and other soulless, humiliating branding deals.
Crump lent his name to a pizza joint that the Turtles fucking hate.
And that's really just a front to get people to go to his birthday party,
which is kind of the whole vibe of Mar a Lago, right?
If MC Donald Trump was who we thought we were dealing with in 2016,
A.J., Howard is the maniac who actually became president.
This is another mutants as immigrants allegory.
And you'll never guess where the Trump character falls
on the issue of immigration now that he's pinpointed a scapegoat.
He insists that the only solution is violence.
He somehow gets half the city to wear the stupidest
fascist fashion accessory imaginable, an insanely prescient
foreshadowing of MAGA hats and shit, having literally branded themselves
even his most casual supporters are then compelled to do his evil bidding.
Oh great.
I turn this nostalgic romp into a reminder of the horrors of modern fascism.
But luckily I have a friend who's an even bigger Turtles fan than I am.
Brian Van Hooker's the host of the Turtle Tracks podcast,
where he interviews tons of the actors, writers and producers behind the Turtles.
He also has legitimately the biggest collection of Turtles merch
I've ever seen in my fucking life.
Jesse, honey, do you need a ride to Brian's
second buy?
He's coming here.
Private Hooker.
Thanks for coming. Welcome to the basement.
What do you think? I think it's you.
I love it.
Good. That's the answer I wanted.
You're the guy behind turtle tracks. Yeah.
And you've talked to how many episodes you have now?
Probably just shy of 77.
Do you have 70 episodes talking to people who have, like,
created the Ninja Turtles?
Yeah, that's my goal, was to talk to, like,
anybody who had, like, an official stamp on the franchise.
So, like,
I talked to Kevin Eastman, I talked to the directors of most of the movies.
I've spoken to all the voice actors from the original cartoon
comic book writers, creators, things like that.
So that's amazing.
And besides that, you also have the largest collection
of Ninja Turtles stuff that I've ever seen.
I've only ever seen it on a Zoom screen. Yeah, but.
But I've seen your your basement that is chock full of turtle stuff.
So besides stuff you brought me.
What, what are some of the rarest or maybe the.
Most expensive pieces of. Turtles merch that you have?
Okay, so probably the rarest
crown jewel thing I have is a arcade cabinet of the original Turtles and Time
arcade game.
Did you steal that? How did you acquire that?
I spent like three years online hunting for it
and then like, is usually like 22 grand.
And then some guy was selling it for, like $300, and I'm like, This guy's me.
And so I emailed him.
It was like, Dude,
and your eBay auction right now, and I will pay you $600 in cash.
And so that's how it ended up.
So six are literally this week. Amazing.
So which bring me today.
Okay. So first off, is this is a crack magazine
from 1993. Wow.
Of one of the handful of times the turtles were on the cover of crack.
And this is one of them. Yeah. This is like, okay, so what?
What are they? How are they skewering the turtles here? Okay.
They were, I think, making fun of Turtles three, which was coming out at the time.
Oh, well, I mean.
Warranted. Completely warranted. Yeah.
Third movie. Yes.
At the time
when Turtles three was coming out, did people feel were people excited about it,
Do you know? Or was it like. Oh, my God, Now they're. Just I don't know.
People were like at that point, like, it was well past turtle mania.
Like turtle mania in 1991.
By 93, it was like, Oh, we're still making this.
And then like, like they cut the budget and the puppetry looks way crappier.
But yeah, I wonder if anybody noticed that in the trailers
or like going into it, they're like, All right,
we're going to see our favorite turtles that don't look like they're going to
and murders in our sleep.
And then they get there and they see that.
I will tell you this. I was a kid.
That's probably one of the first movies I remember seeing because I was,
I don't know, seven or eight.
I do not think that at all.
I thought it was wonderful and I still like it now.
Like I still can't go back and be nostalgic and be like,
All right, this is but objectively, it's shit.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles three
So just ostensibly they were two earlier Mutant Ninja Turtles additions.
Masterful wordplay, but the guy's a crack yet.
Yes, man. He's.
Come on let's see what.
They're really just wordsmiths Yeah.
So speaking of.
Media, that's hey.
You can say objectively horrible, but you can still look back and actually.
Love it when you're when you're watching it.
Yeah.
You brought for me today.
Some.
Behind the scenes of coming out of their shells.
Yeah, That was a musical tour.
Yeah, they did in.
Well, first they had something else for you.
Okay, I want you to wear this. This is a house. Oh,
it was not.
The continuity that you have is now destroyed by this presence of.
Is that perfect?
So you can pull it off in a way that I can.
I think it's good.
He just looks like it is not wearing a hat. Yeah.
So this is the coming out of their shells tour.
I want you to wear that the entire time. It's too hot.
I can't do it.
I'm just putting your hat.
This is the coming out of the shells toward making of VHS stick,
which I played a lot like.
That's my wear and tear on that thing. Yeah, it's. It's.
It's not.
Yeah, I got to pop it in these ditches here.
Yeah.
So this I had not washed before.
But this. Is now my favorite piece of.
Turtles. It's very weird. It's super weird.
It's so weird. It's like it's legitimately kind of funny.
My favorite part is definitely when
Shredder starts, just like, chopping it up with the kids in the crowd.
Yeah. SHREDDER His music now shred. It, right?
Yeah. That's old you, right? Shredder hates music.
He still.
Let's be honest, though, the premise of the thing is far weirder than that.
The turtles are giving up crime fighting, huh?
They've told this to splinter, apparently,
And they're like, We're going to stop fighting crime.
We're going to go fix the world of music with rock and roll.
Yeah, that's the loose plot that's threaded together.
Yeah.
And Splinter endorses this and also has a song that is very weird in the show.
Yes. Splinters, old thing is he just, like, sounds like Bruce Springsteen.
But. Oh, skipping stones, right?
That's the stepping stones. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's.
It's about skipping stones, about skipping.
That's all the lyrics. The song is actually in the title.
There's that there's Toobin Right.
That's the one about like Surfin how they love to surf in the sewers.
They also said, What's a line from that one that I really like?
Surfing subterranean. Yes, Yes, surfing subterranean.
They also oh, they say sewer side a lot, which is a little uncomfortable.
Is there a list of songs on here? I'm trying to think.
No, there is a list of songs in here.
So I also I also have the original cassette tape.
Amazing. But that's not the same music as you hear in the show.
This is actually made beforehand and the songs are terrible.
Okay?
But it's most of the same songs just badly sung.
And then some of the songs they cut prior to the show actually coming out.
Dude, no treaties is nuts because it's basically it's like, like
we will not take any prisoners.
That's where it's a song about like.
Murder and the like.
There's also something in there called Walk Straight,
which, yeah, is like, you know, Nancy Reagan kind of like, don't do drugs now.
Yes. But if you listen to it now, it sounds like an anthem
for not being gay. Right.
I think that's just the message to the turtles is don't be get do,
don't get don't do it.
But it's is like that actually I do
think are good like pizza power actually sounds awesome.
Yeah there's a handful of them This is objectively kind of great.
Absolutely So okay so this came out before the actual show.
Concurrently. But it was recorded.
But it was recorded before. Yeah.
So like, as I.
Understand, I don't know what that detail was so specific.
Like I why I needed to correct you on.
Well, no, no, but, but that's. Because.
A lot of things happened from like. Pre-show.
To even just after the first show.
So they had never, as I understand it, they had never
done a full
run through the show in full gear until their first night.
Is that. Right?
Yeah, they did.
Like, I don't know,
it's like previews or whatever, but like the big premiere was in Radio
City Music Hall, and prior to that
they did like a show and, you know, wherever the Hell and New England
and they discover that the, like, literally
people were passing out on stage because the costumes are so hot.
So they decided that like that night
on the spot, they ditched all the shells off the turtle costumes.
They literally threw them in the dumpster behind the venue
and turtles coming out of their shells took on a more literal meaning.
That's the craziest.
Is that like, if you like, I didn't notice until I was reading about it.
But yeah, so there's no shells on these notes.
But that was not intentional at all. That was just because.
Like a. Huge oversight.
That like, yeah, well, because they were nearly killing their actors.
So they went out, ran out and got
denim jackets to bedazzle.
And then that, that's the signature look of it,
which actually I think works because it's like it's way more like
Signature Turtles Crazy is that exactly only fits in this one thing.
Yeah that I think is is almost what makes it work to the extent that it works.
Now that this was a huge hit.
It was a huge it was it it was a huge hit.
It was like all over the country.
And then the Gulf War started a damn Gulf War.
Yeah, it always got in the way.
I mean, which one, Right?
The Gulf War started.
And then like the tour kind of got like, sidetracked a little bit.
So it was going gangbusters.
Gulf War started and the venues went, like whittled down to almost nothing. Why?
Why did that correlate with. The Gulf War?
I don't know.
I actually
I interviewed a guy named David SHAPIRO who was in the Michelangelo suit, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
He was also on a show called Titus and a bunch of other stuff.
Yeah.
And he had some really funny stories to tell about this,
but I think it was just like the country just stopped wanting
to dance to pizza for a little while, and suddenly there was a war.
Little did they know.
Yeah, 911 was just around the corner. Yeah.
And we would need but rock more than ever.
There was also them on Oprah, which is objectively
one of the weirdest things in television history.
And so, yeah, so if there's an interview with Oprah
and these turtles and he's not talking, he's just in the suit miming.
Explain if you can just super briefly explain how that works,
how they would like. The person in the suit.
Well, in the shows, everything was prerecorded,
but it was prerecorded by a guy named Bobby,
who was also one of the showrunners who I also interviewed.
And he is
the voice of Michelangelo in this thing.
And then David SHAPIRO was the one in the suit
nearly dying.
And then so. But they had to, like, coordinate.
So in certain instances, like the Oprah thing.
Yoga thing was like a live ish, like he was Bobby's.
It wasn't like the recording booth being Mickey.
And the other guy was just waving his arms around and saying stuff,
some of which is very disturbing.
Like, there's one point where Oprah, Lord knows
why ask the question of any of the turtles are dating April
O'Neil, who's the only live human thing and an adult.
Yeah.
And one of the turtles I think it's Mikey says like we
we tried to arrange that but she can never hold her breath long enough.
Which explain yourself, man.
What do you mean sound is dirty?
Is it possibly me? Huh? So it's. Like.
So it's like some guy in a booth offstage is like telling this, like,
oblique blowjob joke while the guy in the suit has to be, like,
super goofy, like, doesn't know. Like, pretty much.
He's currently saying, Yeah, okay, so what else?
What else?
Okay, so this, this book, this is
some of the weird like the book is literally called
Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, and it's a role playing game
and there's a bunch of weird characters and stuff in it.
There's a lot of weird stuff in here.
So what I want to touch on in there. So yeah.
I could well, maybe just in the, the index or whatever.
There is some deeply sexual like.
Oh the tenets of this game.
Yeah.
There's also like four pages I remember seeing of Oriental weapons.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Weapons dash Oriental 63 to 66.
Cool. Yeah. All right. What else you got?
Also the most culturally insensitive term cause I can find in my collections.
Please.
So there is.
And there's, like, a Wild West set with
Chief Leonardo
Chief Lee, which is really sensitive.
Do you have.
I've seen pictures of the box art and like this, So.
Okay, this is.
Yes, objectively insensitive,
but the stuff that they say about him is like pretty nuts.
Oh, it's worse, right?
Yeah. Remember, they.
Say like they.
Like the whole blurb ends with, like.
Something like.
So get your parents to spend that wampum
so bad.
I'm not surprised at all. So these are okay.
I mean, like, I don't I don't think a cowboy is that bad or whatever.
David Crockett.
Shit you want, cowboy.
This one is the Mexican bandit.
Oh, knuckleheads alone.
So it's maybe just as bad as Leo.
Yeah.
Wow. Oh, it's like gunslinging.
Like bandito wiki or. Ben.
You know something? It's Bandidos in there.
Oh, man, he's got.
Oh, boy.
This is just like a straight out of a
a just like a Halloween.
Story straight out of 92 or. Yeah, really?
Like, like by 96 They're like, this is a weekend update mustache.
Yeah.
Even more ill advised toys which are some of my favorite
because I love bebop and Rocksteady.
Oh yeah. So
hopefully this
is them as literally as Nazi soldiers.
I every picture I've seen of these, it's always straight on.
So you can't see what's on the armband.
What's it's a foot symbol.
Oh, okay. It's a foot.
Got it.
It's not the star of David, but still, it's like.
It's really like it's not a swastika either.
It's really.
But it literally, like it literally is based on German soldier stuff. Yes.
Like the original concept.
That was German soldier bebop, right? Because the turtles were good.
They were American soldiers, whatever.
And so the bad guys naturally would have been.
Yeah.
Like the ones who are America's biggest enemies. Yeah.
So what I read was like, these guys are from a second edition
or like a second run of a certain line of toys
was like American heroes or whatever.
So it was like the first year they had like, well, not these guys.
They had the regular turtles. Yeah. And a few of the bad.
And the next year they're like, okay, you know, this needs this set.
Needs it. Needs more.
Nazis. Yeah, it does. Yeah.
So they threw these guys together.
Honestly, Nazi Bebop and Rocksteady are, like, more appropriate,
more sensitive than, like, Chief Leo because at least.
Know their village.
Yeah, in the box art, they go hard on talking about how stupid these guys are.
Like, basically, like.
Calling them, like, dumb ass Nazis.
It's like, kind of funny. Yeah.
If it weren't for the. Fact that now
Nazi turtle memorabilia.
Exists.
The only other thing I brought along with me was these things
which are kind of the epitome of just stupid Turtles merchandise.
Oh, yes.
These are sneakers that make your snappers.
You can snap them onto your sneakers.
Oh, that's the.
I know some.
Did they did they create tension in the laces or were they just.
Just decorate decorative. Ah.
I wonder if they.
Had to like the in case you needed instructions.
Ideally, yeah.
I wonder if they had.
Oh, I definitely had these man.
I would have they had sneakers at the same time
and they're like, how do we get
how do we sell stuff to kids who can't afford the full Ninja
Turtle sneakers but still want to put some turtle shit on their shoes?
Got it.
Snappers like I like the junk stuff, like cereal box and stuff like that.
Like either like evidence of the time.
That stuff is super interesting.
So it's like stuff that was like a product.
The junk, The garbage. Yeah.
It was meant to be consumed and then thrown away. Yes.
All right.
Well, thanks for watching this episode of Cannonball, Brian.
Thanks for coming by and showing us all this weird shit about him.
Maybe don't tell anybody that you have these.
And Brian, what's your podcast again?
Turtle Tracks podcast. You can follow it on Instagram.
It's on SoundCloud and other other places Podcasts are consumed.
All right. Well, Brian, thanks for joining us
and thanks for watching this episode of Cannonball.
We got to get out of here.
My mom's boyfriend's home and he comes down here to do his taxes.
So I don't know what he's talking about,
but I don't want to be here when it happens later.
Yeah. Framed up.
Yeah.
It's get
the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I have fond memories of wearing my Michelangelo shirt to school.
Can you move the prompter?
Just like one line?
Yeah. Perfect.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Man, I have fond memories of wearing my Michelangelo shirt to school
slurping down four turtle pies worth of in power tornado,
kicking off a lunch table and screaming surfer lingo like a goddamn poser.
Now, those are all symptoms of late stage turtle mania.
I could have died.
The turtles have been a favorite
of sticky fingered latchkey kids for over three decades,
but they actually started as hard boiled, brutal comic book assassins.
Old habits die hard, and every so often
they accidentally get back to their fucked up roots.
I'm talking about the cartoon villain
who may have predicted the rise of fascism in America.
Shredders International quest for Milfs and the subtle blowjob
joke the Turtles told on Oprah.
This is the new cannonball.
Now, I don't want to get into it,
but I lost my old lifeguard job and had to move back into my mom's place.
Okay. It's not that I can't swim.
I just think, Oh,
please would be nice if you're asking me to swim out into a rip tide.
We all got stuff going on.
Anyway.
It's no secret that a lot of Ninja Turtles can and exist
mainly to sell choking hazards to toddlers.
The toy company Playmates is the whole reason the original animated series exists.
They knew there was more
money in Tubular goofballs than hardcore murder turtles.
So the cartoons were so the cartoons were just a slurry of colors and karate chops
designed to milk money out of confuse and exhausted boomer parents.
Right? I mean, look at the bad guys.
A blob of cheese named Pizza Face, a basketball playing giraffe named
half court Donald Goddamn Trump.
I mean, look at the bad guys.
A blob of cheese named Pizza face, a basketball playing
giraffe named halfcourt.
How about Donald Goddamn Trump?
Yemen.
There were no less than four Ninja Turtles villains based on this fucking guy.
Let's take a look.
The first Trump monster was Fenton Q Hack and Brush, a shady
real estate developer who enlists an army of blue collar laborers
and executive lackeys to go out and crime things up
on his behalf.
Then there's that signature casual xenophobia.
This episode is actually
this episode is actually one big mutants as immigrants allegory,
Hack and brush wants to turn public opinion against mutants,
thereby harnessing grievance for personal gain.
When he bumps into the angry and dimwitted slash, he gets right to work.
January six thing him convincing him to mount an attack
on a symbol of democracy.
This lumpy bag of ham is Donald J.
Lofty hack and brush his boss when hack fails
in his attempt to fly garbage into outer space.
Lofty very publicly threatens to beat his ass with a cane.
He even coins Trump's signature phrase
not that one.
This one,
14 years before The Apprentice ever aired.
They also made him look awfully similar to this fucking guy.
That's Donald's father, Fred Trump, the man who handed him
his career, the man who handed him his career.
And as Lofty did the hack and brush castigated him for his failures
while shielding him from any real consequences.
Now, McDonald Trump is the fat necked,
over tanned, goofball asset we all thought was Trump's final form.
In the nineties, Crump licensed his name to a cheap pizza joint
that the Turtles fucking hate
and is actually just a front to get people to go to his birthday party,
which is like the whole vibe of Mar a Lago, right?
If McDonald Crump
which is like the whole vibe of Mar
a Lago, if McDonald Crump. Is.
If McDonald Crump is
the doofus who descended the golden escalator in 2015.
This guy, AJ Howard, is the maniac who actually became president.
It's no surprise that this dude also hates mutants, a.k.a.
immigrants, and enlists
the help of a violent sociopath to clean up the city.
Dirk Savage is basically Stephen Miller.
If he'd been doused with radioactive ooze as an infant instead of near
AJ Howard even convinces half the city to wear this.
AJ Howard even convinces half the city
to wear his fascist fashion accessory. A
AJ Howard even convinces half the city to wear his fascist fashion accessory
a down with Mutants bracelet that's just slightly more on the nose,
a down with Mutants bracelet.
That's just a slightly more on the nose MAGA hat.
Having literally branded themselves.
Even his most casual supporters find that they're compelled to do his evil bidding.
This episode of
having
literally branded themselves even as most casual supporters
find themselves compelled to do his evil bidding.
This episode came out in 1987.
It also features a fawning fascist media personality and a police force
just drooling at the idea of exterminating mutants.
But let's not dwell on bummers.
I promise to tell you about the time
Rafael made a blowjob joke on daytime television and I'm a man of my word.
Now stay with me.
Switch.
Okay.
You can just open and close it, I think. Oh, right, right.
And I'm a man of my word.
Now, stay with me.
Then, and you're close enough.
And then keep going.
If you're not familiar.
Coming out of their shells is a legitimately pretty rad rock opera,
a live stage show that was performed all over the world.
It's nearly 90 minutes of butt rock songs about
surfing and doo doo.
The healing power of pizza
and skipping stones.
For some reason
and skipping stones
for some reason.
It's punctuated by some A-plus crowd work from the guy in the shredder suit.
Seriously, he's hitting on moms.
He's telling little kids to shut the hell up.
He's having the time of his life
to promote it.
The guys who operated the Turtles
to promote it, the guys who operated the Turtles went on a media blitz,
staying in character as they chatted with the likes of Oprah and Regis
and Kathie Lee.
Now, the characters were operated by a team of two people,
one guy ad libbing lines from backstage and another guy in the suit
trying to anticipate whatever was going to be said.
So when Oprah in a roomful of little kids decided
she wanted to
ask, so an Oprah
in a room for little kids decided to decided click to ask.
Yeah. Okay.
If you say decided to ask like that.
So when Oprah in a roomful of little kids
decided to ask
just based on body language, I don't think the guy in the rap suit
was expecting to hear this coming out of his own mouth.
And then Mikey chimed in just in case it wasn't clear.
It's like whose line after hours?
To be fair, I'm not actually 100% sure whether that was an oral
sex joke or just a traditional joke.
I'm sure DeviantArt will clear that up.
The real victim here is poor April, the only party involved who had to suffer
through that ordeal.
The the real victim here is poor April,
the only party involved who had to suffer
through that whole ordeal with a straight face.
This franchise does have a complicated history with its April's,
but that's a story for another day.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a vintage 1991
turtle pie in the microwave that should be just about ready
to cook.
You just leave one more time? Sure.
Leave quicker. Yeah.
Like imagine if when you say that's just about to be ready, it'll ding.
So clock.
Can you back me up like a paragraph or.
Perfect.
Yeah, but that's a story for another day.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a vintage 1991 turtle pie in the microwave.
That should be just about ready. Oh.
God. I really should just get closer.
It should be open and empty to be at, like, starting position or whatever.
Yes, it should be Exactly. That
kind of visual
imagery and just letting
that kind of work. Yeah.
Okay, I'll take it.
Cool. Great.
Okay, so it's just nice flat TV.
Awesome.
This just isn't it?
Does zoom in. Mark.
Perfect.
Okay, great.
Let's do Sue. A couple of you.
Putting it in.
Just putting in.
Yeah, go for it.
Okay.
One more time.
Go for it.
Done this 100 times.
Great water.
Cool.
And let's do
let's do it again.
And I'm just going to focus on the VHS itself.
Okay? So let's just do a do the same exact thing.
So let's have it open.
So let's sit there
and go,
hang on a sec.
Great.
And go
do it again.
I figure this works for you putting you switching them to.
Yeah. So.
Okay.
And do it again.
Let's do it.
Time for good measure.
Cool.
And just leave it.
Let's get a couple of you.
So let's turn that dial on the TV up. Great.
Let's get a few of you putting the tape in
and taking it out. Still here.
So go for it
and go
to slide again, which is a huge problem.
It's just the weight of this teleprompter right now.
Yeah,
let's do one more We can.
You don't really see your arms coming in.
I just try to
go, okay.
And then I just hold this here for a little bit.
Let's just do it for a minute
and then we'll do the TV.
I think that's a nice
I mean, this looks a lot cleaner and I don't think it's
going to be too hard to get something on the screen.
I think
know, it's like, here's me saying this
thing to be able to
kind of create an outline of the TV.
Yeah. Yeah.
Do you there
and I don't think we well
if the thing move if the tripod moved while we were filming
then he might have to do a couple of different outlines down there.
Go Okay, great.
We definitely had the tripod still.
It only felt like before we were filming, I believe.
Yeah.
Which was pretty dumb.
We're just going to get a lot of this TV because we have time to do
so I'm going to get like 2 minutes of it.
Not that whatever show clip that's 2 minutes on.
Okay, so let's do that dial turn essentially, like
just say the line for the sake of saying the line and then just turn it
and then go back to how you set and just and then turn it back
after a couple of seconds.
I want to do the same thing.
So on Oprah
in a roomful of kids decided to ask, Thank you.
Turn together. I think you're right.
So when Oprah and a roomful of kids
decided to ask, great.
Right.
Well, let's just leave it here for a minute.
I think. Oh, okay.
And actually, why don't you do another one? Do
so in Oprah a roomful.
Get excited, ask.
Okay.
I think we got that
in the way that we can always do
that is is like pre lot your voiceover
so your whatever you're saying over just the turn
so you can find the most organic time for that to happen if that makes sense.
Yeah.
Should I do it again without making this stupid voice or no.
Because it will literally pre lap your actual like performance on top of it
I think. Yeah.
So it'll be like decided because you'll be reaching for it at that point.
So we'll have moments to cut away I think grab
position, keep this on for a little bit longer.
I'm going to double check my notes B roll TV
changes, put one in, take one out, put one in.
We did that because you took it out and you put it back in.
We did your takes of eating and leaving, blah, blah, blah,
B-roll of set and other things I'm going to have.
So I'm going to cut this cutting B-roll to leave
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I put the fourth one on top of there.
So it was originally.
Or whatever, unless you're cool.
Here we have.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja.
Turtles.
And then it back to a slow.
Donald Trump running for president again.
Can you believe.
It? Now, the other thing is that I forget every single word that's in the script.
So hopefully it doesn't really matter all that much.
So I keep on going.
Is that part of it?
Am I in the shot we made?
It's like putting the something in a TV again
over time.
Cool.
And then I'm going to try and get some of the back
backgrounds stuff
that's so shiny
and a better color match,
but that's okay.
Can you take some VHS out of the VHS thing
or put it in?
I guess
you move back a little.
Jesse Gray.
Okay.
And I'm just coming to you
a couple of here,
a couple close up.
I'm doing like a lot of racked focus.
So, like, you know, the Nintendo's out of focus right now.
It's in focus.
Great.
Is getting a late here Do you
bitmoji
get the. Correct magazine here?
Yeah, you can kind of see what I'm doing, you know.
Oh, sweet. Oh, yeah.
Here in school. Probably should have.
Found that turtles on that.
They look found
to review it out.
It's okay.
I'll get a bunch of this stuff here. It's
okay.
I wrote it.
It said have covered day.
Oh, I'll
go get this. Go
Could get you said
get right.
It's just so weird.
Of course.
Yeah.
It's like you see it in better texture detail than you do with your eyes.
Kind of in a weird way.
And move your hand a little.
Like you're talking.
I'm assuming this can be used for a title sequence as well.
Oh, this is some.
Yeah, just like, fun, random shit like this.
It's cool.
Including you.
Like putting something in maybe the room?
Yeah.
Yeah,
yeah.
I just.
You can move a little over to your left.
Perfect.
Jesse.
You look right at the camera.
Welcome.
So it's the focus here, okay?
Don't come in a busy.
Okay.
You see?
Okay, here we go.
This is the turtles one.
If you want to get some. Kind of is
the zero.
People that are
like you're eating it
when you're like, put your feet back up by the desk or something.
That's right.
Okay.
Yeah.
The Americans rebelled against the British.
The British send in soccer fans to quell the uprising, Correct?
You crazy kids.
And can you give us a moment where you, like, see that someone comes in
and put it down and?
Go to sit in your position, like throw the magazine on the ground and.
Sure.
And oh, yeah, you
nailed it.
You're really blown out. And that's okay.
It just it looks great.
I got them falling over. I did.
Okay, good.
Do you want to stuff this stuff out of the frame a little bit? No.
It doesn't really matter.
In fact, can you just hold the cracked up to the camera?
Cool.
And he and Jesse.
Sorry, actually. Andy. Yeah.
Just so you can hold onto it for a little bit and look through it.
Okay,
cool.
You can get in your shirt.
Ryan for a second. They call. April. Advil.
Yeah.
This is like
insulting in the face and, like, it's just like they used the wrong word.
Yeah.
Which was revolutionary in.
1992 or whatever. Three.
Yeah, They just come over quick
and cool.
Okay, I've. Got a turtle.
And a guillotine.
Where's the guillotine?
I can't. I literally can't see it.
Okay, It's just focusing.
If it's cool.
Great.
Jesse, can you just put the magazine down so I can see the cover?
Actually, can you hold it for a little while?
Cool.
You can count on us.
That was the other side I was trying to reach out.
Yeah, I actually pretty. Good.
The pizza power.
This looks so cool from here.
This is really neat.
Yeah, this is good idea.
But remember, do grab this.
It occurred to me when I saw that I was like, Oh, shoot.
There's a handful of
tournaments.
Going wrong, so
I definitely want to get.
I'll include this, I guess when we send it.
Is Brian editing this or.
Yes, like, hopefully so this dude.
Shredders like improv is so.
Fucking funny, like flirting with moms.
Let's get the VHS next.
Yeah, I know.
I've seen that. It's very good. It's cool.
Not to see like it.
And you kind of put it up on the.
You kind of put it up right here. Yeah. Okay.
Do you mind just kind of plopping it right there?
Yeah. Yeah.
I think there's a lot of the toy actors that.
Oh, wow.
Like. Like the modern toy.
Yeah, Actually, I have stuff.
Yeah, like, actually, I helped get him the job.
And he was like,
he's like, does the,
like there's a lot of classic toys now that are, like, overpriced that, like.
Like he doesn't look at us.
That's right. Yeah.
I don't know if there's a world where like you do because it's so.
Much more shit. Like, I only listen to a couple of episodes of your podcast.
Oh, so much.
So much stuff. Yeah.
If you want do interviews.
Somebody here who?
I got caught first.
Let's get the cover of that book now.
Yeah. Eric Can do you hand in that book, Ryan
to put this down?
Actually, let's get you popping that in real quick, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
We'll see if we even need that. All right, great.
Let's handle the book.
That.
Says, you.
Know what?
Make it weirder.
Actually, it's nice
next door in your hand.
Him like you guys should, like, fight.
Have a little hand fight or something.
Yeah, Yeah.
Okay. Come over your show.
And if there's some weird sexual caption.
There is. I seldom found it, but. I mean, they took it out.
This is the 13th version.
The 13th edition. Good God,
this is so like, no, my thing.
I will never be sort of.
Like, are there some more, like, just visually stimulating things?
Oh, I. Think there are, actually. Yeah, there's a bunch of artwork.
Okay, so. This is like, so.
We could just cut to this one. You're like it's oddly sexual.
The open.
I can't see the man, but
he's the hardest part
Size increased by three growth steps.
Sounds like a fun game.
Cool.
Just getting you flipping through.
And Jesse, can you kind of just hold that up to me?
Yeah.
Badger's a. Squat.
Carnivorous animals who spend most of their time digging
into underground nests of their prey and sucking on it.
Cool.
All right. Awesome hat.
You get the hat
there, Jesse, You have your hat on it.
Had you did you take it off? You got.
Yeah. Cool.
It was on and I took it off.
This is, you know, retro thing.
All right.
I think we can do that. Better at that. Yeah. Try it again.
I actually can see the hand up. I missed it. Remember
that?
You going to look at Brian? See?
We done?
Yeah.
Like this is a gotcha interview.
Yeah.
You never interviewed Bob Beijing?
Had he say his name? Bob?
I think it's Bobby's.
Yeah. I'm glad.
Yeah, I'm glad I did not,
because if you cheat over to me a little bit, you talk about.
Yeah, I. Almost included.
That was going to be. On section. The coming out of shells.
I had no to pronounce the guy's name so they did not include that.
Okay.
What is next? The cassette in the cassette.
That's good.
Yeah. It's. That's the easier to fight over to.
Oh, yeah.
We did the VHS set.
We could do a
radio.
Yep. Over there.
And show me.
Just show me this one.
TOOBIN Jeffrey Toobin.
I mean.
He's like, kind of down table, actually.
Yeah, better.
Just super brilliant.
And just
you pick it up, let's get each one of these characters
like we can just kind of put them on display one by one, right?
Oh, this is.
That's kind of how he did it.
Yeah.
And just take like 5 seconds per one, I think.
And let me kind of cue on the next once
someone's there, go for it.
Okay.
Hang tight.
I can't zoom in any more, but I got it.
I got to get closer up on this.
Yes, do it again.
And that's okay.
You can you actually kind of like
turn it slowly.
You keep turning over.
Yeah. And turn it back there
a little bit more.
Thank you.
Okay, next one.
It's getting you.
Okay, Cool. Yeah.
We're not too upset about the cowboy. I remember.
I matter as much. Yeah, it's really just.
Yeah. Tell me what to do. The next one.
Okay, Next one
more time.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And can you kind of do the same thing and, like,
audition it off left and right a little bit?
This one's not too bad either.
Yeah, you point to Jessie, point the gun towards.
I said I missed that.
Okay,
next is good.
You're good to go.
Last one
was objectively terrible.
It really is. A couple.
Of these guys like talk about the.
Second. Try that again.
Yeah one more time.
You talk about like skinning the foot plan.
It didn't focus my bad one more time.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I'm just going to try and do like I do.
The voice. Yeah, but.
But make it like extra Mexican.
Did they.
Are any of these based on a cartoon or is this strictly a toy?
Strictly. There's such a disconnect. Oh, God, no.
Just like I'll just. Whatever that means.
Yeah, whatever.
If I can print that money.
Yeah, A little.
Pizza dream catcher on his.
Head. Like, you know.
Oh, yeah, I mean, Americans do. That's pretty great.
Oh, yeah.
Squish cashmere.
Those details up to the camera.
That's pretty great.
I never noticed that.
Coco Vascular they are in.
Oh, yeah.
Peter,
this also they're saying about armbands.
You talked about the armbands. That's in the other ones.
Does that leave the rocksteady?
Did you have those out?
Yeah. Yeah. Let's. Let's get to be Robin.
So we're all done with this
camera again.
Real hot.
All right, Let me know when you're ready for. The next Ray.
I ready.
Does.
Yeah. And show me the armband.
Yikes.
No, no. Real close.
I mean, getting ready for beep up.
By the ears, right?
That's cool.
That was a maybe a set.
Lisa wasn't ready to just.
Brian etched in the foot like Andy.
There are.
You have a number of have that.
And Jesse, can you turn it the other way
completely
egg that backside
to the retail dudes packing and turn it back.
Cool And
time.
Yeah.
No, uh,
no feet.
There are No, no, no.
Norman Is on his head.
He's got this little thing there.
I turn that I can't see it, and. I.
Put on his helmet.
A foot right there.
But he gets up there, stand in for the swastika.
Yeah.
Got to have something.
Yeah. He's got real veiny hands.
Yeah, they all had a crazy detail like that.
Pretty much.
That's super interesting, too, that they even bothered to do.
Like, Oh, yeah, they work really hard.
I just talked to a guy the other day who, like, was one of the original
toy sculptors.
Like the amount of,
like freedom they had to do these things was actually kind of remarkable.
And, and they just kind of like went all out in that stuff and had fun with it.
Just kind of that's cool.
It's the whole.
Franchise is just a good balance of like kind of cash grab attraction
Mom who lives. Up there in that corner.
And then I got up, I guess, to let you in. So.
Cool. Great.
Okay, so I'll, I'll like, I'll just kind of step in and be like.
Welcome.
But kick that under the table.
Yeah, we are just we are not really rolling yet, so.
Sorry. I'm great. So big.
You should have your.
Box of stuff like in hand,
right?
We like.
Sorry about my mom.
She's a little testy.
US mom.
Testy.
She's been.
She can't visit.
Yeah, she's dating again.
Got a really bad history.
Okay, that's really
whatever.
We don't have to shoehorn a joke. I'm just a enter.
Just come on in and talk. I think we're really far into it.
I welcome you.
Yeah, Have a seat, man.
Thanks for bringing all this crap today. No problem with it.
What do we got here? What kind of. What kind of stuff? To bring things.
All right, so, first of all, I want to show you
the crack magazine with Ninja turtles on the cover.
Now, what is crack magazine? I don't know.
Okay. I think it was a bad rip off.
Jesse, look, take a look at me.
And can you give us a clap?
Great.
We are speeding that man.
I just am so nervous about this profile.
I'm so sorry. I'm going to cut it. Cool.
Yeah. Go for it.
Yeah, we just got a look at that.
Just so that. That look.
Yeah, that's stupid.
They do.
You need the instructions, by the way, because the instructions assume
that you're just completely mentally retarded.
Here, get the Luther.
Really? Oh, hey, The case.
With.
What looks like this profound invention.
This is basically this.
We keep your laces in their.
Places pretty good.
We're proud of our product.
Say that on me. Yeah. Oh, my God. That's hilarious.
Oh, more times. They
the. Oh, well, actually, let me see it and then flip it around.
So this yours?
Yeah. Yeah.
This is legitimately. Ground, Jesse.
Oh, wow. You're done.
They're nice. This is like.
This is like a
I didn't get really heavily into the mini ones, but this is one of three plays
that's out.
Oh, cool. Yeah, like gentlemanly. Like a weird thing.
That's cool.
My mom. Just got it, like, a couple of years ago from.
Just some, like, like a thrift store, Like, Oh.
That's something like that. Yeah.
It's not like.
The detail on Little Donnie is the very cool.
Yeah, it was honestly very cool. I lost.
I think I was on my way to that.
You know. Did you
have we talked about, like, Max or you?
Were you my next guy?
I was.
I didn't keep them like I like I did my turtle stuff,
but I did have a lot of money match, which I in business is not going to
cool.
Um, okay.
This is comic book origins.
So who created it and how?
Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were a couple of 20 something comic book nerds.
They just made their own comic book studio studios, so to speak.
They called it Mirage Studios because the studio didn't exist.
They're pulling up.
They were pulling an all nighter one night, working on one
their first comic series,
and just started sketching stuff to make each other laugh.
When Eastman sketched up this bad boy,
Peter, Peter Laird later sketched up his version of it,
and from there they just kept going back and forth, back and forth all night long.
And before they knew it,
they had an entire comics book worth of canon in their pocket.
Can you pull up the first one and be like, Let me give you a closer look
and be like, what?
And hold it like a little close to the camera.
Okay, It looks cool and, you know, like a wider length
version. Yeah.
So you like this is Eastman's version.
And he came in like, show it closer Like that is the straight up just great, right?
Oh, okay. Yeah. Is that cool?
All right.
So who who created them?
Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were a couple of 20
something comic book nerds
who were working on
one of their first comics one night and just sort of drawing some shit
to make each other laugh.
When Eastman drew this bad boy,
the first ever
Ninja Turtle on planet Earth that we know of,
Peter Laird then took that and ran with it,
made his own version
cool.
How did that become a kid's show?
How did that come So.
The toy company Playmates approached Eastman and Laird
and talked them into selling turtle toys to four year olds.
But to do that, they had to make it a lot less bloody
great.
Why was it really?
It was always really blurry at first. Yes.
Yeah, I don't have them printed out, but the original way.
Okay. So it'd be.
Like actually let me.
Ask question because I feel like I'm delivering this like I was delivering
the script, except I'm like ad libbing it instead of talking like this, right?
How do I talk like a human?
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Maybe. Like,
let me ask you questions that aren't prompted, I guess.
Okay. I have an answer to it.
Just asked them to camera to calm cool as best you can, so, like.
Yeah. So it's really.
So the Mutant Ninja Turtles are really bloody at first.
Is that the idea?
They were insanely bloody.
This was
the original comic book was insanely bloody.
They just had page after page of the Foot
Clan who in the cartoons were robots but originally were humans.
They had the Turtles
just slicing them in half, stabbing them, bleeding all over rooftops.
It was disgusting.
Oh, you mean bleeding all over death.
There was a huge battle scene on a rooftop where there's about a dozen
or more foot clansmen trying to beat up the turtles.
The Foot clan is a they're the sort of the main
group of brainwashed bad guys in pretty much all of the Turtles canon.
But at the beginning they were just human beings
that were following the shredder for nebulous culty reasons.
Like, that's a perfect answer.
And like all the A's and pauses, cut them out, we'll cut them out.
That's great.
Hopefully great, great. Thanks, buddy.
And how did they come up with, uh oh?
How did they come up with the back story with the Turtles?
So they had these goofy sketches drawn.
They decided they wanted
to make it into an actual comic book, but they didn't really have time
to come up with their own stories. What they did.
Well, that's not entirely true.
I don't know if that's a case.
Instead of coming up with their own story,
they turned to one of their favorite comic book characters who happened to be
one of the most popular characters of the day.
Daredevil, which you may know belongs Marvel.
So what they did was they looked at Daredevil's origin from like 20 years
earlier,
which was a little something like this
Daredevil saves a blind guy who's trying to cross the street,
but a truck almost hits him, veers off the road,
and a canister of radioactive material flies out.
The truck, hits Daredevil in the face, and that's how he both goes
blind and gets his superpowers.
So Eastman Laird took that story and they said, you know what?
That canister started?
That canister falls into a sewer.
It bounces all over the place and it breaks open on
four little turtles who happen to be just kind of walking around in the area.
But they can see.
The turtles and see as far as I know,
they didn't start talking for several days.
That's that's also part of the canon.
This happens in the movie.
The movie's actually pretty faithful to their origin story
where the Turtles approach Splinter Splinter takes them in
and because he starts caring for them, he gets the shit all over him.
He is already grown rat, but he starts getting super fucking smart
and he grows only somewhat The turtles.
Meanwhile, because they're little babies, they grow huge.
But They have the minds of children.
So I think their first words are pizza.
Of course they are.
So. Okay, so.
And wow, so are they comically related?
Are they more about moral?
But you had said so how did so did Marvel?
Was Marvel okay with this like rip off or did they notice at all.
When Marvel first noticed, they thought it was just some
they thought it was a flash in the pan.
Frank Miller, who created Daredevil I think Hope
Frank Miller caught wind of it and his quote is,
if these guys could draw better, they'd be a real threat.
So they just sort of let him off the hook.
Marvel is notoriously litigious.
But for some reason, when they saw the Ninja Turtles,
they knew it was based off of Daredevil's back story.
They're just like, I would let them do their thing,
but they pretty quickly made tons and tons of money.
So Marvel,
instead of suing for some reason, nobody knows why they decided
that they were going to clap back and make their own spoof of the Ninja Turtles.
So they actually put this in one of their comic books
teasing,
teasing, a new series
called The Power Pachyderms, which is just as stupid as it sounds,
but because it's such a big company,
it took them two full years to actually produce the comic.
And at that point they realized,
Oh my God, everybody else has already made a stupid parody of the Ninja Turtles.
So they said they already had it drawn.
They already had a written and they said, Oh,
it's not a Ninja Turtles parody, it's an X-Men parody.
It's cool.
We were just having fun with ourselves.
That's awesome.
I'm going to ask you question and can you answer it
as I'm going to ask you a question?
Does your mom answer it like it's your mom?
And then go speaking of the movies and that'll be your transition.
Cool. Okay, cool. So
Jesse still watching
those Ninja Turtle movies downstairs?
Yes, I'm still watching.
I'm rewatching them.
My work is never done, Mom.
Speaking of the movies.
So how did the first get started?
How the first movie got started.
The first movie for some reason.
Okay, let's see. How do we start this?
There was a guy in Los Angeles.
He's an ex-pro surfer, Gary proper.
He also happened to be the professional manager of Gallagher
and Carrot Top.
This guy was a surfer.
This guy was a pro surfer.
He's actually like a very accomplished pro surfer using just some fucking dude.
He's in like the surfing Hall of Fame.
He just died like five or ten years ago.
A lot of heartfelt tributes to this guy.
So he had a whole, like, badass, like rad tubular career.
And I guess when he got too old to surf, he decided, well, I got to keep doing
weird eighties shit.
So he started managing the weirdest acts he could find mostly comedy,
so he managed Gallagher, He managed Carrot Top, and then he started
hearing about the Ninja and he said, I got to make a fucking movie about this.
This guy's a surfer.
This guy's into over the top eighties bullshit entertainment.
So he's running around Hollywood trying to get studios
to throw him some money to start making this thing.
But what movies had just come out a few years earlier?
Superman for Howard the Duck, Nobody wanted puppet movies.
Nobody wanted superhero movies,
but he
finally got in touch with the studio based in Hong Kong.
And these guys said, Oh, Ninja, that's cool.
We got a bunch of what are they called?
Suits? We got. We got a bunch of stuntmen.
Yeah.
They said, Oh, ninjas.
Hell yeah. We got a bunch of stuntmen.
We could just keep throwing them at that until we get the movie finished.
They thought it would be cheap.
Just throw them in some crappy suits and have them do karate.
But as the franchise
gained popularity, people were more and more willing to throw money at it.
So they got some other some other funding from some other people.
And before they knew it, they had enough money to pay Jim
Henson to come in and actually make these incredibly intricate suits.
You mean the Muppet guy?
The Muppet guy, the Henson Company.
Had? Oh, I'm.
Trying to think of there's really good footage of
Brian probably talk about this, but I'll say a little bit
the suits were absolutely insane especially for the for the early nineties
or whatever.
Yeah especially for the nineties
they could be they were controlled by both the person in the suit.
There were infrared scanners that would like
catch like subtle eye movements that would make the eyes move, make the mouth move.
At the same time there's another crew offset using
like robotic arms to make other parts of the face and the suit move
and they had to be in perfect tandem.
The guys in the suits doing karate and emoting along with these puppeteers
that were off stage working with robotics night.
And then so the first movie is made
well received.
People like this.
People loved it, fucking.
Ruled and answer the question when I will rephrase the question,
I say to you, So like.
Restate. It. Yes.
So the first movie, well, how people received.
The first movie was insanely well received.
They started making money hand over fist and they knew they had to start.
Fuck.
See, I'm getting into that like, cadence of like, reading something.
Yeah. So.
Okay, so the first movie's made as well. We, we.
You said that to me. What about the second or third movies?
Second and third movies.
They made a lot of money, but they kind of sucked.
It got to be really just constantly.
It'll never end.
Wait, so the second movie was shit right off the bat.
The second movie wasn't the worst. It was.
It was it was very cynical, very cynically done.
First of all, it came out less than a year after the first movie came out.
So they saw that the first movie was super popular.
They knew they had to cash in
and they said right away, we're getting back into it.
We don't have time to come up with new characters.
We don't have time to make new costumes.
We're keeping Schrader.
I don't give a shit about crying
would be way too hard to make bebop and rocksteady.
Let me think about it.
Nope, Can't do it cause we're not going to make
any of the money rights and we're not going to make
we don't have the rights to the to the toy monetization.
We're not gonna make them any money off of that.
So they asked the
Henson Company to literally just find parts
around their shop and just put together these fucking jerk offs.
Toka and Razor. I don't know how to say their names.
So the Henson Company
found parts around their studio to build
new villains that weren't in the canon already.
Exactly.
Anecdotally, they so in reality New Line Cinema
asked the Henson Company to come up with two brand new never before seen villains.
Anecdotally, the Henson companies sort of scrambled
and looked around their shop and like pulled together all these parts
from like leftover from The Neverending Story Dog and shit.
Leftover
from the Neverending Story dog named.
Falkor. And think.
About furniture.
Leftover fowl core parts.
Yeah, give me a reaction like.
Leftover fowl cause yeah. Yeah.
So they just scrambled looking around for they put these two jerks together
out of like leftover fowl core parts.
Yeah, well, that's like a thing about. Core New.
Order.
Yeah.
Cool.
Let's do another transition for the cartoons, I guess.
Like, uh.
Hey, Jesse, you left.
You left the cartoons.
You left your cartoons up here.
You want to get them?
I don't need them, Mom.
I have them on YouTube.
Oh, the cartoons did even weirder shit because they're around
for almost a decade.
They had just under 200 episodes.
Great.
So and in those cartoons, like, what's the weirdest villain in the cartoons?
Because the cartoons come after the movies, right?
Um, no, they start before the movies. So.
So the cartoons had already been running for like three or four years
before the movie started.
But the cartoon vibe and the movie vibe are noticeably different.
Just like the cartoon vibe and the comic vibe were super different.
Cartoons started because Playmates said,
We want to sell some toys and we had to make a kids show
as a lot of cartoons from the nineties and even today. AH
the was made as basically a commercial for toys.
So they had all these villains, basically a new villain every episode,
super colorful, super weird and eye catching.
There was like, what?
Like pizza face, scumbag half court, big fucking giraffe.
Who's the weirdest villain in your brain?
To me, the weirdest villain has to be Donald fucking Trump.
They had four different villains based on Donald Trump.
You're telling me Donald Trump's in the news.
Donald Trump is all the fuck over the Ninja Turtles.
And stuff saying Fuck not
believe about who you really like.
Jersey baby.
Thank a hell.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a doll Trump all over this shit.
Donald Trump is all the fuck over the Ninja Turtles.
There's four different characters.
It's span about six or seven episodes, which I just rewatched yesterday.
It's like 3 hours of content.
So like venting. Q What's your name?
Venting? Q Hack and brush.
This guy is the is the first edition.
This guy is the first
introduction of Trump as a cartoon character in the Ninja Turtles.
Oeuvre, right?
It sounds a little more veiled, like it's not quite
it's like a uppity name, but it's not.
Exactly what he has in common is that he's a shitbag real estate mogul.
He doesn't look exactly like Trump either.
He's like a little bit fat, a little bit squat,
but he is just a giant piece of shit as a boss, as a public
figure, he's just trying to soak up as much
funding, as much space in the city as he can for himself.
Also, he's got this big plan to fly garbage to space.
They kind of called Space Force.
Which is what the episode about.
The episode is about how he's trying to fly garbage to space
while at the same time.
Well, here's the thing. This is very interesting.
The episode is about him trying to take over the sewers
and make them into high end condos.
But part of that plan is to fly garbage to space,
which makes me think the actual pitch in the writers
room was Donald Trump wants to fly shit into space.
And they probably said, Well, we can't fly shit into space.
Let's just make it garbage.
Okay? Yeah.
I mean, who else is like flying stuff into space?
Remind you of Bezos and like, Yeah.
Oh, weird.
A rich person trying to put trash in the fuck in orbit.
Perfect.
Yeah, I do like him.
His business is like penis, Yeah, yeah.
So and then the other one is really, like, kind of on the nose.
Donald J. Lofty, right? Yeah.
So the next guy
they straight for it actually at the same episode is hack and brush.
This guy is Donald J. Lofty.
They exist in the same F during.
The exact same episode.
Lofty comes in at the end.
So Hackenberg
does this whole things try and make condos trying to fly garbage in space.
He fucks it up because the Ninja Turtles stop him.
Then all of a sudden they're up on a roof.
They got like April O'Neil
and all the media around them, the Turtles, the whole city is watching.
And they introduce Donald J.
Lufti, whose hacking brush, his boss, he's the owner of this real estate company.
He threatens to hit them
with a fucking cane over and over again while everybody's watching, just like
brutally embarrassing this guy, which is also a big Trump thing to do.
He also he pops up in several different episodes.
He's not a villain.
He sometimes works with the Turtles.
This also feels like a very Trumpian thing to do.
He'll bring that up when he's giving a speech, unveiling a new tower.
He'll be like.
Thank you, Ninja Turtles, for helping me build this big phallus.
So this episode, right?
He, like, threatens to beat him with it with a cane.
But the super interesting thing is that he looks exactly like
Fred Trump, which is Donald Trump's real father.
And they have a very similar real life
relationship as hack and brush and Lofty do,
where Fred Trump gave Donald his career
he yelled at him, he made him feel like a fucking asshole,
but also kept him from ever actually getting in trouble.
Which is exactly what happens here in this episode.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Great
big phallus.
Sounds like he's compensating for something, huh?
Yeah, I guess we never see, but we can imagine.
Which is it? Rule 34.
Okay.
Who the fuck is McDonald?
McDonald?
Trump should be the punch line should be the end of the line of
characters in a kid's show.
He just is over-the-top goofball.
He's kind of a dumb piece of shit, but he has more money than God
when he does so he
represents the version of Donald Trump that slaps his name on like,
whatever kind of product will let him and try and make some money off of that.
So what he does is he runs a pizza joint that from the very
the turtles make it very clear that they hate this thing.
They give out tiny pizzas. The pizzas suck,
the turtles love pizza.
It's what's that whole thing with like pizza and sex?
Like, there's no bad pizza.
There's just like, okay, pizza somehow.
MCDONALD Trump
manages to make awful pizza,
but the whole thing is a, every pizza gets you a lottery ticket
and you win the lottery by winning a spot on on.
MCDONALD Crump's yacht for his birthday.
So he makes a pizza place just to invite people
to his birthday party, which is super fucking sad.
Sounds like.
Sounds like something someone would do.
It sounds like exactly why Mar a Lago exists.
Great.
And what's the like, fascist age, Howard?
AG Howard is fucking nuts.
So Who's A.J. Harris?
AG Howard is a businessman.
He's an aspiring politician.
His whole episode revolves around him building a tower of homes
or a tower with a statue of himself on top.
So he's Donald Trump.
He is fucking Donald Trump.
He's Donald Trump's final form knocking Hopefully.
So AJ Howard gets people to wear these bracelets that say, Down with mutants.
That's the whole thing.
This is where they it was very prescient for the nineties
knowing that Donald Trump was like anti-immigration and that he would
wield immense power as it as it pertains to immigration.
So he gets about half the city buy these bracelets that say down with mutants
and gets people to hate mutants.
It turns out that the bracelets are actually mind control devices.
So anybody who's even slightly bought into his shitty
banter about immigrants are tearing the city apart.
Eventually, when he flips the switch, they all turn into these zombies
that do his evil bidding.
Literally parallel to that, he hires some big bad motherfucker
named Dirk Savage to come and round up
as many immigrants are not immigrants as many mutants in the city as he can,
and he jails them.
This is to say this is like he's hiring
heavily armed, muscled to round up immigrants and put them in jail.
It's so fucked up.
But here's the kicker I didn't even include this in the script
because it's so on the nose and like
AJ Howard
literally pulls off his face and reveals he himself is a mutant.
So like, it really, really like, puts a bow on the hypocrisy
of Donald Trump's evil.
Wow. Yeah. Fucked up.
Fucked up.
Hey, Jesse, you write your friend Brian still.
Brian's coming here. Mom.
Doesn't matter.
I can go there if I want to. Like an Uber.
You got to help me with the pot roast. Can you come upstairs?
I don't have to help you. The pot roast.
I'm busy working.
It. I can.
You can you give us, like, a camera? Like. Just a minute. Just a minute.
Just a minute.
I got to go take care of something.
It's really tough being the breadwinner of this.
Family, right?
He'd be like, a little pissed off just finishing
just a minute.
Just so you really kind of like this.
So I'll just do the Paris thing.
I need your help with the pot roast.
Can you please.
Just a minute.
Coming. Mom. Great.