Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Go Ninja! Go Ninja! Go!


For males of a certain age, the coolness of Ninja’s is ingrained in you. Starting out small with roles in action films like James Bond’s You Only Live Twice, and evolving to feature-lengtth, Ninja-based actioners like Enter the Ninja and the American Ninja series, the stage was set for a full-blown Ninja explosion, like a roundhouse kick to our collective jaw.



By the late eighties, Ninjas were everywhere. And few were immune from the black, mysterious magic of martial arts espionage. It wasn’t long before it spread to children’s entertainment. From the pages of Japanese and American comic books came heroes steeped in martial arts brilliance and heroic one-liners. Animated shows like G.I. Joe and Double Dragon, video games like Super Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and, later, feature films like 3 Ninjas and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers saturated the market. But no children’s ninja vehicle succeeded with such overriding, often unimaginable success as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.







Spawning 4 feature films (3 live action, 1 animated), a long-running animated television series, numerous video games and countless merchandising avenues, TMNT’s pizza-loving-wisecracking teen turtle crime fighters were in every toybox, on every video shelf and quoted across schoolyards for years. Now the turtles have come to DVD.
This particular set, the sixth season, mainly focuses on the turtles battling the Shredder as he has left the Foot Clan to join forces with a brainy evil genius who is, in fact, a talking brain named Krang. With their clumsy, dim-witted, genetic mutant henchmen Bebop and Rocksteady, Shredder and Krang battle the turtles from an underground lair (a rolling spherical ship that looks surprisingly like the Star Wars’ Death Star).

The DVD set itself is a sparse representation, completely devoid of bonus features. Many may see this as an oversight on the Lionsgate distribution team not to include some featurettes.
For example, the cast includes some pretty well-established actors. The Shredder is voiced by James Avery, best known for his work as Uncle Phil on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. A veteran of trademark Disney characters like Tigger and Winnie the Pooh voices the majority of the Turtles. Interviews with these men would have been cool.
Or they could have included a short doc on the rise of the turtles from comic books to the big screen.





And you may be thinking that, after 5 DVD incarnations of turtle power, the creators have nothing left to say on the creation. But unfortunately for fans of the series, every season to this point have all been straight episodes and nothing else.
So please forgive the above cultural breakdown of the ninja phenomenon but with a total lack of features to speak of, it is tough to write on a DVD set. But if you are a true fan and are looking to add some rare cartoon fun to your DVD collection, the full season (sixteen 30-minute episodes in all) should tide you over until some smart amazing fellow comes along and makes a turtle documentary. We can only hope.

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