FisterRoboto

I'm going to have to listen to this episode, like, six times because there's so much to it. But I thought I'd expand a bit on Jason's question about The Foot and if they were named that because of The Hand in Marvel. Basically, the first TMNT comic was a sort of parody of some of the grittier comics of the early 80s, specifically Frank Miller's Ronin and his run on Daredevil. There are a lot of weird, noir-style monologues poking fun at Miller's writing style (which he would later use in his The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City). So, yes, The Hand became The Foot. But the other big borrow from Splinter, who is the master that trained his young vigilantes to harness their fighting skills. Just like Stick trained Matt Murdock, who eventually became Daredevil. Stick...Splinter...yeah.

They definitely went over the top with him this time. He's always had the surfer dude persona, but they basically brought all the other turtles up to his normal level in this movie and then rolled him up to 11. I'm pretty sure I have something in my notes that says something along the lines of "Sooo...Raph's a dick, and Donny can use a computer, but otherwise, we have four Mikeys."

It's a bo staff. The chalking thing is just...well, it's fucking nonsensical. But the real fun part is that it comes and goes throughout fights. Sometimes, it's across his back, but other times, it's nowhere to be seen - often within the same fight sequence. Unrelated, but did anyone else think it was hilarious that Adam Pally was totally berating Michelangelo for being so over the top when, really, he's pretty much on the same level as Pally's character on The Mindy Project?

I've been holding off on dropping this knowledge in the minisode thread, but now the episode is out, everyone knows and loves the Ninja Rap, and the time has come. So, Vanilla Ice's (not Ice T, as Paul calls him once during this ep) Ninja Rap was the big thing to come out of this movie. But, the previous year (that's right, these movies were only a year apart), there was a song from the first movie that made it all the way to #13 on Billboard Top 100 and #1 on the UK Singles Chart. It was called Turtle Power by the rap duo Partners in Kryme: Much like "Deepest Bluest," it basically just tells the plot of the first movie. Well, after that song, the group never really hit it big again. But, the last thing they did before splitting up was record a cover of a Donna Summer song called "Love to Love You": But, so what, right? Some rap duo released two songs, and one of them was in a TMNT movie. Who gives a shit? Yeah, I hear ya. But here's the thing: their song "Love 2 Love U" was recorded for a little vehicle for one Rob Van Winkle: Cool as Ice!

That's pretty fucking inconsiderate of them.

Maybe all hope is not lost for my Friday! I was so excited I almost overlooked the bad spelling and syntax. Almost...

I'm totally not at all. I'm also totally missing my Friday HDTGM fix =\

Ho ho!

I saw the Arabic title and watermark thing, and I was really hoping this was going to be dubbed in Arabic with English subs. I think I would have watched the whole thing. I guess that's the difference with me. I prefer my bad movies to have actually tried to make a good one. As much as we beat on JA last week, they were (as Nick Kroll would say) all trying their hardest to make a good movie. And I'll always prefer that to intentionally bad movies filled with winking at the camera. Maybe the self-awareness makes it easier to stomach for some, but unless it's done in parody (like, for example, Black Dynamite), it just feels like a half-hearted excuse to make a bad movie to me.

And our opinion is that you're acting like a dickhole about it. You can agree or disagree.

Yeah, that game and the 4-player X-Men game took MANY of my quarters.

Are you saying Tom Cruise might be Chuck E Cheese? That would go a ways toward explaining his weird middle-tooth.

It was 1991. Bart Simpson was literally EVERYWHERE. Also, I don't know if anyone else find this interesting, but I did some research on the history/etymology of the word "Cowabunga" after watching the Turtle Power documentary I mentioned earlier in the thread. There's some dispute about which Native American phrase it comes from initially, but everyone pretty much agrees that it was popularized by the Howdy Doody Show in the early 1950s, which actually pronounced it "Kawabonga" (kah-wah-bone-ga) In the late 50s/early 60s, surfers picked up the term and changed the pronunciation to the "Cowabunga" we all know today. In 1965, drew a cartoon featuring Snoopy surfing and using the term: When David Wise was writing the first episode of the 1987 TMNT animated series, he basically shoehorned in a scene for Michelangelo to surf on a piece of office furniture. He put the Turtles in a room that was being flooded, and of course, they all ride out on desks and shout "Cowabunga!" (at about 0:15 in the video below): [video=youtube;4co-d81mS7k] In the Turtle Power documentary, Wise talks about how someone (I can't remember who, but probably Fred Wolf) jumped on that term immediately and decided it would be Mikey's catchphrase. Around the same time, a little family in Springfield was starting to appear as animated shorts on the Tracy Ullman show. Bart Simpson used the phrase a couple of times during the shorts and throughout the first season of their own series. Initially, it was never really his catchphrase (his main ones were "Eat my shorts!" and "Don't have a cow, man"), but the combination of the word re-entering the lexicon in both TMNT and The SImpsons, various merchandise featuring Bart riding a skateboard and saying "Cowabunga, man!" began to appear: After that merchandise became popular, the word became yet another catchphrase for the young Simpson boy. TL;DR - The Simpsons and TMNT both pulled out this random surfer slang from 20 years prior and made it a huge catchphrase of the 80s.

Interesting. I had the opposite reaction. I liked Batman Forever when it first came out. I was 13 and didn't know better, but the next year, my sister got a job working at Blockbuster Video, and she shared her free rentals with me. So I started realizing what good movies actually were, and by the time B&R came out, I was like, "Wtf is this trash?" So happy you're going to watch TMNT2, though! Can't wait to hear your thoughts!

I think he keeps it from the current guest so that the conversation focuses on the current guest's answer and not about why the previous person asked that question. That's always been the vibe I've gotten from it.

What does it feel like to be dead inside?

Surf Ninjas and 3 Ninjas came out a year apart, and I always get them confused because of that. I saw both, but no matter which one is named, I always think of 3 Ninjas. So when I read this, I thought, "Did Tone Loc square off with fuckin' Tum Tum and I just forgot about it?"

I totally second this! I want to hear from someone that doesn't know that much about the Turtles. I hadn't seen this movie in years and years, and I was fully expecting to be defending this movie like Nonesuch was with JA last week. The opening scene stripped me of that notion entirely, but I still had a blast watching this movie, largely from the nostalgia factor. I really want to see if it's totally bananas to someone that didn't grow up with a TMNT obsession. Tayloranne - be our social experiment!

If you're not belting your hands together to have a knife dancefight, you're not REALLY in a gang.

Before I even hit play, I was like, "This is the one with 'Right Field,' isn't it?" I saw that commercial so many goddamn times... And going with the idea of how when pizza is nearby, help is never far, isn't that the whole setup for the first scene? Keno goes into the mall (that's a mall, right?) to stop the dudes stealing nondescript boxes of god-knows-what. And the Turtles show up because there's pizza. What if there weren't dudes stealing shit? Would they have just beaten the shit out of Keno and stolen his pizza?

That's why I was curious if anyone that saw it now was unaware of the Turtles' background. I'm really hoping that's June's situation, because she generally doesn't seem to have much background when it comes to these kinds of movies. And I love hearing what it's like from someone that doesn't know what the movie assumes they do. And yeah, TMNT 3's animatronics are awful. That's because Jim Henson's Creature Shop didn't do them. But hey, at least Corey Feldman came back! (He was in rehab during TMNT 2's filming) Cameron makes a good point about Zouks. He would have been in his late teens/early 20s when this came out, and I'm sure he was enough of a comics nerd to have at least read the part of TMNT's first run. The cartoon had already run for three seasons by the time Secret of the Ooze came out. The first movie really tried to walk the line between the comics and the cartoons. Obviously, in this one, they didn't give a shit and just tried to make it as over the top as possible. As a 10-year-old, I was all about this. Everything I cringed at while re-watching it now was stuff I remember thinking was so cool and funny back then. Except "A little too Raph." Which I maintain is the only good line in the movie and still made me laugh 20+ years later.

I'm watching TMNT right now. Quick question: is anyone not familiar with the Turtles? I don't mean, like, you've never heard of them, but more like, you don't know their origin story, who April is, how they ended up in her apartment - that sort of thing? I'd be really interested to hear anyone's reaction to this movie that knows a lot less about the Turtles than I or most of my friends growing up did. I'm kind of hoping June is in that boat for this ep because I feel like this movie is almost incomprehensible if you don't at least have a baseline knowledge of the Turtles and some of their background. Anyway, I'm off to go remove all the bells in 15 seconds...while working in concealment.

I'm pretty sure that was Paul as Mike the Janitor from last week's CBB. I know Pivening was mentioned on something I've heard him do recently. And you're right. He did confirm it earlier:

And we got her for two weeks in a row! I heard her and Marc Evan Jackson's laughs pretty early on and was very excited. Also, Colin Hanks has always been totally delightful on CBB, so I'm glad to see him turn up here. He seems to really get whatever format he's thrown into and will play straight into it. Even down to his simple response of "I've never heard it called that, but okay..." when Paul called press junkets "PJs," he always entertains. And this, 100%. I love his riffs on the studio episodes, but this made me wish every episode was a live one. There's a reason he's known for his riffs (and why they're the tracks I've listened to the most on his albums). He feeds off of the audience energy so well, and his preramble was the best one so far this week because of that. Do we know if this episode was recorded chronologically after the one with Open Mike Eagle? I'm always fascinated by who asks what questions. The question to Mike (since I initially referred to him as "Open Mike," I feel like I can now "let the Mikes fly) last week about social anxiety seemed like it was probably an Aimee Mann question. I'm curious if he gave the question about why Colin chose his outfit. Next to Dave Foley's "Where were you when you realized God was a wholly implausible lie?" I think this might be my favorite question so far. Finally, I know we say this every week, but damn it if Eban Schletter isn't onlllllyyyyyyy the best. Oh, and according to his website, he really is a lawyer. I really wasn't sure if Paul was making that up or not.

Nah, it's going to be called Infuri8ed. Edit: I guess that's not really disagreeing with you, so I don't know why I started that with "Nah," but whatever.