We Wish You A Turtle Christmas Holiday Special (1994)

It’s Christmas Eve, and Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael are about to wrap some Christmas presents when they realize that no one picked up a gift for Master Splinter. Worse yet, everything is closing soon! The only way to rectify this turtlelly terrible situation is to hit the streets and sing a bunch of shitty versions of Christmas songs while they search for gifts.  

Released in 1994, We Wish You A Turtle Christmas is a live action, direct-to-video Christmas Special featuring everyone’s favorite pizza eating sewer dwellers, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We’ve seen the Turtles go through a variety of changes since their incarnation back in 1984, with a fluctuation that has ranged from being quite serious to pretty silly. But the Turtles seen in this Christmas special are possibly the most ridiculous they’ve been, being light years away from the heavy metal listening, violent characters created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.

Currently bestowed with a solid 2 out of 10 on IMDB, We Wish You A Turtle Christmas features the most ratchet version of the turtles imaginable. Their mouths hardly move, and if they do, they certainly aren’t in sync with what they are saying/singing. Furthermore, the voice acting is as broke as M.C. Hammer, but what would you expect from a group of characters covered in visible zippers? Maybe that’s just a part of the mutation.

Terrible costuming and voice acting be damned, for the real bad of this really bad Christmas special has to be the wall-to-wall musical numbers. We Wish You A Turtle Christmas is overflowing with offensively bad music that comes in a variety of awful flavors. Songs range from a reggae tune to a hip-hop song, fittingly titled Wrap Rap, which naturally occurs as the turtles are wrapping presents. There’s a scene where Michelangelo sings an opera song, and of course there are a number of holiday classics, all of which are given a TMNT makeover.

For example:

“Deck the Halls with pepperoni

Fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la la

Mustard, eggplant and bologna

Fa-la-la-la-la la-la-la la”

However, the cream of the crap-crop comes during a moment where I could not help but verbally exclaim, “Splinter, NO!!,” and that comes when Master Splinter spits his version of The Twelve Days of Christmas. Which in this case should be renamed The Twelve Hammers I Want to Lodge Into My Cranium Simply So I Can End this Pain Days of Christmas. But as bad as this never-ending song is, however, I am almost more offended by the gifts that the turtles give to Splinter, which include a framed pizza, videos games, a skateboard, yo-yos – you know, the kind of stuff that Master Splinter would love to own if he were a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and not Master Splinter.

We Wish You A Turtle Christmas culminates in an epic musical number ending that features a slew of street kids dancing in the background like generic strippers to the titular song, which seems like a brilliantly thought out idea. I mean, it’s not as if the turtles are trying to keep a low profile or anything. You know, it’s not like they’re teenage mutant ninja turtles who live in the sewers with a human sized rat that wears a robe and practices kung-fu.

In closing, We Wish You A Turtle Christmas is bad on a level that is challenging for my mind to absorb without creating a stream of blood pouring from my nose. But at the same time, I kind of love it, which I guess speaks to my tolerance for shit. I know there are those of you out there who, like me, will get a kick out of this one for how awful it is, but be forewarned, for there are moments where you will question your sanity.

You can watch We Wish You A Turtle Christmas in three parts on YouTube. If you can make it through all three parts, that is.

Freddy's Friday Night Dance Party!: Cool as Ice Edition!

Nothing quite says Ninja like one Mr. Vanilla Ice. Much like a stealth assassin, he snuck past your better judgment and made his way into your boom box, and before you could say NO!, you were playing that funky music and shaving lines into the side of your head (You, not me. Okay, maybe me.). Like a Ninja, he was also a master of disguise, as he was able to convinced America that he was a rapper that came with a certain level of street cred. Much like a Ninja, Vanilla has now snuck past Chuck (he was eating) and made his way onto Freddy's Friday Night Dance Party, with the song, Ninja Rap!

Go Ninja, go Ninja, GO!!!

Ninja Rap was written and performed by Robert Matthew Van Winkle for 1991's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. Vanilla even makes an appearance in the film itself and performs the song at a club for the movie's action filled finale. While Ooze kind of sucks in comparison to the first and very fun Turtles film, it does have many positive things: Ernie Reyes Jr., Super Shredder, a much hotter April O'Neil, and of course, the Ninja Rap ending! Nothing quite says commercial like getting the hottest sucker to perform a song for your movie, in your movie and what it says about that performer is all that needs to be said. Naw mean?

Still, sucker sell-out or not, I love every second of it! This video is gold from second one with Rob doing the Go Ninja cheer, and all with some super Hip-Hop hand gestures. It shows that even a thug can have fun once in a while too. I also love just how hard he dances…it's like he really means what he's rapping about and to not dance spastically would be holding in his love for Ninja Turtles. You just can't fight back a love like that, and the only way to get it out is with hard and quick head turns that go from left to right. Of course, the lyrics are also quite amazing, with my favorite line being: "Did you ever see a turtle get down?!" It's not my favorite because it's sooo corny…nope, it's my favorite because I have seen a turtle get down, so I can totally relate. I do think the best part of this entire clip is the end, when Robert talks about his experience doing the song and his role in the film. Keep it clean, make it Ice, and Vanilla did just that. Yup-yup, he sure did.

An Update, News and the Secret of My Ooze

Big news in the comic world - Nickelodeon just recently bought the rights to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Global property from The Mirage Group and 4Kids Entertainment, Inc. for a whopping $60 million dollars! While it may be good news in a way, it is kind of a bummer to me. What many people probably do not know is that the Turtles were not originally set in NY; they were actually based and created in North Hampton Massachusetts, which is only about 30 minutes from where I grew up. I have all of my Mirage Studios TMNT comics to this very day (actually, I have all of my comics still), most of them signed by many of the artist and writers involved with the original series, including Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the creators of the Turtles and founders of Mirage Studios.

I used to go to a comic store called Altered Earth Arts everyday when I was a kid, and that comic store was owned by Craig "A.C." Farley, someone who at the time had been doing covers for the compilation issues that came out every so often - a best of TMNT if you will. So anyway, he went on to do a few of his own issues (writing and drawing) for the series, and the very first one he did was clearly set in Chicopee center (where I'm from), and one of the main young characters had a striking resemblance to yours truly (right down to the lines shaved on the side of my head)! There was even a moment where a bully beat up "my" character and that bully happened to look exactly like a guy that used to work at that same comic store. He was a big dude that would rough house my friends and I when we came in to buy comics, in playful (and non-sexual way...I think!) way, so it was fitting that he be the bully to punch "my" characters lights out.

So as you can see, I have a soft spot for the Turtles property (Totally Tubular Trailers?), and even if the movies and TV series were never nearly as cool or dark as the original Eastman and Laird creation, they were still a ton of fun. Knowing that such a majorly successful franchise/property was thunk up and created near where I grew up, and is now all but completely sold off is a little sad to me. Especially when I had some personal connections to that franchise/property in a lot of ways, so I feel like it's kind of mine. I am pretty selfish, however.

I also wanna mention - the Dario Argento book by Mr. James Gracey that I just recently posted about has unfortunately been pushed back to an unknown date. Seems to happen with all the good shit, doesn't it? Anyway, hopefully it will be out sooner rather than later, and I will update you skanks if I hear anything else about a release date - as will James on his blog. If you are a fan of dope, or if you like bad-ass, and you are a fan of Argento, then head over to Amazon and give this little bitch a pre-order in support of dope, bad-ass, Argento-ness!