Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.
While perusing through some digitzed VHS tapes, I ran across an ad for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze on home video. I contemplated using it as a Holiday Horror entry, mostly for shameful nostalgia reasons.
See, I used to love TMNT, even though I was a little too old to be into it during its heyday. It was probably the last gasp of my “I will watch anything on TV aimed at kids” phase. In retrospect, two things baffle me: 1) Why the cartoon was so insanely different from the original comic book, and 2) Why I kept watching this show well after I got into said comic books. In its original form, TMNT was weird, dark, and vaguely reminiscent of Japanese martial arts movies. The cartoon was goofy and centered around pizza and surfer lingo–and of course was a monster hit among kids during the First Bush administration years.
Unfortunately, the tape that had this commercial was not in the best shape. It looked pretty bad on my computer and even worse when exported to a YouTube-able form. So on a whim, I searched around the interwebs for some TMNT-Christmas stuff. Surely something that was once so huge had tried to cash in on the holidays.
As it turns out, they did. In 1994–well after the height of their popularity–TMNT was responsible a straight-to-video special called We Wish You a Turtle Christmas. That is not a promising title, but the special somehow manages to crawl under even this low bar, with plenty of room to spare. I agree with the sentiments expressed at X-Entertainment*: “You could put my dick in one of those vices they screw on to the tables in middle school woodshop…I still won’t watch it again.”
* I used to read X-Entertainment religiously, yet somehow had never read their takedown of this monstrosity until now. Don’t ask me how that happened.
Continue reading Holiday Horrors: We Wish You a Turtle Christmas