Director: Randall Lobb
Cast: Peter Laird, Kevin Eastman
Have I Seen it Before: Never.
Did I Like It: There’s so many stylistic choices in this documentary that baffle me, it feels like I should give the film a thorough pan. The entire affair is padded out with a too-long sequence of people gushing about what the franchise has meant to them over the years. Touching on that is fine, but all of the testimonials seem similar to each other, and I didn’t need the film to tell me that people roughly my age (mostly boys, although they do manage to find one female-presenting fan) would have had a hard time getting out of the late 80s and early 90s without being required to pick their favorite turtle*.
The film spends a lot of time on the production of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) (the topic is second only to the development of the cartoon, and rightly so) but next to no time on either of its sequels, and considering the varied qualities of those other films, I think I wouldn’t have minded a little more on how those two went as wrong as they did.
Making most of the film about the friendship and working relationship of Turtles creators Eastman and Laird proves to be one of the film’s strengths, at least in the early portions, as they were apparently a lot of home movies taken of Mirage Studios back in the days before the Turtles fulfilled their commercial potential as cartoon characters and action figures, so we feel like we are there during those heady days. But then, the film ends with some kind of… love theme, I guess you would call it. It’s a song not at all about the Turtles, or the making of the Turtles, but just a reminder of the vibes the filmmaker would want us to feel as the film ends.
*Mine was Michelangelo, although I probably spent some stretches over the course of my youth identifying with all four of the turtles, which probably owes to their enduring appeal.