MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

By: Adelina Vaca
January 15, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES | 1987–1996

Amongst the infinite number of parallel New York City universes, Gotham City and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sewage system form the foundation of my relationship, not only to that city, but to all cities; the primordial and purest concept of urbanity. One is granular and dark, the other, luminous and superficial, and if you’re a bit newer to this earth you wouldn’t guess which is which.

The underground sewage system of the Ninja Turtles was brighter and more joyful than the noir and dense floating skyscrapers of billionaire Bruce Wayne. Both were desensitized to strangeness and decay, much like… well, us now. “Crime is something we take for granted” said April, reporter and human best friend of the turtles in the very first episode of the original cartoon show.

I was part of that barbarian horde of school children who thought Renaissance painters had turtle names and not the other way around. We were born in a superficial era, and all we wanted was pizza. None of that crispy, organic, fresh Neapolitan-ish nonsense we now like. Nuh uh, these were the Eighties. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles surfed the waves of concrete and evil with a slice of pizza on their hands. That was the way to thrive in a big city. In a way, the Turtles taught us how to live in chaos without loss of innocence, how to move through cities hidden within cities, within cities. What started as a parody and homage to Ronin and Daredevil became a model for apocalyptic joy and happy toughness.

The turtles are more about absurdity than about ninjas or action. In a city unimpressed by amorality, attention flows to the absurd rather than the shocking. There is a stark absence of nature, but an ecosystem of technology flourishes in its place. Mutations and technological body enhancements create an intimacy between tech and humanness that’s grotesque but endearing and funny. The dark symbiotic relationship between Japan and the US since WW2 is in the heart of the joke that is the TMNT, where both “Japanese-ness” and “American-ness” are used as signifiers of strangeness, the unknown, and ultimately as a door to a city that is not the “real” world, the known, boring old world. Centuries-old ninja-tradition heirs and pizza-devouring teenagers are one and the same.

Upon my most recent arrival to NYC a couple weeks ago, I was greeted by a Truman Capote line at JFK: “New York is the only real city-city.” I agree… but New York is so palpably real because it’s so fictitious. It starts in our imagination with the thousands of variations the city has produced. We’re all pre-familiar with it, and lots of us could trace it back to a bunch of turtles.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

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