4—
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
The Supersystem and the Video Game Movie Genre

There's never been a success story quite like it in the annals of comic book fandom. About four years ago, Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman . . . sketched out four of the most unlikely heroes in the history of comics. Take a quartet of genetically altered turtles, name them after Italian Renaissance artists, add a diet of pizza, throw in a little martial arts action, and you've got Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The first TMNT comic book [1984] was in grungy black and white and was limited to a press of two or three thousand copies. . . . Now TMNT are part of a larger industry. There are t-shirts, toy action figures, Saturday morning cartoons . . . the list goes on. Could a Nintendo game be far behind? You bet your nunchucks."
—Game Player's Buyer's Guide
to Nintendo Games 2, no. 5 (1989)

Since this minihistory was written, not only have two successful TMNT Nintendo home video games and a spinoff for Game Boy called "The Fall of the Foot Clan" been developed, but also a popular arcade game, a blockbuster movie with a sequel, a top-selling original soundtrack album, a rock group that performs live in concerts, a network television series (also in syndication), a collection of popular

home videos of both the live-action movie and the animated TV series, a new syndicated comic strip by Eastman and Laird, a dramatic increase in kiddie enrollments in martial arts classes (one ad in the Los Angeles yellow pages reads, "Tiny Tot Ninja Turtle classes—3 years & up"), and dazzling proliferation of over one thousand Turtle products—all of which has generated a media blitz on "Turtlemania." The December 1989 issue of Playthings reports that

in 1987, despite a downturn in the sales of boys' action figures, Playmates introduced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Twenty-three million dollars worth of action figures and $20 million worth of Turtle-related products have been sold since June 1988. Aside from action figures, Playmates offers dozens of Turtle playsets and accessories, including the popular Turtle Party Wagon and Turtle Blimp, and even cuddly Turtle plush. By the end of the year, 55 licensed manufacturers will have produced a wide variety of "turtilized" products, from lunch boxes and bubble bath to a talking Turtle toothbrush.^[1]

By the 1990 Christmas season forty-four of these Playmates TMNT action figures were on the market—most of which were sold out in Toys 'R' Us and other popular retail outlets, despite the overall decline in Christmas toy sales. Such statistics clearly demonstrate that these amphibious media stars now form the nucleus of a commercial supersystem.

Growing into a Supersystem

A supersystem is a network of intertextuality constructed around a figure or group of figures from pop culture who are either fictional (like TMNT, the characters from Star Wars , the Super Mario Brothers, the Simpsons, the Muppets, Batman, and Dick Tracy) or "real" (like PeeWee Herman, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Michael Jackson,

the Beatles, and, most recently, the New Kids on the Block).^[2] In order to be a supersystem, the network must cut across several modes of image production; must appeal to diverse generations, classes, and ethnic subcultures, who in turn are targeted with diverse strategies; must foster "collectability" through a proliferation of related products; and must undergo a sudden increase in commodification, the success of which reflexively becomes a "media event" that dramatically accelerates the growth curve of the system's commercial success.

Even though most of the children I interviewed at the video arcade (see appendix 2) were terribly naive about money and the capitalist system, they seemed keenly aware of the dynamics of consumerist desire. They knew from their own experience that the reported popularity of a commodity and its promotion through commercial tie-ins greatly intensify its desirability to consumers. For example, when asked why they thought Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were so popular, one eight-year-old Caucasian boy responded, "Because everybody knows about them and they have lots of stuff," and a ten-year-old Latino boy replied, "They are selling a lot of stuff in stores and usually I buy things like that." Susan Willis claims that "children have difficulty conceiving of their toys as having been made, . . . [since] commodity fetishism erases production and presents the toy store (or TV commercial) as the toy's point of origin." Nevertheless, "children learn and want to be consumers at an even earlier age"—that is, they want to buy into the system.^[3]

The stunning success of the TMNT supersystem was particularly extraordinary because to most adults it was so baffling and yet to most children so immediately appealing and accessible. American youngsters of all ages, classes, and economic backgrounds were able to participate in the system to varying degrees, for almost everyone could afford a quarter

to play the arcade game (even though a quarter buys little play time) or slightly more to buy the comic book or cookies, and practically no one was too young to wear the t-shirt. Thus, even the usually marginalized categories of the infantile and the poor were being actively hailed (or, in Althusser's terms, interpellated) as members of a highly socialized commercial network: that is, they were being integrated as consuming subjects along with those whom they perceived as more empowered. Paradoxically, though, membership in this system also authorized these individuals to engage in the socially disapproved behavior of fighting, which is one reason why Turtle toys, clothes, and jargon have reportedly been banned at several day-care centers and elementary schools.^[4]

I first witnessed this phenomenon at the birthday party of my three-year-old nephew, where a man dressed as a Ninja Turtle came to entertain the youngsters. He was immediately recognized, even by the two-year-olds—who were proudly wearing the t-shirts, who already knew the language and ninja moves, and who were immediately caught up in the fantasy of belonging to the cult. One five-year-old was actually convinced that a villainous Foot soldier was hiding in a bush, and to dispel the child's anxiety the visiting Turtle finally had to go outside and pretend to chase away the phantom killer. I have also noticed that one of my son's three-year-old friends (the brother of a seven-year-old girl) frequently brings all of his Turtle paraphernalia and wears his Turtle shirt and shoes when he comes to our house, as if to demonstrate to my son, Victor, and to his older sister that he is not too young to belong to the Turtle network. Although he does not yet play the home video game with the older children and has not yet seen the movie, he can already perform the ninja moves. Even these two- and three-year-olds derive pleasure from identifying with the Turtles,

who love to "fight"—an activity ordinarily condemned by their parents. It is a pleasure similar to that which children of all ages derive from identifying with mischievous animals like Garfield and Heathcliff (who also love to fight), or unsocialized creatures like Animal, Slimer, and Cookie Monster, or a renegade family like the Simpsons—identifications that are rendered safe by the distancing techniques of animation and animal masquerade. (For more empirical information about how young children enter the TMNT supersystem, see appendixes.)

The supersystem coordinates the growth curves both of its marketable components and of its consumers, assuring young customers that they themselves form the nucleus of their own personal entertainment system, which in turn is positioned within a larger network of popular culture. As the live appearance of men dressed in Turtle costumes at birthday parties and public events grows into a live musical performance or rock concert, kiddies are simultaneously being prepared for their entry into teenage pop culture.

Turtle Growth on TV

This coordination of the growth curve is highlighted in the new hour-long TMNT animated television show, which premiered in the fall of 1990 on CBS in the 8:00–9:00 A.M. time slot and quickly became that network's top-rated Saturday morning program. The show's entry into the Saturday morning field forced "Muppet Babies" and "Garfield and Friends" to move back a half-hour, to the 7:00–8:00 and 9:00–10:00 slots, respectively, and "PeeWee's Playhouse" to move forward, to the 10:30–11:00 slot, where presumably it could attract older viewers and retain former fans as they matured (and came to appreciate sleeping in on Saturday

mornings). Because these later Saturday morning network shows are frequently preempted by sports on the West Coast, however, the higher rated "TMNT" program was soon reversed with "Garfield and Friends"—but only on the West Coast.

Like the previous half-hour syndicated TMNT television series, the new network Turtles show continues to feature the protean malleability and reflexive transmedia intertextuality of its amphibious heroes. In practically every plot one of the Turtles and at least one of their friends are transformed into some undesirable regressive form by an advanced technological gadget—either one of Donatello's inventions gone awry or a scientific apparatus created or appropriated by a villain. For example, in an episode broadcast on Saturday, October 6, 1990, first one of the Turtles (Michelangelo) and then TV reporter April O'Neil are "miniaturized" by a "short" scientist who harbors Napoleonic ambitions, in a plot that recycles both the adult classic The Incredible Shrinking Man and Disney's kiddie version, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids . Calling himself "a big shrinker," this little patriarchal villain evokes not only the historic figure of Napoleon through the "sizing" of his ambition, but also Captain Bly (from the adult narrative Mutiny on the Bounty ), through his British accent, naval costume, and obsession with ships, and Inspector Gadget's archenemy, Dr. Claw (from the popular animated children's series now in syndication on Nickelodeon), through his scary cat, Claude, and his high-tech hardware.

Like "Muppet Babies," then, this episode is blatant in connecting protean transformation and intertextuality with cognitive, physical, and emotional growth and with the various anxieties aroused by such growth. The giant rat guru, Master Splinter, explicitly states the moral in terms of the relativity of size—"Bigger is not always better"—which Michelan-

gelo (now restored to his former mutant gigantism) retranslates as, "Small is cool with me." These aphorisms become more resonant in light of the episode's central irony: when Michelangelo is miniaturized, he is actually restored to the "normal" size of a turtle, implying that even so-called physical and perceptual norms (like big and small, advanced and regressive) are merely relativistic social constructs.^[5] Although this theme is pointedly dramatized when Michelangelo is momentarily frightened by the huge shadow of a tiny kitten, its implications are more significant when we see the supposedly full-sized April O'Neil already miniaturized on a TV monitor or computer screen before the villain pushes his power buttons.

In the context of this growth narrative, such size reductions seem to imply that high-tech mass media like television and computers are replacing the Lacanian mirror in subject formation. They are creating an imaginary signifier that is not static or stable, but dynamic and processual, a signifier that is constantly moving backward and forward in time and constantly shrinking and growing—like Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass , like the growing kids and their magic mirror images in the milk commercials, like the Muppet babies in their hybrid world of animation and live action, like Garfield in the Lasagna Zone and his friend Sheldon half out of the shell, and like the Super Mario Brothers in the complex warp zones of their video games and TV series.

Since every supersystem has its own unique history and its own pattern of growth, adaptations can move in any direction; the specific sequencing is merely a combination designed for peak marketability. It can start with a movie (like Star Wars ), a TV series (like the Muppets), a video game (like Super Mario Brothers), or a comic book (like TMNT). Yet as Sheila Benson, film critic for the Los Angeles Times , has

pointed out, the boundaries between comics and movies are becoming especially permeable:

Visually, the comics and the movies had fed off each other for decades. . . . [But] the gap between the style of comics and movies is getting smaller every summer. Just like the best comics, the most popular movies of the last 15 years are studded with characters who are already larger than life: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rocky, Jaws, Star Wars . It's not hard to imagine an artist's hand drawing Back to the Future : it's no surprise that Robocop is already between the pages of a comic book.^[6]

Roland Barthes observed: "The one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances."^[7] Despite the prior success of the TMNT comic books, toy figures, video games, and TV series, most American adults entered the Ninja Turtle network by becoming aware of the movie.

TMNT and the Video Game Movie Genre

Making over $25 million its opening weekend alone (one of the biggest-grossing three-day openings of all time), the film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has since gone on to become the highest-grossing independently released film in movie history, thereby validating the name of its producer, Golden Harvest. After 178 days in the theaters, it had taken in over $133 million, more than doubling the $54 million made by the former record holder, Dirty Dancing . In the May 30 issue of the Hollywood Reporter (right before the big summer movies for 1990 opened), TMNT held second place (only $2 million behind Pretty Woman ) in the "Year's Boxoffice Top 10." These figures are all the more remarkable when one considers that the film has no recognizable stars, that it cost only $12 million to make (modest by Hollywood's current stan-

dards), and that nearly half its audience was between the ages of five and twelve, whose tickets cost half the price of adult admissions.

The box office success of TMNT is now being repeated in home video rentals, which (according to the October 15, 1990, issue of Variety ) have already brought in an additional $65 million. In Variety 's list of "All-Time Film Rental Champs," TMNT is ranked in fifth place for movies released on video in 1990—behind the adult films Ghost ($90 million), Pretty Woman ($85 million), Total Recall ($70 million), and Die Hard 2 ($68 million) but well ahead of Dick Tracy ($60 million), Back to the Future III ($47 million), and Gremlins 2 ($22 million). Perhaps even more impressive, TMNT is already in thirty-ninth place for top video rentals of all time, where it is tied with Back to the Future II (released on video in 1989) and Coming to America (1988) and far ahead of all Disney's animated classics.

Why did TMNT do so much better at the box office and in home video rentals than The Wizard (which flopped in the theaters at $9 million and took in only another $6 million in rentals) and earlier video game films like Disney's Tron (which took in $27 million at the box office and $17 million in rentals) and The Last Starfighter ($22 million in theater receipts and $13 million in rentals)? I think the answers are primarily related to marketing strategies and their aesthetic consequences.

Positioned respectively at the peak and crash of the first home video game boom, Tron (1982) and The Last Starfighter (1984) were aimed at an older audience than The Wizard and TMNT —at young adults with personal computers and at teenage patrons of arcades (which survived the crash and always accounted for a higher percentage of the video game market). Both are science-fiction films featuring the fast-paced action and fantasy one ordinarily finds in arcade

games. Both incorporate video game imagery (it is particularly dazzling in Tron ) and are specifically linked to an actual arcade game. Both feature oedipal heroes, who are grounded in a domestic melodrama with economic overtones (business rivalries and program piracy in Tron , and college tuition blues in Starfighter ). As a talented "cyberspace cowboy," Tron 's Flynn doubles as user and program and excels in both science and the arcade; as a fatherless teen in transition, Alex is recruited from his trailer park by an alien air force to be the Last Starfighter and is doubled by a simuloid. Because of their malleability as sliding signifiers, both heroes find a lucrative future in the fantasy warp zones of video games.

Positioned within the second video game craze, The Wizard and TMNT were geared more to the home video game market. The producers of The Wizard probably miscalculated by relying so heavily on star power—on young Fred Savage for kiddies, Christian Slater for teens, and Beau Bridges for adults. Young spectators may well be more readily presold on characters than on actors. When I asked my son, Victor, which of these two films he liked better, he said, "I like both because The Wizard has Nintendo and TMNT has my heroes." When I asked him whom he identified with in the movies, he replied, "With Jimmy in The Wizard and with Michelangelo in TMNT ." Thus, in contrast to TMNT , while watching The Wizard he experienced a split between his object of desire and his object of identification. This gap may explain why some young spectators grew bored, complaining that they would rather be home playing the video game themselves rather than sitting in the theater passively watching it being played by the actors. Although The Wizard featured "Super Mario Brothers 3" and the Power Glove, the game was not yet available in the stores and the glove was used very minimally on screen. Viewers merely got glimpses

of these products in action, without any interactive relation; they were restricted to traditional cinematic suture, identifying with kids who were playing with the new products in the film. Moreover, despite his so-called wizardry, the young hero Jimmy does not function as a sliding signifier like the heroes of the other films in the genre. Perhaps even more significantly, the story remains totally immersed in low-mimetic domestic melodrama (with few flights into fantasy) and contains almost no violent action (except for the demolition derby between father and bounty hunter). These differences may partly explain why the film failed to draw the home video game audience, and why it was relegated to the subordinate role of simply promoting the Nintendo system.

TMNT provides a much more effective model for a lucrative movie–video game tie-in. It is the first film in the genre to use an accelerating intensification of intertextuality to make the moviegoing experience a "unique" component of an existing network rather than a discrete event. This participation in a preexisting system may also help to explain why Batman did so much better in its opening weekend at the box office than Dick Tracy . Even though both were based on comics and both relied on a highly stylized look and a brilliant villainous performance to gain critical praise, only Batman (like the Superman series before it) was part of an elaborate ongoing network that included not only the original comic and the current media hype, but also numerous radio and TV series, parodies, and spinoffs. Thus it was the Batman character and perhaps the stunning visual logo, rather than the stars, that drew spectators to the theater. Dick Tracy , in contrast, in trying to adapt a classic comic strip, had to rely solely on media hype and the star power of the Madonna-Beatty romance.

Like Batman and the Star Wars sequels, the TMNT film was eagerly awaited by young fans who had already been re-

cruited into the TMNT network by means of other "unique" consumerist experiences—exposure to the original black-and-white parodic comic book and the successful series of sequels, reprints, and toys that it spawned; play with Nintendo's home video game, which sold out at most stores by Christmas; and experience with Konami's new arcade game, which quadrupled in popularity and profit by letting four players play (and feed the machine quarters) at the same time (thereby addressing the charge that video games isolate players and decrease social interaction with other children). The children's consumerist desire was further inflamed by months of advance advertising in movie theaters and on TV, which made many demand that their parents take them to see the movie as soon as it appeared. The strategy of independent distributor New Line Cinema was to have its "giant promotional campaign" peak on the day of the film's nationwide release. When the movie finally opened on March 30, 1990, it had immediate mass penetration in theaters "everywhere," as did its novelization by Dell, one million copies of which appeared in the stores that same week. There were also immediate successful marketing tie-ins with Burger King (who first gave away toys and then sold video tapes) and Toys 'R' Us (which created separate TMNT sections in all their stores). Interviews revealed that movie sequels were already in the works, and Dell announced plans to publish four more novelized adventures and to sell a boxed set of five the next Christmas. Thus, like the strange "glowing goo" that caused the Turtles to mutate, the movie accelerated the growth curve of the TMNT network, transforming it into a supersystem. Appropriately, the first movie sequel is called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze .

Consistent with Standard and Poor's advice to toy manufacturers for the 1990s, the producers of the original TMNT movie took the young core audience for granted and tried to

appeal as well to parents and teens (who were probably the readers of the original comic book)—and so they went for a PG rating rather than a G. As Tom Gray, the Los Angeles—based executive in charge of the production company, Golden Harvest, claimed before the film's release: "We purposely skewed this movie for an older audience. We know that the kids would come, but we really wanted to make it for the teenage and university level. The script is very, very hip and very timely. We will probably end up with a PG-13 or a PG. . . . A G-rating would kill us."^[8]

One way of reaching this expanded audience was to stress the creative connections with television, with which all three generations would be familiar. Jim Henson of Muppet fame designed electronically controlled "animatronic" puppet costumes for the Turtles; Bobby Herbeck, who has written for "Different Strokes," "The Jeffersons," and "Small Wonder," did the screenplay; Todd W. Langen of "The Wonder Years" rewrote the script; and Steve Barron, who has done over 250 music videos, including Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" and "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits, directed. As in the animated TV series, April was changed from a computer programmer to a TV investigative reporter; Shredder was introduced while watching TV; and the Turtles are seen watching not only April's newscasts, but also a cartoon of the Tortoise and the Hare. The film also includes many verbal allusions to TV programs and commercials. For example, when two of the Turtles embrace, Donatello quips: "It's a Kodak moment." And when April and her love interest, Casey Jones, are bickering, Donatello remarks: "Gosh, it's kind of like 'Moonlighting.'"

The success of the film may be due in part to the reassurance offered by the optimistic TMNT myth, for, like the resilient comic figures of animated cartoons, these protean heroes are able to survive every violence and calamity—

especially those that are most terrifying to today's youngsters. Far from being poisoned, corrupted, or disillusioned by toxic waste, junk food, substance abuse, urban decay, dysfunctional families, parental abandonment, homelessness, gang violence, or teenage traumas, these happy mutants actually thrive in the urban sewer and are strengthened by such postmodern threats. Like milk (in those TV commercials where "milk does a body good"), the mysterious radioactive ooze magically accelerates the growth of the Turtles, turning them into superheroes who are super good, super big, and super powerful. The myth implies that the way to fight current dangers is by entering a supersystem where (as the devouring Octopus Ursula tells Ariel, the title character of Disney's Little Mermaid ) "you can become a [mutant] yourself"—that is, by a total immersion in consumerist mass culture, an area in which the United States still reigns supreme.

The extraordinary success of the film owes a great deal to the Turtles themselves, whose presold identity as sliding signifiers was far more appealing to the kids than any human stars from movies or television would have been. Undaunted by the spectacular commercial failure of Howard the Duck , the producers of TMNT decided to rely primarily on their live-action animal protagonists and to forget about human stars. Tom Gray claims: "All along, my concept was the Turtles are the stars. . . . I want to sell the Turtles . I believe in the Turtle concept and I don't want to have people say, 'Hey, wasn't Chevy good as Donatello?'"^[9]

What distinguishes the Turtles is their amazing powers of assimilation and accommodation. Their passion for pizza not only sets up the marketing tie-in with Domino's Pizza (which is prominently featured in the film), but also marks them as avid consumers like Garfield and Pac-Man. When this penchant for consumption is combined with their talent

for imitation (which they learn from their Japanese ninja master), the Turtles emerge as powerful assimilators. According to Piaget, the collaborative combination of assimilation and imitation is an essential condition for reversible mental operations, one of the key traits characterizing the operational thought of the seven- or eight-year-old.^[10]

Evoking the comic prototype of Proteus (the Greek sea god who fluidly changes shape), the Turtles' powers of accommodation are even more formidable than their powers of assimilation. Their status as amphibians, teenagers, mutants, and American ninjas with Italian names and California surfer jargon quadruples their capacity as transformers, making them the ultimate sliding signifiers: they can easily move from an animated TV series into a live-action movie, and they can transgress borders of species, race, ethnicity, generation, and media. While such cross-cultural malleability might help construct subjects who are less prejudiced against alien Others, the changes promoted are far from revolutionary. Susan Willis's analysis of the Transformer toy genre is also relevant to the kind of changes we find in the Ninja Turtles (and to a lesser degree in video games):

Everything transforms but nothing changes. This is a fitting motto for late-twentieth-century capitalism, particularly as it is embodied in the mass toy market. . . . Often the complicated series of manipulations required to produce the transformation from car to robot and back to car again baffle the adult left reading the toy's instructions, while the four-year-old child, using fingers and intuition, performs the transformation unaided. What's interesting about the Transformers is the way the notion of transformation suggests spontaneity and change, while the reality of the toy teaches program and preprogrammed outcome. . . . Such toys weld transformation to consumption and offer a programmed notion of change to supplant con-

Image not available.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stand by their motto in their fight for
"Truth, justice, and the American Way!" © 1990 Northshore 
Investments Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Photo by Timothy White.

ceptualizing change in any other way and to compensate for the absence of meaningful social and historical change. The fascination with transforming toys may well reside in the utopian yearning for change which the toys themselves, then, manage and control.^[11]

This absence of meaningful social change is particularly apparent on the register of gender, for despite all the boundaries that the Turtles cross, the Manichaean lines between good and evil and between male and female hold firm. Unlike their archetype, Proteus, and their favorite fan, April O'Neil, the transforming Turtles never adopt androgyny as part of their identity, even though their gender is acknowledged to be a social construct. Even in the TMNT home video games, where players can switch identification from one Turtle to another at any moment, or even in the arcade game where four people can play at the same time, all of the player positions are exclusively male.

April O'Neil is the only female character who appears throughout the network, yet, except on the register of gender, she has much less fluidity than the Turtles. In many episodes of the CBS television series, April's courageous behavior is played off against the cowardice of her coworkers—the conventionally "feminine" Irma, who frequently faints, and the effeminate (possibly gay) cameraman Vernon, who constantly "chickens out" and whom the Turtles call a "wimpazoid." Though the Turtles find April quite "foxy," the film avoids any trace of transspecies romance by pairing April with Casey Jones, a self-appointed streetwise vigilante who fights alongside the Turtles. Not only is Casey human, but he even shares April's Irish-American ethnicity. As a spunky TV news reporter and "the Turtles' greatest fan!" April plays Lois Lane to their Supermen. This role authorizes her access to the word and to control over the

Image not available.

The Turtles find April O'Neil quite foxy, but she has less fluidity
than her amphibious friends. ©1990 Northshore Investments Limited.
All Rights Reserved. Photos by Alan Markfield.

gaze, and it empowers her to confront corrupt patriarchs like Police Chief Sterns and even to throw a few punches at the Foot soldiers. Like Haley in The Wizard , April is portrayed as a spirited, red-headed, freckle-faced tomboy and daddy's girl, a Howard Hawks—ian woman who is attracted to male bonding. In fact, she is so deeply connected to her dead father that she preserves his antique shop, fetishizing her patrimonial legacy.

Like so many films and video games of the 1980s, TMNT is primarily a discourse on fathers and sons, addressing the actual absence of the father from so many American homes. Although this dimension is also present in the other three films in the video game genre and in the other versions of the Turtles' tale, it is greatly intensified in the TMNT movie. The main dramatic conflict centers not on the Turtles (who are always good), but on a wayward boy named Danny Pennington who rebels against his father (who is also April's boss) because he thinks his dad doesn't love him. After running away and becoming a Foot soldier, Danny betrays April and the Turtles but is redeemed by Splinter, who assures him that "all fathers care for their sons." Like "the Kid" in Dick Tracy , Danny has been included in the story to insure that all young boys have someone with whom they can firmly identify—just in case they are unable to cross borders of gender, generation, or species to identify with April, Casey, or the Turtles. As in The Wizard, TMNT grounds its slim plot in contemporary social problems—the millions of teenage runaway and throwaway dropouts who are neglected by their single-parent families and who are on the verge of becoming hardcore criminals in a decaying urban America, which is policed by incompetent patriarchs like Chief Sterns.

Image not available.

The ideal patriarch is Splinter, the Japanese-American rat guru, whereas Tatsu,
Shredder's second-in-command, is an abusive father to his Foot soldiers.
©1990 Northshore Investments Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Photos by Alan Markfield.

Thus, the film's primary moral conflict is a choice between good and bad fathers. The evil patriarch is Shredder, whose headquarters the press kit describes as "a cross between Pinocchio's 'Pleasure Island' and a ninja 'Fagin's Lair.'" Like the head of a modern terrorist organization, he recruits young delinquents, molding them into a disciplined army of criminals, telling them: "This is your family, I am your father." Shredder's evil is fully exposed when Tatsu, his ninja instructor and second in command, becomes the abusive father, callously killing one of their sons.

The ideal patriarch is Splinter, the Japanese-American mutant rat who learned to be a ninja in the old country by imitating in his cage the moves of his master. We learn in a flashback that one day in a New York sewer he discovered the four mutant Turtles, who, like Oedipus and Moses, were abandoned in infancy. Splinter adopts, names, and trains them in the ninja arts and lovingly calls them "my sons." These mutants enjoy the same master-disciple, father-son relations that proved so commercially successful in Star Wars and The Karate Kid . Significantly, the names of both the villainous and the ideal patriarchs—Shredder and Splinter—suggest divisiveness, yet the latter also evokes an apparatus (a splint) that helps to repair ruptures. It may well be that the idealized father-son bonding between Splinter and the Turtles reassures its young spectators that those disturbing oedipal tensions and castration anxieties can be overcome. That is part of the myth's great appeal.

In this world of glorified father-son bonding, the maternal is more invisible than ninjas. No mothers are seen or mentioned; April, Danny, and the Turtles are all pointedly motherless. This is not the case in the novel, where Danny thinks about his mother, or in the original comic book, where April works as a computer programmer for a villainous black scientist who creates an army of robot "mousers"

run by a larger central "mother computer" (as in Alien ). Besides April, the only other females (or potential mothers) in the movie are victims: an anonymous old woman has her purse snatched by Foot soldiers, and the bride of Splinter's master is murdered by Shredder in a flashback. One exception is the sexy young girl seen among the many male "punks" in Shredder's warehouse, where (as in Pinocchio's "Pleasure Island") delinquents are encouraged to do whatever they want—smoke, drink, gamble, draw graffiti, and (most significantly) play video games. Presumably the girl's singular presence is meant to suggest forbidden sexual pleasure, which is otherwise discreetly omitted from this PG-rated movie. As with the oedipalization of video games, the film attempts to make postmodernist flexibility compatible with a patriarchal orthodoxy that demands the total repression of the maternal and a rigid rechanneling of erotic desire.^[12]

Yet the Turtle network does create some ironic distance around the issue of gender, primarily through masquerade. The opening line of the original parodic comic book is "Stupid Turtle costumes!" which immediately marks the Turtles' amphibious slippage between human and animal identities as the masquerade of subject formation. This dimension is elaborated with additional irony in the movie, where the Turtles are cybernetic animals (like Papert's computer-controlled Turtle that moves within the cognitive minicultures of the "LOGO environment" and that the kids in his experiments use as a "computational object-to-think-with").^[13] But here humans are both controlling and wearing heavy electronically controlled puppet costumes (the precise combination of puppetry, electronics, and humanity is a closely guarded secret). Nowhere is this masquerade more blatantly linked with gender than in "April Foolish," one of

the four TV episodes from the animated syndicated series that were sold at Burger King.

Female Masquerade in "April Foolish"

As an adaptation of "The Prince and the Pauper," this TV episode teaches young spectators how to use masquerade to function more effectively as consumers. The central setting is an embassy masquerade party, where the Turtles are mistaken for humans in amphibian drag and awarded a prize for most ridiculous costume, and where April is mistaken for Princess Mallory (when she exchanges her androgynous yellow jumpsuit for a hyperfeminine royal gown). She is then inadvertently kidnapped and held for ransom by Shredder, who hopes to obtain the emperor's lidium 90, "the most valuable element on earth" (for more plot summary, see appendix 1). Most interesting in the episode is the way gender is positioned along with other valuable commodities like diamonds, pizza, and amphibious media stars (minerals, vegetables, and animals) as a cultural construct whose meaning and value are as "unstable" as the lidium 90, which deconstructs when exposed to the atmosphere.

The gender switching begins when April's sound technician, Irma, tells her she can't wear her jumpsuit to the party, advising her to become "a new woman" so as to find "a new man." April's transformation is specularized when she goes to the sewer, where Splinter and the Turtles are eating. Defending his choice of sushi, Splinter pronounces his transformative credo: "A wise person embraces as many new experiences as possible"; but then, when he is offered marshmallow-pepperoni pizza, he qualifies his thesis: "Some things are more embraceable than others." Just then April enters, and one of the Turtles quips, "Talk about embraceable!"—establishing her as a consumable like pizza. (This

connection is later reinforced at the party when Leonardo asks, "Do you see April?" and Michelangelo responds, "No, something better, it's pizza!") Applying the sliding signifier explicitly to gender and class, Donatello exclaims: "Gosh, April, you look just like . . . a girl," and Raphael adds: "Yes, you clean up real good," echoing a line from Pretty Woman (the blockbuster Cinderella movie that was TMNT 's toughest competition at the box office, probably because it promises that class differences can be easily erased by cross-dressing and compulsive shopping).

April's feminization arouses in the Turtles the dual masculine desire both to protect and to ogle ("We better keep an eye on her . . . maybe two"), which, in the very next scene, is unified in the male gaze and explicitly linked to patriarchal power. Here April's double, the "real" Princess Mallory, accuses her father of "looking after her like a child," complaining: "I hate masquerades . . . you always make me go as a princess." As soon as she dons plebeian drag, Mallory becomes the active subject rather than the object of the gaze, especially when watching April's princess impersonation on TV.

Upon arrival at the party, April, like Cinderella, is immediately mistaken for a princess, for the servants hail her as "Your Highness." Like the hooker heroine of Pretty Woman , April admits that this is an interpellation she "could get to like," and presumably, so could most young female spectators. (When I showed this tape to a group of youngsters, all the girls preferred April in her princess masquerade, and some said that if they were invited to a costume party they would also like to dress as a princess; see appendix 1.) This princess drag proves particularly effective in fooling the lower classes, for even Shredder's retainer Rock Steady admits: "All those princesses look alike to me"—a remark with racist overtones, which undoubtedly applies to the entire

female gender, especially as represented in fairy tales and video games.

These differences in gender, species, and class may be merely social constructs, but the episode implies that they are still essential to successful narrative. Thus, at the end of the episode April claims she has learned "that a disguise is a great way to get a story." Donning a bald wig, she tells the Turtles that next week she will disguise herself as a baldheaded diplomat, whereupon a Turtle remarks: "Paint that thing green and you can pass as one of us." This ending reminds us that both females like April and superheroes like the Turtles are similarly constructed by masquerade. Yet this ending also encourages young spectators of both genders to go out and buy the necessary paraphernalia that will facilitate their own empowering identification with these awesome sliding signifiers.

Masculine Masquerade in the Movie

In the TMNT movie, masquerade is focused not on April's femininity, but on the masculinity of Casey Jones and the Turtles, all of whom are presented as male impersonators. With their minds and bodies still in flux, they are still on that "long forced march" toward becoming a gendered adult—or, more specifically, a fully empowered phallic subject. When Raphael goes out on the streets, for example, he masquerades as "Bogey" with trench coat and fedora, and Michelangelo does imitations of Cagney and Rocky. The Turtles reach the final stage of their development when they put their bald green heads together to meditate and miraculously bring forth the spirit of their captive master, who tells them that the source of their new power is "a father's love for his sons." In other words, a boy becomes a man by masquerading as his father—a point that is made literal in the

scene where Shredder costumes his Foot soldier in the headband that carries his own insignia: the Name-of-the-Father. In Danny's case, the rite of passage is identified with the Naming-by-the-Father; he becomes a man when his dad agrees to call him Dan.

Yet it is Casey Jones, the all-American bricoleur jock, who adopts the most disguises—not only the uniform of the Foot clan, but also the array of phallic sporting equipment that he uses as weaponry (hockey stick, baseball bat, and golf club). Even his name evokes earlier American folk heroes, who represented, according to Willis, "the centered, very solid construction of masculinity," particularly in contrast to twentieth-century transformative superheroes (like Superman and Batman). Because these twentieth-century superheroes "are locked on the perpetual articulation of the moment of transformation," their "masculinity is constructed as a duality"—sometimes strong and hypermasculine, and other times weak, bumbling, and even nurturing.^[14] As a slightly older, more traditional longer hero who fights alongside the Turtles without really being one of them, Casey Jones manages to conflate these two models. Although he is verbally compared with "Wayne Gretsky on steroids" and visually (especially in his undershirt) reminds one of the young Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire , his macho status is destabilized when April refers to him as "a nine-year-old trapped in a man's body," as well as when a Turtle accuses him of claustrophobia and he defensively responds: "I never even looked at a guy before!" The androgyny of this longhair makes him a better match for April, to whom he confides with affection, "I love it when you're pushy!"

Despite the focus on father-son relations and the exclusion of the maternal, this flexibility in masquerade implies that gender is a cultural construct and that one has the power to exaggerate, change, or possibly even to choose

one's own gender identification. In the case of spunky April O'Neil, her unisex jumpsuit suggests her choice of androgyny—an identification that presumably qualifies her to be the Turtles' best buddy. In "April Foolish" when she masquerades as a hyperfeminine princess, her costume immediately marks her as a target for victimization. At the end of the episode, when she dons a bald wig, she exaggerates the other side of androgyny and moves (visually and narratively) toward phallic empowerment—both in politics (disguised as a diplomat at the conference she plans to crash) and in battle ("Paint that thing green and you can pass as one of us").

This malleability is much greater with the Turtles, a species whose gender is not immediately apparent (at least to most human observers). Thus, unlike most superheroes, their gender appears to be totally "constructed" by their costuming, weaponry, behavior, and names, which are bestowed on them by their patriarchal master, that is, by the symbolic order—and that means that these accoutrements of masculinity can also be obtained by the young spectators who buy into the TMNT supersystem.

As a valorizing category within the TMNT myth, masculinity therefore proves to be not biologically determined, but culturally constructed—a role that can be chosen, learned, or acquired, even by aspiring members of so-called inferior species like rats, turtles, females, kiddies, and teens. Yet in order to succeed on this quest for empowerment, one must undergo one or more kinds of transformation: martial arts training (Splinter), mutation (the Turtles), masquerade (April in her jumpsuit), moral conversion (Danny), membership in the TMNT system (kiddie spectators). While this conception of masculinity might offer more flexibility than biological determinism, it can hardly be consoling to feminists, for the maternal is totally suppressed and power is restricted

solely to the male sphere. The only way for a female to be empowered within this mythic world is to become, not a Barbie-like princess (as Irma advises), but an androgynous daddy's girl like April—that is, one of the boys.

In presenting masculinity as a cultural construct, the movie allows male bonding and martial arts to function as the primary spectacle, which can be watched, documented, and transformed into pop culture by an empowered tomboy like April. She covers their story not only on TV, but also in her cartoon drawings. At the end of the novel (and probably in an earlier version of the screenplay), she and Danny take her drawings to a comic book publisher, who rejects them as "too farfetched." Even in the movie, April and Danny are models of how human consumers (both girls and boys) can interact with protean superheroes like the Turtles: as in the "Green Ranger" episode of "Muppet Babies," it is a matter of being morally converted, like Danny, and of making them the basis of one's own creative invention, like April.

One of the most unusual and original features of TMNT is the way it elicits an interactive response from its young spectators, which helps to compensate for the deliberate omission of video game action from the movie. (This omission is made quite pointed when one of the Turtles uses the phrase "shell shock"—a term from the video game—and another rejects it as "too derivative.") The interactive response centers not on solving the riddles of the plot, but on the cognitive task of distinguishing among the four Turtles who, despite their illustrious Italian names and color and weapon coding, look exactly alike. When I saw the movie, I was surrounded by kiddie spectators who kept saying aloud, "That's Michelangelo," or "There's Leonardo," as if identifying the Turtles and demonstrating their knowledge of these iconographic codes was the most enjoyable part of the moviegoing experience. (It reminded me of Victor's experience watching

his first movie, The Empire Strikes Back , and the pleasure he took in recognizing the characters.) Although the color iconography was not in the original comic book, a similar color coding is operative in Pac-Man (to mark an enemy's death) and in Tron (both the movie and arcade game). In the case of TMNT , however, the color and weapon coding works across the system of intertextuality.

I remember the mixture of pleasure and discomfort that Victor once displayed when he recognized a "mistake" on a TMNT t-shirt, where the color and weapon coding were in conflict—pleasure in his own powers of discrimination, yet discomfort in finding inconsistencies in a logical system. Another instance occurred on Halloween, when, instead of carrying his nunchucks (a favorite toy, which gave him great pleasure and which was purchased specifically to go with his Ninja Turtle costume), at the last minute Victor decided to carry an old stick because, unlike the nunchucks, it did not conflict with the purple color coding of his headband. On a third occasion the discomfort clearly outweighed the pleasure when Victor vehemently rejected a TMNT folder, on which the Turtles (with menacing facial expressions) were arranged in an Escher-esque design with two Turtles on the bottom and the other two upside down at the top (so that it was impossible to see all four right side up at the same time). While one could argue that Victor was reacting against the violent expressions of his beloved heroes, this aspect was no more extreme than in many other images he had enthusiastically approved. I am convinced that his disturbance arose because it was very difficult for him to assimilate the image within his mental spatial models either of reality or of the TMNT supersystem. His negative reaction was so strong that not only did he refuse to use the folder, but he actually demanded that it be thrown away so he would never have to see it again. According to Papert, one of "the fundamental

fact[s] about learning" is that "anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult" (italics are mine).^[15]

For the uninitiated moviegoer, the TMNT film foregrounds the cognitive task of recognition in a long reflexive sequence that ruptures the narrative. April sketches the Turtles and in a voice-over (as if she were reading from a diary) explicitly distinguishes them as dramatic characters by explaining how differently each one reacted to their first defeat. These distinctions are "supported" by having each drawing dissolve into a live-action illustrative scene, a technique reminiscent of "Muppet Babies." Yet ironically, all these "different" reactions focus on male bonding.

Even though the Turtles are barely distinguishable visually, they carry unique "designer" labels. From a humanist perspective, the naming of the Turtles after Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, and Leonardo can be read either positively, as an attempt to familiarize youngsters with these important names (which they will later encounter in a more lofty or different class context), or negatively, as a vulgar co-optation of the Old Masters (contradictory readings that can also be applied to the use of Fellini on Saturday morning television). From a postmodernist perspective, however, these icons of uniqueness are merely being refigured as surviving players in a larger system of mass entertainment.

As we saw in the case of Garfield, this paradox of uniqueness is central to advertising discourse, where the false promise of distinctiveness is granted by legally protected brand names and extended to spectators who consume products designed for mass tastes. Thus, one takes pride in belonging to a cult that appreciates a supposedly unique product with ever-expanding popularity (once the TMNT movie became a big success, some of its newspaper ads were headlined, "Give in to the TURTLE URGE! [Everyone Else

Has]"—but the more popular the product becomes, the less prestigious the cult.

Interestingly, the TMNT movie does not emphasize the Italian names of the Turtles, but uses instead their Americanized nicknames—Raph, Don, Mikey, and Leo. The film highlights not the uniqueness of individual Turtles, but their bonding as a foursome, a distinction that children seem to absorb. For example, when I asked Victor why he chose to identify with Michelangelo rather than with the other Turtles, he replied: "Because Leonardo argued with Raphael, and Raphael got beat up, and Donatello said things that weren't nice about Raphael." This emphasis on bonding also conveniently quadruples the selling power of the Turtles by fostering "collectability," since most young consumers desire the complete set of ancillary products: all four flavors of cookies, all four videotapes at Burger King, all the Playmates action figures at Toys 'R' Us, and the TMNT Collectors Case, which safely stores at least twelve statuettes.

The conflict between uniqueness and bonding is centered on Raphael, the most emotional of the four Turtles and the one who is almost killed by the Foot clan. At one point Splinter tells him: "You are unique among your brothers in that you choose to face this enemy [anger] alone!" The Turtles' primary mission is to become stronger as a foursome with the aid of paternal love. Thus, rather than being identified exclusively with the Old European Masters and their cult of uniqueness, the Turtles are vividly linked with the team spirit of their Asian Ninja Masters, who apparently have far greater popular appeal with American moviegoers of all ages, particularly at this moment in cultural history.

TMNT is the only film in the video game genre that makes strong use of the Asian connection—with its Japanese samurai backstory and a producer like David Chang, vicepresident of international production for the Golden Har-

vest Group in Hong Kong, which specializes in the martial arts genre and even produced a documentary on Bruce Lee. Instead of including inset video game references like the other three films in the genre, the entire narrative of TMNT simulates the nonstop combat structure of most video games, a strategy that must have contributed to the film's success. Moreover, as in the games (but not the original comic book), the violence is stylized and bloodless,^[16] and it is figuratively extended to the economic arena: when April is being mugged by ninja Foot soldiers in the subway, she sneers, "Am I behind on my Sony payments again?"

This joke reveals the "other scene" of global economics, where the struggle for power is not illusory (as it is in the Turtles movie and video games) and where the Japanese have proven to be formidable players. Part of the film's timeliness comes from reflexive allusions to the Japanese invasion of American markets, which make the film's references to the wave of Japanese-style "silent" crimes more resonant. Adopting a strategy similar to that used by Eastman and Laird in the original comic book, the movie imitates the Japanese technique of assimilating successful models of old foreign masters. It adapts the samurai and kung fu conventions the way Japanese filmmakers like Kurosawa earlier absorbed and transformed the western in the post–World War II era, or the way Eiji Tsuburaya built on King Kong to create his popular series of Godzilla movies with their fantastic elaborations in the mid-1950s.^[17] Thus the TMNT movie breaks with the traditional conception of orientalism, where one is defined strictly in opposition to the alien Other, and instead adopts a postmodernist form of intertextuality and accommodation, fluidly consuming and becoming the Other—a strategy now being used not only by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but also by Japanese multinational corporations in their acquisition of American properties. As Akio Morita,

the founding chairman of Sony, said shortly after his company's 1989 purchase of Columbia Pictures (for $3.4 billion): "We are more willing to act in the U.S. like a U.S. company, in Europe like a European company, and in Japan like a Japanese company. That's the only way a global company like Sony can truly become a significant player in each of the world's major markets."^[18]