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.