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The World of Ninja Turtles Is Darker Than You Thought
If you watched the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies as a gullible kid, your perception probably only scratched the surface of the franchise’s dark universe. So the movie is about crazy, fun-driven, and courageous turtle warriors who also happen to like pizza, right? Wrong! Read on to find out about some nasty aspects of the TMNT world you probably never noticed…
Where the money from?!
So where do the guys get their money from? A giant turtle can’t exactly drop by a job center on the way to the sewers. And the warriors do use dollars. The first thing that comes to mind is when they order pizza, which is a regular endeavor. However, at one point in the movie, Raphaello even goes to the cinema. So how do you get money if you don’t work? The answer is entirely illegal. The turtles must simply be robbing the villains they knock out… There’s no other way for them to be able to afford all that paid entertainment. Makes them less heroic.
Do you want fries with that nunchaku?
Even with the dark web readily available with your computer, you wouldn’t have an easy time trying to get ninja weapons. And the turtles lived in the 90s so there couldn’t have been an online ninja store! Sure, they would certainly pick up whichever weapons their adversaries left behind them, but those wouldn’t have included ninja attire! So where did Raph get his sai, or what about Mikey’s nunchakus? Are they friends with some smugglers?
No freedom of speech
Via: slate.com
Just take a look at how powerful the police is in the TMNT universe – more powerful that the media, which we deem as omnipotent in the current world. April is a reporter for a major news outlet, but she is not allowed to inquire about the rise in the crime wave – although it really is the case, the wave is right there. However, the police chief has the power to get April sacked if he wants to, and even her boss just plays his part, warning April what may come if she keeps meddling. And it does come – after April loses her job, she mysteriously disappears, her place having burnt down… Of course, no one decides to report this story, either. Sounds like a terrible, terrible country with police control and corruption.
Kids just wanna have fun
Via: ign.com
In the original film, the Foot Clan is not even a clan at all – it may have to do with ninjas, but it’s as ancient as a freshly baked pizza. Shredder visits New York City with just two cronies to help him out, and what he does is to look for some gullible teenagers, welcoming them into their ranks and training them towards becoming a thief. So why doesn’t anyone care about the fact that as the number of runaway teens increases, so does the crime? Even the son of April’s boss, Danny Pennington, disappears one day, and still no one seems to care. Not the media, not the politicians. The kids just go off, impressed at their newly acquired liberties, and the world’s merely okay with that.
No one cares about the sewers
Via: deallocatedobjects.com
So if you’re a giant turtle, it can actually be a nice setup – the sewers. There may be the occasional inundation when it rains heavily, and maybe there’s a nasty stench, but you’re also free to do whatever you want… And the pizza reaches its destination, so everything’s alright. And the pizza guy doesn’t seem surprised at all
at people living in the sewers… Says something about how equal the TMNT society must be. But think again – the sewers. They’re not there just for the turtles’ entertainment, they serve some purposes in the city. Why are there no maintenance workers at all descending into the turtle paradise? The city must be in an appalling shape.
And no one cares about anything in that city!
Via: artsfon.com
So in the first movie, Shredder actually flies off the roof and into a garbage truck, then supposedly switched on so that it would crush him. Splinter and Casey Jones are two merciless badasses. But back to the city – why would there be an abandoned truck just standing there, waiting for a villain to crush? And it’s not just a one-off. In the follow-up movie the Foot Clan HQ is situated nowhere else but in the city dump – sounds fitting… They even organized a whole laboratory right in the middle of it, and the grounds & infrastructure belong to the city! Yet no one ever notices, no one ever comes, no one calls the police. It really is one chaotic, decadent system.