Original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie Darkness Serves A Specific Purpose
The original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were dark. I’m talking black-and-white, indy comic in which the team is put together solely to murder their sensei’s enemy, dark. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the Turtles’ live-action debut was also dark, although not for the reasons you probably think. Although the film did have a tone that closely mimicked its source material, the dimly lit action scenes mainly served to hide the imperfections in the original Turtle suits.
The Comic Was Very Dark
In 1987, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird—the creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—turned their successful independent comic book about talking animals who wield deadly weapons into a colorful Saturday morning children’s cartoon. This is where I and most of the other kids born in the ’80s first fell in love with the pizza-eating reptiles, a love that we expressed by begging our parents for action figures, bed sheets, NES games, and even snack food.
Speaking of which, Hostess, please, please, bring back the TMNT pies with the green glaze and the vanilla pudding inside. I’m begging you!
1990 Was Peak Turtlemania
By the time the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was released in 1990, Turtlemania was at its peak, and I would have sold my younger brother for a ticket. Fortunately, I didn’t have to because my dad paid for us to see it in the theater, and, whoo boy, did we see it. Legend has it that the ushers at my childhood movie theater are still searching for my socks today.
Dark In Tone And Style
Watching a quartet of lovable Saturday morning goofballs religiously did not prepare me for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. It was violent, the Turtles swore, and above all, it was dark—pitch black compared to the relatively toothless animated series. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a PG movie, but they stretched that PG to its limits.
But when I say dark, I don’t mean thematically or tonally; I mean, parts of the movie look like they were filmed by candlelight. Part of the reason the movie was lit sparingly was to create a feeling of griminess. Watching that first movie, you really believe that the turtles lived in a New York City sewer.
Designed By Jim Henson
The other reason the movie was kept dark was to better hide the seams on the Turtles themselves. The first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles boasted animatronic costumes built specially for the movie by none other than Jim Henson himself. And while that quality shows even in well-lit shots, at the end of the day, the Turtles were still guys wearing bulky rubber suits. The darker the shot, the better the suits looked.
A Record-Setting Movie
Unsurprisingly, the film’s director, Steve Barron, encountered pushback from Golden Harvest, the studio bankrolling the film, over the movie’s lack of illumination. The studio told Barron upon seeing footage of the unfinished film that it was “too dark,” and to remember that the film’s primary audience was children. “It’s gotta be colorful. It’s gotta be bright.” Golden Harvest told Barron. The director simply dug in his heels and kept making the movie the way he wanted to make it.
Because he did that, the movie still looks great today, especially compared to its two live-action sequels. Despite the fact that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made a ton of money and was the most successful independent movie of all time until the Blair Witch Project, the producers of the sequel decided to brighten things up to bring the movies more in line with the cartoon.
The Other Films Don’t Look Nearly As Good
That meant more light, which in turn meant that every imperfection in the Turtle costumes was now visible. The suits in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze still look rather decent, thanks to the incredible craftsmen at the Jim Henson Creature Shop, but the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III costumes look so bad I haven’t watched the film in close to twenty years. I’m not sure there’s even a single shadow in that movie, not that it would really help.
If you put a turd in a pitch-black room, it’s still a turd, but I digress.
Turtle Power
So next time you pop in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for a little rush of nostalgia, remember that all those dimly lit nighttime scenes aren’t just to set the mood but to make the Turtles themselves look like they really crawled out of the sewer and not a Spirit Halloween.
