Are the TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES part of the Marvel Universe?

[00:00:28] Hello happy campers and welcome to another episode of Comics Are My Happy Place, in which I, Nick Kirk, or Nick Crick, or Nickity Crickety, or that baldy fella if you want to follow me on Instagram or Blue Sky, please do, in which I sit down with my pal Colin Hoult, actor, writer, comedian, and accomplished kazoo player, in order to chat about the important business of comics, as well as continuing to run through all of the Marvel characters on the Marvel Unlimited app from

[00:00:58] A, A-bomb, to Zed, Zax, not necessarily in that order, so that we can put them all into one massive list and rank who's the best. Quite a long sentence just to open with there wasn't it? Now, as regular listeners may know, Colin and I have been struggling to try and find time to both be in the same place at the same time in order to record a new episode for you, and sadly this week is no exception in our continued game of podcast ping pong, as you've just got me for this week, Soz.

[00:01:26] Also, as mentioned in the blurb for last week's show, you do read the blurb, don't you? No? Why not? I write them, you know. For the time being, we're dropping these down to fortnightly, in the hope that at some point we can maybe get back onto a weekly track again, or at the very least have both of us on the pod at the same time, which would be nice.

[00:01:45] So what, I pretend to hear you ask me as a sort of useful narrative device, is this week's episode all about? Well, I am continuing my little solo series of questions about certain characters, and this time I'm asking, are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles part of the Marvel Universe? Before I get onto that, however, I'm going to indulge in one of our regular features, and pretend that Colin has asked me,

[00:02:14] Nick, what other things have you been reading? Ooh, the magic of editing. So what have I been reading recently? Well, loads, to be honest, but let's pick one to talk about. Recently, I have read The Nice House on the Lake and The Nice House by the Sea, all of which is one continuing storyline. It's by James Tinian IV, and the basic premise, it's one of those ones you don't want to give too much away,

[00:02:44] but it's a group of people brought together in the initial one, The Nice House on the Lake, in a lake house. That's not a spoiler, that clue is in the title on that one, I have to say, yeah. They're brought together by their friend Walter, who's been asking them various questions, and seems to have sort of selected them to try and get them all together there, only to discover when they're there that the world appears to be ending, and it's entirely possible they might be the only people left.

[00:03:12] There's a lot more to it than that, there's plenty of twists and turns, it's a sort of series that doesn't really go in a direction you expect it to. So highly recommend it, I really enjoy that, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it's going. I think the latest issue of The Nice House by the Sea is issue 11 of 12, so yeah, I'm just waiting for that last issue to come out, which I don't think is the last issue of the series overall, and I don't know what the third volume will be called.

[00:03:39] But yes, I recommend that one, give that one a go if you haven't already. All right, there you go, there's a little bit of what else have I been reading for you. Just to, you know, make it seem like it is a regular podcast episode. Enough of that anyway, let's dive right into the main thrust, the meat of this episode, shall we? I don't know if I like saying thrust and meat there, it's a little bit too. Anyway, the question today is, are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or TMNT,

[00:04:08] because it is going to get very boring to say Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a lot, although I probably still will. Are they part of the Marvel Universe? Well, firstly, the question arises, who exactly are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Brackets TMNT. All right, look, you didn't know who Transformers were, and you had no idea about Godzilla. I mean, are you sure a pop culture related podcast is for you? Maybe you want to broaden your horizons a bit more. All right, look, just for your benefit,

[00:04:35] here's a bit of a whistle-stop guide to those heroes in a half shell, and they're green. So the comic book version of TMNT was first launched onto the public back in 1984, created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, and published by their self-funded publishing company, Mirage Comics. The turtles themselves are Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Yes, all named after painters.

[00:05:02] They're four ordinary turtles who are mutated by radioactive waste, along with the pet rat who finds them, Splinter, into four human-sized turtle mutants. Splinter himself also getting mutated in the process. They're brought up in the sewers by Splinter himself, in the original comics at least. In those comics, he is the pet of a renowned martial arts master, Hamato Yoshi, who knows everything you need to know about martial arts but afraid to ask.

[00:05:31] Splinter, by observing him, he's an above-average intelligence rat, has learnt those martial arts, and he imparts that knowledge onto the turtles, acting as both father and sensei to them. In the original comics, Splinter's master, Yoshi, is murdered by the ninja Orokusaki, more commonly known as the Shredder, and he's the main antagonist in pretty much every version of TMNT that's out there. As well as the turtles, Splinter and Shredder,

[00:05:58] that initial comic introduces a lot of elements that come into play in many other versions, namely characters like the mad scientist Baxter Stockman, friend to the turtles April O'Neill, who is variously a reporter or scientist, depending on whatever version you're in, and the hockey-mask-wearing vigilante Casey Jones. Although perhaps surprisingly to those of you who grew up on the 1980s cartoon version,

[00:06:25] the original comic doesn't actually feature the alien Krang, and his henchmen Bebop and Rocksteady. Ah yes, I've mentioned it. So, the 80s cartoon. So the turtles became pretty successful pretty quickly. Eastman and Laird optioned the characters fairly early on to be produced as toys, and, as with everything in the 80s, Transformers, He-Man, Thundercats, etc., if you were launching a toy line, you needed a cartoon.

[00:06:52] So, in 1987, the turtles made their TV debut. A series which, and I didn't realise this, ran for almost 10 years. So that's pretty successful for a toy tie-in cartoon. There's not many that ran for that long. Most of them sort of two or three years tops, really. Now, if you grew up in the States at the time, and hello to American listeners if you're one of those, you grew up watching a cartoon called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Not so in the UK.

[00:07:22] No. If you grew up in the UK, and certain other parts of Europe as well, you grew up watching a cartoon called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Yes. Yes. This was due to there being a lot of controversy around ninjas at the time, which feels like an absolutely insane thing to say, and also the banning of weapons like nunchucks in the UK, which meant that any depiction or mention of them would have to be removed. So yes, we had a specially edited version of the show.

[00:07:52] So the theme tune itself was re-recorded to include the word hero instead of ninja, as well as that being depicted as the title on screen. And any shots of Michelangelo using his nunchucks were edited out, with also the word ninja throughout the episode being edited. Possibly sometimes quite clumsily, I would imagine. I mean, it does seem mad now, nearly 40 years on, that just the word ninja could be controversial. I mean, I've said it several times in this podcast already.

[00:08:21] So if this were the 80s, we would be banned. Different times, I guess, though. Different times. As alluded to earlier, what the series did introduce was some characters that would go on to become enduring parts of the Turtles' mythos, namely the aforementioned alien Krang, who is a sort of squiddy, tentacly thing who sits in the stomach of a big robot body. Completely dissimilar to a Dalek, of course. In no way are they the same thing. And his mutated animal henchmen,

[00:08:51] Bebop the Warthog, and Rocksteady the Rhinoceros. They have sort of moved back into the comics subsequently after that. We'll talk about that a bit later. The success of the cartoon, of course, inevitably led to feature films. Although, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the initial films were live action rather than animated. So they didn't go down the Transformers, the movie route, of doing an animated film. Although, if you did go down the Transformers, the movie route,

[00:09:20] you would have to kill most of the main characters within the first five minutes. So probably best they didn't do that. Here's a bizarre little sort of footnote in history. Before they launched the actual live action adaptation that came out, earlier in the 80s, creators Eastman and Laird were pitched a live action version of Turtles, which would have featured Billy Crystal, Sam Kinison, Gallagher, and Bobcat Goldthwait in the main roles.

[00:09:48] Yeah, I think we can all agree that we've probably dodged a bullet on that one. I doubt that would have been what you and I would call good. The first Turtles live action film back in 1990 was directed by Steve Barron, who was most notable for working in music videos prior to this. But he had also been the lead director of the Jim Henson series, The Storyteller, which features John Hurt as the storyteller and a Muppet Dog as his dog. It's a great series.

[00:10:18] I highly recommend it. You should go and watch that if you haven't. So I guess it's somewhat unsurprising then with him as the director that the Jim Henson Creature Workshop was brought in to design and build the costumes and animatronics for the Turtles. In fact, and this is a sad fact, this was one of the last projects that Jim Henson was personally involved in prior to his untimely death of pneumonia in 1990. The film did well as the two sequels followed, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, The Secret of the Ooze,

[00:10:47] and the imaginatively titled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3. Both, I would say, to very much diminishing returns on that one though. However, this didn't stop them a few years later from launching a live action series, Ninja Turtles The Next Mutation, which we all remember, I'm sure. We all watched that avidly. This was a series produced by Saban Entertainment,

[00:11:10] who are more noticeable for producing the various Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series. A series with which Turtles The Next Mutation did in fact cross over. Yeah. It feels weird, but crossovers are kind of nothing new when it comes to Turtles. They've crossed over with some pretty strange characters. I mean, the original comic series did a lot of crossing over with other creator-owned series.

[00:11:39] So for example, they crossed over with Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot, Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, Dave Simms' Cerebus, and then later image comics such as Savage Dragon and Spawn. So yeah, crossovers that you wouldn't necessarily think fit together have been a staple of the Turtles world pretty much since the start. While they might not have hit that kind of ubiquitous pop culture status they had in the late 80s and early 90s,

[00:12:09] the Turtles have pretty much stayed on our screens all the way throughout. I mean, there've been four other animated series since then. Two more simply named Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 2003 and 2012. In 2018, we had Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And in 2024, off the back of the most recent animated film, we had Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

[00:12:36] Speaking of films, on the big screen, they've had a few gaps, but they've never been that far away. The computer animated TMNT released in 2007, while Michael Bay's uncanny live-action monstrosities hit the cinemas in 2012 and 2014. I will admit, I haven't watched the Michael Bay films. There's something about just the clips and images I've seen of the Turtle designs that make me feel weirdly uncomfortable.

[00:13:05] I don't know. It's like, it's like I don't know if you ever saw the first advert that came out for the first of the recent Sonic the Hedgehog films, in which Sonic had extremely disturbing, realistically human teeth, and the entire internet as one recoiled at the sight of it. But I feel like the bits I've seen of the Turtles from the Michael Bay film has that sort of effect on me as well.

[00:13:33] Following the Michael Bay stuff, they did return to their animated roots with, I have to say, the surprisingly delightful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Madness back in 2023. I really enjoyed that. I think it's got a real Spider-Man, Spider-Verse vibe, but does it in such a way that it doesn't feel like it's just copying Spider-Verse. It feels like they've applied it to the Turtles to make them sort of fun and visually interesting to look at.

[00:14:01] I really enjoyed it, and I wasn't expecting to, I have to say. I mean, it does mean that they just really haven't ever been that far away from the public eye, although it may not obviously seem like it. They've been pretty much continuously on the screen somewhere all the way through for the last nearly 40 years, which does make you asking who they were all the weirder, quite frankly, if I'm being honest with you. In comics terms, yeah, they've equally been pretty consistently there,

[00:14:30] with some versions more beloved than others. I have to say, outside of that initial Eastman and Laird run, the move to and reboot with IDW has garnered the most acclaim, and I can see why, if I'm being honest. I read the first few issues of the original Eastman and Laird run, but I haven't read all of it, and I enjoyed those ones that I read. It's kind of fun. It's got that independent, creator-owned 80s comics vibe. Before, that was really a mainstream thing.

[00:14:59] You've got to remember, it wasn't really till the 90s and really image coming along that creator-owned comics became more of a thing. And I say more of a thing because they're still not a huge thing. DC and Marvel still own their properties, so creators don't really own anything they work for on Marvel and DC. But I have been reading the collected IDW run recently. It's really enjoyable. I'm really liking it.

[00:15:23] It's mixing a lot of those elements from the classic series and doing some newer mixed-up takes on it. For example, in the IDW run, rather than being the pet of Hamato Yoshi, Splinter is the reincarnation of him. Him being a long-dead martial arts master. And the turtles are his reincarnated sons as well. And Shredder is still the man that killed them,

[00:15:53] but he's a sort of endlessly resurrecting person, and that's linked to the ooze that created them in the first place. I haven't read all of it yet. I'm only a few issues in. Well, I say a few issues. I've probably read about 30 or so. But I'm enjoying it. I also like the way that IDW's been collecting it because there's a lot of individual tie-in issues outside of just the main issues. And actually, all of those feed into the main storyline, which I like. It kind of reminds me of James Robinson's Starman run,

[00:16:22] in which pretty much every ancillary issue, be it an annual, a miniseries, a one-off, a special, 80-page giant, things like that. All of that fed back into the main storyline, which is enjoyable because I have to say a lot of the time on something like Batman, when you get an annual, it just feels like it's probably disposable stuff that you don't really need to bother with. So I quite like it when it feels like, okay, you've released an extra issue, but it's giving you something that ties back into the main storyline.

[00:16:52] Also, with the IDW run, they've taken the opportunity to explicitly make Krang one of the Utrom race from the original comics and made him a part of the storyline from the start. I guess largely because people were expecting to see Krang because of the 80s cartoon. So, the question was, if you can just cast your mind back to the start of all this rambling nonsense, are the TMNT part of the Marvel Universe? Why would I be asking that?

[00:17:20] Well, I'm glad I'm pretending to get you to ask all these questions. It makes it much easier for me, in the absence of having someone else to actually ask me questions. So, in the first issue of the first version of The Turtles, Splinter, who is already an above-average intelligence rat, is mourning the death of his master out in an alleyway, after recently escaping, when he sees a blind man stumbling into the road and about to be run over by a truck.

[00:17:48] However, that blind man is saved by a heroic young boy who dives and throws him out of the path of the truck, only for that young boy to be struck across the eyes by a falling canister of toxic waste, which is shaken loose from that truck. The canister then bounces into a manhole, but not before, smashing a terrarium held by a different young boy, containing four baby turtles, who then tumble into the sewer alongside the now-cracked canister of radioactive ooze.

[00:18:18] Yes. For those of you that are long-time Marvel fans, you've guessed it. The Turtles are very much meant to be in the background of Matt Murdock, the Daredevil himself's origin. Now look, obviously, given that this comic is not in any way published or endorsed by Marvel Comics, I think it's fair to say that, unlike Transformers and Godzilla, the Turtles are not, nor have never been, officially part of the Marvel Universe. I have to say, though,

[00:18:47] it is fun to imagine, the next time you read that first issue of Daredevil, that somewhere in the background of that scene, where he's jumping at the old man and gets biffed in the eye with some toxic waste, some little heroes on the half-shell are also being born down in a little sewer grate behind him. Does this question feel like a bit of a cop-out compared to the other two, Transformers and Godzilla, who were actually published by Marvel for a bit, so I could conceivably ask that question.

[00:19:17] Have I just contrived this whole thing in order to come up with a way to talk about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for a bit? Hey, look. Look. If you've got a problem with this, why don't you make your own podcast, mate? See how easy it is to come up with decent filler material when you can't both be in the same place at the same time. So there you have it. The Turtles are not officially part of the Marvel Universe, but I do like to think that they are unofficially hanging out in the background there

[00:19:46] of Daredevil's origin. A short episode for this week, but just to give you something in terms of content while Colin and I are struggling to be in the same place at the same time. Hopefully next time you will get an episode with us both together and we'll be starting to get a bit more back on track. Thank you as always for listening and thank you for bearing with us during this period of difficulty in coming together to record episodes for you. We're hoping it's just a blip and we will get back on track.

[00:20:15] So I'll leave it there for this time. So all that remains is to say it's a radical cowabunga shaflang from me and we'll catch you again next time. Hank Pym sucks. Thank you for listening to Comics Are My Happy Place. If you have enjoyed this podcast, there are many ways you can support us. You can follow us on Instagram at comicsaremyhappyplace.

[00:20:44] You can drop us an email at comicsaremyhappyplace at gmail.com and if you've got anything funny or interesting to say, we'll read it out on the podcast. But the best way to support us is to go to our Patreon, patreon.com slash comicsaremyhappyplace, where for a small fee, you can subscribe to get yourself early access to extended versions of these episodes. Yes, that's right. A day before the episode drops on all your regular podcast platforms, you'll get a longer version

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[00:21:43] This podcast is part of Podomity, the UK's podcast comedy network. Why not laugh at what else we've got? Visit podomity.com.