Out Of My Shell: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Me

In seventh grade I was faced with a new class menace—the kid who liked to de-pants people. Because I didn’t want to be his next victim, I began wearing jeans and other types of pants that didn’t depend on flimsy elastic waists to keep in place. I even had obtained a pair of jeans with what in retrospect was a very tacky and obnoxious Ninja Turtles print all over it. I’m talking logos and turtles, in full color, over black denim. I shudder to think what I must have looked like in them (sadly I can’t find any pictures to prove their existence). Needless to say, at the time I thought they were very, very cool.

Panel from Qwantz.com
© 2005 Scott Forsyth

Until I wore them to school and got laughed and pointed at. All day. As cliché as it sounds, it was quite possibly the worst day of my entire life. I wasn’t just laughed at by kids in my class. Recess brought out the bullies in everyone that day, even kids younger than me. Even kids I’d considered friends. It was halfway through the day when an older student in my class asked me why I was so upset. When I told her what had happened (how could she have not seen my loser pants?) she kindly said that people were jerks and that they were cool pants.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, she was right. The Turtle pants, however, were demoted to the rank of inside clothes, never to be worn in public again.

I recently found a cassette at a thrift store that brought up another memory from the past. The Ninja Turtles actually had an album other than the movie soundtracks. The concept was that the Turtles were an actual rock band, though listening to the entire cassette will reveal absolutely nothing rockin’ about their debut (and only) album, Coming Out of Their Shells.

Still, upon its release and Pizza Hut endorsement tie-in, I secretly wanted to own the album. By this point, I had come to the sad and false realization that if I wanted to be taken seriously I couldn’t like things like cartoons. I never did get the album because of this secret shame, but I did get to listen to it once, over the phone. My younger cousin had borrowed the tape from a friend of his and had it only for the night. Had either of us had a dual cassette deck, we would have no doubt made copies of it. Alas, I had to settle for the tinny, reduced range of a telephone speaker—which now that I’ve heard the full album in glorious stereo, didn’t do it justice. While it’s nice to find out what I had missed out on all those years ago, I can easily see how the cassette’s original owner let it go.

It’s funny now, knowing that the creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had simply allowed a joke concept to go too far, resulting in a world-wide craze that’s still going strong today. The goofy cartoon of the 80s was far removed from the dirty, black-and-white source material, but it’s what made me fall in love with it. The most recent incarnation of the Turtles was the movie TMNT, released in 2007. While it distanced itself from the first three by adopting a much darker tone, it still paid homage to them via a trophy case full of old artifacts in the turtle lair.

Though I repressed my interest in Ninja Turtles and cartoons through my adolescence, I’m grateful I grew out of wanting to grow up. Since that time, I’ve re-embraced those past loves unashamedly. I’ve come out of my shell, and it feels great.

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