Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III

Hey, Do You Remember...?

Christopher Schrader

Tv & Film, Comedy

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2016

⏱️ 117 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The critical and commercial failure of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III didn't just derail plans for subsequent films in this franchise - it also represented a pretty definitive end point for our generation's "Turtle-mania". No one's suggestion that the movie hasn't earned its bad reputation, but it's grown so aggressively hyperbolic over the years that the HDYR gang couldn't help but wonder if the slide in quality was really THAT severe.

Well. We have our answer.

When we revisited the first two films with a more objective point of view, we realized that each of them had their issues - but boy oh boy is this third one a different beast entirely. It's probably no great revelation that this isn't a very good movie, but what was surprising were the reasons it felt like such a spectacular failure to us now... because the terrible Turtle costumes are the least of its problems.

Topics include: how the studio's recognition of the Turtles' dwindling popularity influenced their decision to cut corners, the story behind those hideous new suits, the baffling choice to bring back Casey Jones and do nothing with him, some absolutely insane time travel logic and how easy it would have been to simplify this whole scenario, a more satisfying backstory for these new villains, a discussion about the right time to age out of this stuff, and much much more!

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About The Show

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, do you remember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Thune? Hello and welcome to Hey Do You Remember, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose-tinted glasses to see how it holds up.
0:31.1	I'm Chris.
0:31.8	I'm Donna.
0:32.7	And I'm Carlos.
0:33.7	And today we're revisiting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3.
0:52.9	Yeah. And today we're revisiting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3. The brighter a star burns, the shorter its lifespan becomes.
0:57.1	And by the early 90s, the Ninja Turtles had gone supernova.
1:01.1	Their popularity peaked with the release of the first live-action movie, but just three years
1:05.7	later, even the production company responsible for these films recognized that the
1:10.0	property's best days
1:11.1	were already behind it. But the bean counters still felt like there were a few drops of blood
1:16.0	they could squeeze from this stone. So rather than give the turtles the hiatus that culture
1:20.0	at large was clearly ready for, they just sort of tied some strings to the limbs of this franchise
1:25.0	and paraded it around weekend at Bernie style.
1:28.7	Now, the death now echoed throughout all facets of merchandising and licensing. The cartoon,
1:33.9	which would run until 1996, was relying on increasingly outlandish plots to sustain itself,
1:39.8	eventually reaching a point where it barely resembled its original incarnation. And the same was true of that popular line of Playmates' Toys, which, having long sense
1:48.3	past the point of being able to release straightforward action figures of the main characters,
1:52.9	grew shockingly avant-garde as it wound down.
1:57.1	And then, of course, there was this third movie, which is something of a chicken in the egg
2:02.7	situation. Did the studio cut corners because they realized this was a case of diminishing
2:07.8	returns, both creatively and financially? Or were there diminishing returns because the studio
	...

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