Five Teenage Mutant Fighting Squads That Are Totally Movie Material

It is a long-established law of history that any truly significant pop-cultural phenomenon will eventually birth imitations that will desperately try to capitalise on and somehow recapture whatever it is that made the original play so powerfully on the public consciousness. Maybe they'll flip a few key elements, or throw in a talking dog, but there's no hiding the influence: Pokemon gave us Digimon; The Flintstones wrought The Jetsons (and, much later, The Simpsons, itself a world-changer of its own that brought a whole new wave of derivatives out to play); any popular Australian band begets most of triple j's playlist spectrum for the next three months… the list goes on.

But perhaps no pop-culture behemoth of recent memory has inspired, directly or otherwise, quite so many obvious emulations in quite so short a time as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — itself (at least partially) a riff on Daredevil. With the home-media release of the latest feature-length Turtles reboot bearing down pretty quickly, it seems a decent time to revisit the mostly forgotten crop of rip-offs (or just plain suspiciously similar properties) that sprang up in the wake of the Turtles' jump from little-known comic-book heroes to global cartoon megastars in the late '80s. Because, really, what's not to love about the time-honoured tale of four (or thereabouts) close friends or siblings, who are social outcasts by design but committed to the values of truth, justice, and beating the shit out of faceless armies of thugs? And, with how many chances the Turtles have had at getting the big screen right (even after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III), who's to say that these other guys wouldn't make good mindless cinematic fodder too? Shit, even Digimon got a movie.

street sharks

Lasting three seasons from 1994-1997, the US-Canadian series Street Sharks tells the tale of unusually buff brothers John, Coop, Bobby and Clint, whose lives are turned upside down when they become the half-man, half-shark victims of the "gene slammer". Created by their father, a university professor, for good, the gene slammer is hijacked and used by his lunatic partner, Dr Paradigm, specifically to turn marine animals into tortured monstrosities whose sole purpose for living is to exist as a crime against nature. For science.

After their dad gets all kinds of hideously mutated at the gene slammer's hands (rays) and their buddy gets kidnapped by the clearly insane professor, the Street Sharks wreck up the joint and turn Paradigm into a giant piranha-man.

I don't even remember what happened in the rest of the series, except that sometimes the Street Sharks rode motorcycles and eventually dinosaurs were introduced, but it really doesn't matter. That origin story — hell, that villain — alone, with at least Sharknado's budget behind it, is worth 90 minutes of my time for sure.

toxic crusaders

Toxic Crusaders (1990-1991) is actually an exceedingly watered-down adaptation of Troma's very-much adult-oriented Toxic Avenger film series, leveraged on the success of the Turtles cartoon, with a dash of Captain Planet pro-environmentalism mixed in. After a run-in with a barrel of toxic waste following a mean-spirited prank gone wrong, central protagonist Melvin Junko, a scrawny health-club custodian, becomes Toxie, a muscular freak of nature hellbent on stopping the evil, armed forces of pollution — invading aliens from the planet Smogula, led by the four-armed, mask-wearing, sly-as-fuck Dr Killemoff.

To achieve victory over Killemoff, his boss, Czar Zosta, his offsiders, Bonehead and Psycho, and the many yellow-suited, terrible marksmen of the Radiation Rangers, Toxie conscripts fellow environmentally themed mutants to his cause: Nozone, a former test pilot who flew through a hole in the ozone layer and crashed into a silo filled with, for some reason, radioactive pepper, giving him the power of massive sneezes; Major Disaster, a former soldier who fell into a toxic swamp and learnt how to control plants; Headbanger, a two-headed science catastrophe that fused a bitter old professor and a totally rad surfer duuuuude in an atom-smasher; and Junkyard, half-hobo, half-guard dog, whose separate parts were caught in a storm at a… junkyard… and fused together when toxic sludge covered the kennel they were sharing for shelter.

Tell me you wouldn't watch that movie.

biker mice from mars

All right, granted, the Biker Mice from Mars aren't strictly mutants (and they're questionably adolescent), but given their arrival on the scene in 1993, about 60 percent of the way through TMNT's original series run, and the show's general set-up — the alone-in-this-world man-sized freaks, the helpful lady human, the shady villain (who, by the way, was a weird pastiche of Dr Killemoff's aesthetic and Hoggish Greedly from Captain Planet, with a little bit of Looten Plunder thrown in for good measure), the unconcerned, open vigilantism — it's not like you could say it's going to any great lengths to hide its roots.

Regardless, if you could honestly look me in the eye and say that you don't want to watch a film about six-foot-something rodent-people riding space-bikes, shooting lasers and bringing down some fat alien's big-business world domination front while wailing future-metal shreds in the background the whole time, then the next call I'd make would be to the mortuary because, buddy, you are dead inside.

To be totally fair, the show (which originally lasted until 1996, the same year the maiden Turtles cartoon ceased production) did get a reboot back in 2006, but it only lasted for a season before it was relegated to online-only, deeply maligned status on account of how de-fanged and terrible it was.

samurai pizza cats

To be totally fair to Samurai Pizza Cats, it's probably the least openly influenced by the Turtles, despite the ubiquitous presence of pizza. Firstly, it's a US adaptation of a Japanese anime that started airing in 1990, only three years into the Turtles' TV run, and, secondly, the whole premise of the series is a little further removed from the usual "anthropomorphic animals cleaning up the streets of New York, or somewhere that looks a lot like New York" paradigm than most of the other titles on this list.

Samurai Pizza Cats takes place in the city of Little Tokyo, in a universe filled with cybernetically enhanced talking animals, and is, beneath the goofy exterior, actually a tale of political corruption of Super Mario Bros or Aladdin-esque proportions, in which a shady usurper, aided by a militia of ninja crows, wants to overthrow an emperor and/or his daughter. Enter the heroes of the piece — Speedy Ceviche, Polly Esther and Guido Anchovy, dedicated pizzeria workers and political saboteurs, enlisted by cornered councilman "Big Al" Dente to expose the ambitious prime minister, Seymour "The Big" Cheese, for the traitor he is, and save the dynasty.

Plus, the Samurai Pizza Cats actually have a female on their team, which is a nice change of pace.

adolescent radioactive black belt hamsters

Just in case you think I'm lying about this:

This comic book was one of the very first gifts my partner of now nearly four years bought me when we started dating and that was frankly the moment that I knew she was the one. I had no idea it even existed until she put it in my hands and I was introduced to Clint, Bruce, Chuck and Jackie, the four furry little friends that were fired into space by NASA before being exposed to the titular, much-dreaded RADIATION (and thus, mutating). They crash in Tibet, whereupon they are trained in the ancient ways of martial arts, because what else are you gonna do with mansters?

If it doesn't sound like there's much of a story beyond that, that's because there isn't — the comic, which was an open parody of the Ninja Turtles to begin with, only ran for nine issues in 1986 and then sat in dormancy until 2007, when Dynamite Entertainment picked it up and nabbed the rights to reprint the original run as well as pen some new scripts. 

Still, if these guys just seem like the Turtles if everyone were Splinter, and thus not quite worthy of a full-length cinematic adaptation (although — are you crazy?), then we could always delve into the trove of increasingly specific (and all very real) rip-offs that were born out of this rip-off — Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos, Colossul [sic] Nuclear Bambino Samurai Snails, Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils, Adolescent Maniacal Samurai Hares, Radioactive Wrestling Rodents…

As always, the list goes on. All because of those turtles.