Hacker Cinema
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
1990 · Film · 93 min
Directed by Steve Barron
Science FictionActionAdventureComedyFamily
A quartet of humanoid turtles, trained by their mentor in Ninjutsu, must learn to work together to face the menace of Shredder and the Foot Clan.
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7 comments on Hacker News
Blockbuster was a corporate, soulless chain sent into the world to destroy the wonderful experience of mom-and-pop and small chain video rental stores. They were the Walmart of entertainment. They knew small stores couldn't afford many copies of blockbuster hits so when you visited Blockbuster they would have an entire wall dedicated to one single hit movie. Their selection was garbage.
The weekly visit to the local video store was one of the highlights of my youth. I could browse for hours. I remember the first Blockbuster that opened near me. It had zero atmosphere or charisma. I guess if you just want to watch a movie, that's the way to go. and that's why Netflix killed them.
About 10 years ago I was driving through remote Texas and stopped at a gas station that had, to my utter surprise, a video rental section. VHS tapes, not DVDs. And there was a young family browsing! It made me so happy to see.
The shift to digital for movies and music stripped away something real from the experience. Better picture and sound? Sure. At the cost of atmosphere and fun. I recently watched a 4K remastered Aliens (1986). There were maybe 3 short scenes where I said 'wow, the detail is amazing'. The entire rest of the film was me thinking how they had stripped the atmosphere from the film experience. The blue hue was gone. The murky, exoplanet looked fake.
Close Encounters (1977) on 4K is a different experience. It looks great, but there are scenes that play totally different in 4K. What once was a dark shadow moving against the starry sky is now very clearly a spaceship. The shadow was better. At the end, the aliens were clearly kids in crappy costumes. But on VHS they were child-sized aliens standing in front of a bright light, leaving much to the imagination. Outside of those who saw it in the theater during it's original run, everyone since has had the same experience, pretty much. The 4K version changes that. And don't get me started on the massive changes to color grading in Eyes Wide Shut and Trainspotting. Or how they jacked up the color and brightness on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) so it better matched the cartoonish, and inferior, sequels.
With Chinese you have 简拼 (jiǎnpīn) for your pinyin input, which lets you type only the initial Latin letters of a common phrase to complete the phrase.
For example, instead of typing “buzhidao” to get 不知道, you just type “bzd” and pick the top suggestion. Since all the phonetic endings are gone, it does look a little cryptic, but it means if you don’t have a pinyin keyboard, you can still type something fast that is highly correlated with your actual phrase.
For example when you’re searching a movie title on your SmartTV; teenage mutant ninja turtles (similarly abbreviated tmnt) becomes rzsg; some Chinese search tools will pick up on this; whether through statistics, fuzzy matching or specific 简拼 (jiǎnpīn) support, I don’t know.
>The quality of writing in big budget media is truely shocking; they have no idea how to write a tight plot, or what verisimilitude means, or why consistency is important.
1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie better than a lot of schlock out there now
> Then there's "it's all remakes now"—but 1) it's not,
It really is, if by "remake" you mean all ways of leveraging existing IP. Here are the top ten box office films of 2020:
* Bad Boys for Life (sequel) * Sonic the Hedgehog (videogame) * Birds of Prey (comic book) * Dolittle (book) * The Invisible Man (book) * The Call of the Wild (book) * Onward (original) * The Croods: A New Age (sequel) * Tenet (original) * Wonder Woman 1984 (sequal, comic book)
Two originals. Now go back 20 years:
* Mission: Impossible 2 (sequel) * Gladiator (book) * Cast Away (original) * What Women Want (original) * Dinosaur (original) * How the Grinch Stole Christmas (book) * Meet the Parents (remake) * The Perfect Storm (book) * X-Men (comic book) * What Lies Beneath (original)
Four originals. Go back another 10 years:
* Ghost (original) * Home Alone (original) * Pretty Woman (original) * Dances with Wolves (book) * Total Recall (short story) * Back to the Future Part III (sequel) * Die Hard 2 (sequel) * Presumed Innocent (book) * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (comic book) * Kindergarten Cop (original)
Five originals. Another ten years to 1980:
* The Empire Strikes Back (sequel) * 9 to 5 (original) * Stir Crazy (original) * Airplane! (original) * Any Which Way You Can (sequel) * Private Benjamin (original) * Coal Miner's Daughter (original) * Smokey and the Bandit II (sequel) * The Blue Lagoon (book) * The Blues Brothers (SNL sketch)
Five originals again. I'm going by top box-office gross here because I think that's a good proxy for what is successful. You can look at other years, but there is a very clear (but not overwhelming) trend towards movies based on familiar content. It's not clear whether studios are leading audiences or vice versa. Probably some iterative process of both.
There's also a clear trend away from dramas. I think that's because drama (and non-slapstick comedies) tend to rely heavily on specific cultural norms for their effect which makes them translate poorly. There is a very clear trend especially in the last decade or so of Hollywood focusing on movies that will also do well in China in particular.
That's pretty interesting. I remember in the orignal Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie they found sunflowers growing over a toxic spill, but I always thought it was just to show that the spilled chemicals made things grow extra large, but it turns out it was just a lazy attempt at a cleanup.
It's more than Homer. Nuclear and radiation being scary is absolutely pervasive in pop culture, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to MacGyver to Spiderman to HBO miniseries.
Part of the problem is that nuclear PR wing is run by utility companies that have a bunch of fossil assets that they don't want to make look bad by pointing out what's good about nuclear (no air pollution, no carbon emissions)
There needs to be a better way to sort out titles which can refer to multiple items. For instance, "Constantine" only matches the TV show, not the Keanu Reeves movie; "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" only matches the Bay version, not 1990.