Stop Motion TMNT 1987 Intro!

Over the years one of the crazes that fans enjoy doing is re-creating awesome stuff from our childhood; be it acting out scenes with a group of friends, drawing out our favorite moments in TV shows and movies, and or singing a song we enjoy our own styles.  With the creation of YouTube, fans have been able to share their love of making these things public for others to enjoy.  Though not all of these re-creation videos get a lot of notice. Recently one has come up this week which is getting the public attention.

With the help of the Toy and Action Figure Museum, a few fans were able to bring to life one of their favorite theme songs in stop motion.  This crew of creative people came together to recreate the theme song from the Original 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series!  With hand drawn background and props, using the original toys along with the NECA Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures, they were able to go through the full theme song in stop motion.

If you have not seen this yet, please do check it out here.

This is very well done, fun to watch and share.  As it catches the eye of all us old school fans to see things done based off of the original cartoon.   It’s interesting that they used the NECA Toy line.  NECA was not designed for the original cartoon series, but was based off of the Mirage 1984 Comic Book.  So that felt a little weird to see those Turtles bouncing around as our beloved cartoon turtles.  While that was off setting a little, it was also understandable.  The original Ninja Turtle toys did not have much movement to them, so you are very limited to what you can do with those toys.  It was good see that all of the other characters were used as their original toys, besides for Shredder, his was one from the Toon Turtles Toy line.  Also take note that April O’Neil is a second edition April as she has the blue strip on her jumpsuit.

The motion of this video is very well done. They caught the total feel of the movements from the original animated opening that we saw back in the late 80’s.  I’ve always liked stop motion and find it to be one of those things that takes a lot of effort even for the smallest of scenes, and you can see that this crew really did put that effort into this short video.  Scene by scene, they got it right and you don’t see any of their tricks for making the toys stay in the spots that they’re needed.  So not only are they well animated, it’s also cleaned up really nice as well.  A great job all around.

The background art is very, very cartoonish.  I’m normally not a fan of this, as I’ve always leaned more towards realistic art work.  And with using toys as detailed as the NECA TMNT line was, they could of worked against a neat grittier back ground.  Though they were able to pull this off with a cartoonish background. It helps draw the attention very much towards the toys.  And if you stop and look at each of these backgrounds, they too match up to the original cartoon series.  So overall they pulled it off just right!

And not only did they do this for people to enjoy their video, they also wanted to share how they put the video together.  So the same day that they uploaded their TMNT Stop Motion video, they shared with us their Making of video as well.  Check out this video here.

This making of video is great!  I always enjoy seeing behind the scenes footage of stuff, people sharing just how they managed to pull it off.  And they covered just about everything.  It’s really cool that the Toy and Action Figure Museum was willing to work with them on this, and that Kevin Stark, the curator of the Museum worked on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy line.  Located in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, this sounds like a museum I should check out one of these days.

Overall, I find these videos very fun to watch and really well done.  I think the making deserves just as many views as the video itself.  As a lot went into making of both videos.  It would be cool to see some more Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shorts come from this group!

Thanks for giving us something cool to enjoy!