This is Definitive Film’s debut feature, independently produced (so independently as to defy understanding) and miraculously sold to Paramount Pictures just in time to celebrate the franchise’s 30th anniversary. This is the documentary that allowed us to become friends with so many people in Turtle world, including Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, and started the whole “Definitive History of” concept, which was in very much in doubt at the time.
It’s hard to imagine now, but in 2008 (yes, that’s when we began production) there just weren’t many movies like this out there in the world, so I had a hard time convincing the industry that what we were doing made sense. Spoiler alert: I am still having a hard time convincing the industry that what we’re doing makes sense. (file me under “obstinate”)
Where to watch Turtle Power: You could watch right here on YouTube →
Provenance
The History: How A Thing Becomes Itself
prov·e·nance (n.) The place of origin or earliest known history of something. — Oxford English Dictionary
In the art world, provenance is the paper trail — who owned something, where it came from, and why that matters. But it’s more than auction records. Adding the story turns a thing into more than itself. Strip it away and you’re left with just another thing.
That’s what these pages are doing. Every interview, every archive clip, every artifact surfaced in a Definitive Film production is an act of provenance-building: this mattered, here’s why, here’s who knew it first.
Below you’ll find origin stories, field notes, cut scenes and scraps that didn’t make the final edit but deserve more than to simply disappear.
The Screening Room
Real to Reel
We were thrilled when Paramount cut and released this first trailer. It was real!
This popped up on social media not long ago, proving once again the value of these docs.
This was the first video we put out during production, before we knew what the film would be.
Stills
Frozen Frames and Moments
Isaac sent this pic from New York Comic Con 2009 as a response to me asking if he had a chance to talk to Kevin Eastman?” Looked like a hard yes. From left to right is Stephan Reese (archon1981 on Instagram), Isaac and Kevin.
Isaac and Mark set up for one of the earliest of many interviews with Peter over the years but rudely, on this production swing I had to stay home and teach high school English. Rude.
Artifacts
Evidence and Wonders
“Turtle Boys”
Before the boom, before massive success, before the business overtook them, two young artists showed exactly who they are in an incredible splash page you can see below.
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Amazing Heroes #107 · Fantagraphics · November 15, 1986 · Although credited to Peter Laird, the dual signature at the bottom, Laird & Eastman, suggests both worked on this piece.
“Turtle Boys”
This is the opening splash anchoring one of the first widely circulated, in-depth interviews with Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. Writer Thom Powers caught the creators about a year before the TMNT boom that changed their lives forever, but what I want to focus on is this two-page spread they used to introduce themselves. Look how they chose to reveal their influences, their love of pop culture and highlight its importance in their work. This was such a thoughtful way to say hello to the comic world — and to possible new fans. They show you what they like, they show you their studio, their working styles, their attitudes and what they think is funny. You can feel their excitement about what was happening to them, but I think you can also see their self-awareness. I see two young artists who already understand who and what they are and it’s clear to me that the sweet, goofy sensibility on display here played a huge part in making the Turtles so successful. It’s an incredible time capsule, full of potential energy just about to burst.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness
Kevin Siembieda’s Palladium role-playing game proved the Turtles were extensible from the start, and its publishing history proved there was a price for some of that expansion.
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Palladium Books, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness · 1991 Revised Edition · From the collection of Gary Richardson, via the Mirage office cleanout, Northampton.
Palladium Books released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness in September 1985, which we know means it preceded the Fred Wolf cartoon and the Playmates toy line. My copy is the 1991 Revised Edition printing, which came to me from Gary Richardson during an interview Isaac and I did with Peter after what might have been a final clean out of the Mirage office in Northampton. This interview was for the movie that is now Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Evolution, Mutation & Reboot, and after I described my thesis for it, Gary made reference to how Kevin Siembieda and Palladium gave excellent proof of how extensible the Turtles had been from the beginning. The characters, the premise, the entire universe Kevin and Peter created were literally designed to be open to mutation in every sense of the word.
In Palladium’s role playing game, the character creation engine ran on “Bio-Energy” points, a point-buy system for distributing the attributes of each player’s own mutated anthropomorphic animal character, such as size, bipedalism, humanoid elements and psionic abilities, to name a few. From the start, transformation was baked into the Turtles and the world they lived in.
This book also represents editorial mutation. The first printing contained a literal “mental illness” aspect of character creation, with tables for Affective Disorders, Psychosis, Neurosis, and Phobias, plus a separate drug addiction and withdrawal subsystem. After some parents complained (or so it seems), Palladium covered that section with a plain white sticker, then removed the mental illness tables entirely from subsequent printings, though occasional references to the deleted section remained elsewhere in the book. My 1991 copy isn’t the version that got caught with the offending table, it’s the expurgated version, still in print through the full collapse of its own audience. Siembieda has described watching sales fall from 50,000 copies per year to 12,000 once the cartoon made the brand seem juvenile, and then to 6,000 the year after that. Gary’s agreement with me about the franchise’s capacity for expansion was notable, but in thinking about it further, the Palladium book also documents, through the way it was changed, exactly what the cost of some of those areas of expansion turned out to be.
Field Notes
It’s All Autobiography (if you write it down)
Backstory to the Backstory
Kevin Eastman finds a magazine on a bus floor and the whole world shifts. Here’s how a happy accident can make history.
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Not everybody likes a big fat backstory.
But they should.
I sure do, but maybe that’s because I can’t shake the feeling that, in many ways, we’re not much more than the literal mathematical product of all the crap we’ve already experienced. We’re meaty pinballs careening around a playing field, clanging and banging into things and bouncing off to whatever’s next.
I think backstory explains a lot.
I’m a guy who eagerly reads origin stories and biographies. I enthusiastically watch movie retcons, reboots and reimaginings specifically to see what new writers, artists and execs are doing with old stories and characters and in daily life I can’t stop digging into the history of whatever I’m reading about, hoping to figure out what leads all these people, places and things to becoming whatever they are.
In a way, aren’t we all just backstories walking around thinking we’re living in the moment? Maybe the mental baggage we’re carrying around is actually who we are. Even if you did a ton of therapy to clear out whatever bad shit you suffered in your past, isn’t that therapy still a reaction to whatever the baggage was and so, actually, you’re still a product of it, even when you choose to act against it?
I know. It’s annoying to read paragraphs like that one right up there. It’s complicated. Well, imagine how annoying it is having this kind of thinking be a lifelong compulsion. Imagine being driven to trace all the endless variables that led to things, to chase all the niggling connotations, to look backwards, project forwards, forever working to understand the meaning, the connections, the correlations for everything.
But it’s handy if you want to make good documentaries.
On some level, sitting down to interview someone is playing a trick where you appear to be talking with them, engaging with them, when actually you’re cross-examining them. As you talk, you’re thinking about all these disparate elements of their story, the layers presented by what they’re saying. You dig into their thinking, assessing, analyzing, linking, rationalizing, recognizing patterns and emergent structures at the root of the stories they tell and placing it in the context and common culture they’re talking about.
It’s a lot. And it’s relevant in the story of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The backstory is key. We know these trippy characters were created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, but the subtleties of TMNT’s creation starts before that oft-told tale of two young comic nerds curled up on lumpy chairs in their little Dover house, Jeannine wrestling with her thesis in the other room, struggling to ignore them as they watched The A Team and lap-sketched whatever might make each other laugh.
That little house, those three people, the first freaky little gag sketches and that ridiculous mash up of disconnected influences, ideas and inspiration, that’s all critical backstory to a bizarre, beloved pop culture franchise that the world just won’t quit as it reboots itself every few years, over and over again.
The story of the TMNT is a happy accident for a thousand reasons, but one of the most accidental bits of impossible backstory is the blind luck of a young Kevin Eastman stepping onto the one Pioneer Valley Transit Authority bus that just-so-happened to have thrown on its floor a cast-off copy of Scat, a free, homemade comics magazine featuring work by a number of local artists including one Peter Laird.
Peter shared this on his blog in 2008 and mentioned it to us as being a cover he did for Scat, but it’s not likely the cover Kevin saw, which he remembered being red.
This was shared by Kevin on Facebook in 2019 and by all accounts, is most likely to be the one he found on the bus.
Without that moment, without Kevin Eastman stepping on that particular bus, in that particular town, at that particular time in his life, at that perfectly random moment in pop culture history, without all of those steps, there would be no turtles, mutant, teenage or otherwise. And I wouldn’t be here talking about it.
In much the same way, Paramount’s release of Turtle Power: The Definitive History of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on August 12, 2014 was itself the culmination of a crazy, head-shaking and ongoing series of events that are every bit as impossible and ridiculous.
The sheer number of improbable events that took Isaac Elliott-Fisher, Mark Hussey, Curtis Lobb, Matthew Hussey, me and everyone else that helped us get to release week simply shouldn’t, couldn’t have happened. And yet, every single one of those improbable things obviously did happen and they all happened in the perfect order to add up to the moment when our little movie came out on that perfectly random August day in 2014, found a home with fans and changed our lives forever.
And if you’re at all curious about how all those impossible things happened, stick around and read along here as I dip into the backstories of FauxPop Media, Definitive Film and our unlikely times with the TMNT.
Randall Lobb
Ephemera
Scraps, Bits and Source Material