19 AUG 2025
I went and saw a movie last weekend! It was a theater screening for the 1990 "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movie. I'd seen it in a theater before as a kid, and this was for the 35th anniversary of the film!
That also makes it the 35th anniversary of what made me interested in Ninjutsu specifically. The TMNT on TV did martial arts, but the movie was really the first time in my life that I saw an emphasis on the stealth guerrilla tactics of Ninjutsu.
As a kid, I thought that was the ultimate in martial arts ability. Training yourself to be able to take out the lights and ambush people sounded amazing! Filling a room with steam to counter-ambush was brilliant martial arts!! Why do anything else where you have less chance of coming out alive?
There's a bit that's cut from the movie that's in comic and junior novel adaptions. It goes over the Turtles training with blindfolds. You see it a bit in the sparring footage in Northampton, but they don't really point it out.
That part is sort of like the Bujinkan Godan Test, where someone tries to hit a person with a bamboo sword from behind, and if the person avoids being hit without looking, they pass the test. It would've been a cool thing to include!
You can kinda see the benefit of that training in their final street fight with the Foot Clan. They were way more relaxed and able to handle enemies from all angles without even looking directly at them! It's was like a fantasy version of the Godan Test I was talking about earlier.
This movie is one of the most faithful comic adaptions out there, though. Cutting that part out and focusing instead of rebuilding group unity and the Turtles' resolve did bring it more in line with how it went down in the original indie comics from the 1980s.
Anyway, it's thanks to that movie that I'm involved with Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu now. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles obviously doesn't look exactly like the real deal, but the spirit is there. I'm glad I went and saw it in theaters again!