Jon Reads Comics

24 Turtle Power Hour — Adventures 19 and TMNT 12

·1 hr 20 min·5 clips
A devilish businessman named Mr. Null is secretly negotiating to sell the entire Earth to alien invaders.
The mouth goes weird immediately. John opens Turtle Power Hour by explaining that the show pairs Archie TMNT Adventures with Mirage-era Turtles, then Lane catches the accidental "prodcast" and turns it into a shell joke. Clinton shows up with sewing, sulking, and back pain. That loose start sets the pace: comic recap first, friendly interruptions never far away. The Archie fight is especially odd. Skull and Bean take hits like a drum, so the turtles keep swinging while the hosts stop to enjoy the visual logic. Michelangelo goes over the side. Instead of playing it as simple danger, the table gets stuck, in a good way, on Donatello's bow, the fall distance, panel placement, and cartoon physics. Two feet becomes the magic number. The sacred-stick angle comes back too, which lets the scene live somewhere between continuity memory and nonsense physics. The fight keeps dodging normal stakes. A coordinated attack still does nothing, the villains talk through the brawl, and Skull finally tells Bean to stop with the gross little smoke-bomb move. The description stays vivid without getting grimy. Bean's head-made yellow blob lands as mashed-potato Play-Doh crossed with a smoke bomb, exactly the sort of image this crew knows how to linger on. Then Null enters. The recap keeps moving, but the best stuff is how often the hosts pause to ask whether any of this could work at all. Even the closing stays organized. They point ahead to the first Mighty Mutanimals miniseries issue and Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issue three, with only the many-armed deity cover as their clue. Nobody tries to make the material slick. The fun is three fans making old Turtles comics readable, silly, and stubbornly odd.

As heard by us

A rooftop rescue, Bean's smoke-bomb gag, and Null's entrance make room for loose, panel-minded fandom.

Turtle Power Hour treats a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic as both a story and a puzzle box. John, Lane, and Clinton move from opening wordplay and a lower-back-pain detour into a rooftop fight where the central question becomes oddly serious: how far did Michelangelo fall…

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Why you'd press play

Press play when you want rooftop panel math, Bean's yellow smoke bomb, and Null's devil-dude entrance.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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