Here's the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Taking Over Oprah Winfrey
"This is 43 minutes of nostalgic '90s insanity," reads the Uncanny Brett White Tumblr post accompanying this YouTube upload of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' appearance on a 1990 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Yes. Yes it is 43 minutes of nostalgic '90s insanity.
There are many things to love (or however you handle your feelings about such things) here. It's a bizzaro episode of Oprah's daytime talker, in which she pretends to seriously interview a bunch of douchebags in foam rubber about their lives and art ("Has all of this gone to your heads?"; "What I don't understand is how you can be in the cartoon and then you can be here?"; "Do you sometimes wish that April was a turtle?"). There's an appearance from the Turtles' nemesis Shredder, during which the kid-filled crowd turns into a professional wrestling audience and unleashes a round of boos so loud you can barely make out what's happening in the skit. There's an urgency in the crowd-sourced questions from those kids: Where the fuck are the Turtles' weapons? There are three—three—performances by TMNT, who were at the time supporting their Coming Out of Their Shells album and tour.
Three. Three times this "band," comes together to play their songs. The audience claps along, sometimes rhythmically.
If you are in the market for cheese and terrible acting, there's a new episode of Love & Hip Hop Atlanta airing tonight. In the meantime, watch this.