For those of us who were alive when Steve Barron’s 1990 film “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” was released, it felt like the culmination of a phenomenon.
The Ninja Turtles had taken the world by storm in the mid-to-late 1980s, having moved from their comic book origins to a massive media franchise at a head-spinning pace.After appearing in a popular animated TV series and spawning multiple video games — not to mention landfills worth of toys and ancillary merch — it was finally time for the Turtles to infiltrate theaters.
Barron’s film realized, for the first time, the quartet of ninjas in live-action.
The production employed Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to construct lightweight latex full-body costumes for the Turtle actors, as well as complicated masks that would mechanically mouth lines realistically.
Four actors would play the bodies and other voice actors (except in one case) would read the dialogue.
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