Animated '80s television series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was amazing. Even if it's difficult to remember details without consulting YouTube, one thing sticks with you: that extremely catchy theme song, re-created in an awesome new stop-motion video.
"As a Turtle fan as a kid I had always wanted to create a stop-motion with them," the clip's director, Kyle Roberts, said in an e-mail to Wired. "Figured what better way to do a tribute video than the theme everyone remembers."
Fueled by sleep-deprivation and Turtle Power, Roberts made the stop-motion clip using 4,000 individual pictures of action figures. Artist Nathan Poppe (that's him in the beginning of the video chugging coffee) drew more than 60 images to serve as the Magic Marker-looking city backdrops in the video. Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo were then filmed in front of a blue screen (they couldn't be filmed on green screen because they're, well, green) to get the action down.
It took three months to churn out the final video. Roberts used the more modern Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures from NECA instead of ones from the 1980s because the new ones offered a wider range of movement. Luckily, the figures were provided by the Toy and Action Figure Museum in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, which also sponsored the video.
"Everyone involved with this project were/are all huge TMNT fans," Roberts said. "My first concert (age 5) was a TMNT concert. It was a traveling rock concert/show called "Coming Out of Their Shells" – [It] was totally ridiculous and awesome!"
Check out the video below and see a behind-the-scenes "making of" video here. Hey, it's something to do until we get that new live-action TMNT movie.
