What Was Turtle Power, Part 2
How the film became a delayed echo of 1980s cyberfunk culture
Welcome to ddrake.substack.com, a substack written by former music journalist/current industry A&R David Drake. This substack is one dimension of an art project I’ve been working on, one which manifests primarily as a series of DJ mixes courtesy Industrial Streaming Information Logistics (isil.club) exploring a sound I’ve labelled cyberfunk. In contrast with the predominant strains of retro dance culture—particularly disco and techno, which I find boring—cyberfunk has largely been marginalized as “dated” since at least the early 1990s. This substack is an effort to explore the real histories of a fictive genre, and have some fun.
Earlier, I described how the initial 6-episode cartoon pilot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles utilized the music of one Dennis C. Brown to capture a pastiche of early-mid ‘80s New York City musical culture, just as the city was emerging from that sound and shifting into the more “organic” sampling styles and cultural evolutions of James Brown loops, New Jack Swing, “live” bands, et al. Today, we will discuss how the first two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films—released in 1990 and 1991—used film scores which, by release date, were so anachronistic it made it seem as if the “real” textures of the mid ‘80s were essentially the sound of TMNT themselves—after all, the sound of the wider culture had already moved on.
When it was time to create the first live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film (released in 1990), the creators resolved to veer closer to Eastman and Laird’s original vision of the show—Splinter went back to being a pet rat transformed into a ninja master, and the overarching plot is an extended version of the first comic, ending on a rooftop confrontation with The Shredder. Some aspects of the TV show were kept on—ie, the turtles love of pizza. While the officially-released soundtracks were full of contemporary artists (MC Hammer, Johnny Kemp etc.) the score of the first two films included—much like Dennis C. Brown’s music for the cartoon show—a pastiche of mid-’80s cyberfunk was their primary inspiration. The film’s creators had initially intended for Malcolm Mclaren to do the soundtrack; the initial trailer for the first TMNT film was set to Mclaren’s “House of the Blue Danube,” an amazing slice of cyberfunk from 1989’s Waltz Darling.
“House of the Blue Danube” obviously contained a portion of Strauss’ “Blue Danube Waltz.” Wikipedia helpfully informs me that Warner Bros. animated short wherin Daffy Duck attempts to join a family of swans used the Blue Danube Waltz, which strikes me as the right cultural context for a kind of “beauty of the natural world” soundtrack I have subconsciously associated with the piece; when you combine that with its well-known use in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (parodied by The Simpsons right around the same time, as Homer eats potato chips in space) and you get the right mix of ‘nature always finds a way, gracefully’ that gives it modern resonance. In Space Odyssey, right after the film jumps from the prehistoric to the future, we watch spaceships gracefully interlock in a weightless environment. This blend of naturalism and futurism makes it the perfect soundtrack for a movie of heavy Jim Hensen bodysuits of mutated turtles resisting gravity to do ninjitsu. Yes, the effects of retromutagen are grotesque—but also beautiful? Someone should set footage of Chernobyl animals to “House of the Blue Danube.”
In the meantime, the beat itself—which featured Bootsy Collins and Jeff Beck as a kind of fake Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald—is a clear pastiche of mid-’80s aesthetics with which Malcolm McLaren had been associated since the days of “Buffalo Gals” and cyberfunk classic “Hobo Scratch.” Of course, hip-hop hadn’t sounded like this since the mid-’80s. In fact, on Waltz Darling, “House of the Blue Danube” is almost a throwback—the rest of the 1989 album is much more heavily influenced, pre-Madonna, by house and the New York vogue scene. Its song “Deep In Vogue” samples disco hit “Love is the Message” and Willie Ninja dialogue from Paris is Burning, which would be released the following year.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are canonically early-mid 1980s, even if Vanilla Ice appeared in the soundtrack of the sequel, which explains why Malcolm McLaren—already a mid-’80s pastiche artist—was the inspiration for the eventual 1990-1991 Turtles soundtracks. Hard to know why executives could not lock McLaren down for the Turtles soundtrack—perhaps because he was more “ringleader” than composer himself; maybe because his interests had moved onto vogue and house, and he no longer felt as passionate about this dated style. Either way, the composer John Du Prez had recently turned in the A Fish Called Wanda soundtrack on time and under budget (metaphorically speaking—I don’t know if he actually was under budget), and so he was an appealing alternative.
John Du Prez is a fascinating character, though not quite a cyberfunk auteur. A native of Great Britain, Du Prez (born: Trevor Jones) started out as a composer for Monty Python, composing and arranging for The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, thus a relationship with John Cleese which we can presume led to A Fish Called Wanda. In the meantime, in the mid-1980s, he was also a trumpet and horn player for Modern Romance, a British pop group with at least a half-dozen UK hit records beginning with 1981’s “Everybody Salsa.” Few of these crossed over to the United States, with the exception of “Can You Move,” a No. 2 dance hit here thanks in part to its success in the Chicago house music scene—it was a staple for the famously catholic tastes of the Hot Mix 5 on WBMX.
Modern Romance, as far as I can tell, features some of the earliest UK rapping. Their lead singer Michael J Mullins has an almost Brian Setzer-like sardonic delivery. The overall sound mixed a kind of kitsch pastiche of salsa, disco, hip-hop, new wave, etc. And their trumpet player? Well that’s John Du Prez, and he appeared on most of their hits. You can watch him in this great video of their version of “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” a song popularized by Perez Prado. Or you can catch him playing a horn in a retro flight suit that looks like something out of “Tail Spin,” performing the group’s “Best Years of Our Lives” on Top of the Pops in 1982.
Needless to say, little of this would suggest Du Prez is a candidate to create Malcolm McLaren-style New York hip-hop pastiche, except inasmuch as Modern Romance’s sound, and the sounds of Monty Python, contain the seeds of whimsical versatility.
The TMNT score—as opposed to the official soundtrack, which was released in 1990 and featured MC Hammer and Partners in Kryme’s “Turtle Power,” an international smash—wasn’t released officially until Waxwork records made vinyl reissues in 2019. (For a time, these were available on streaming; they’ve since vanished from Spotify and Apple). This site has a good rundown of the specific sounds and influence at play in the original TMNT soundtrack:
The motif for the Foot Clan, the gang of criminals attacking New York, is a dark and menacing 4-note motif that features prominently in numerous cues, and is first heard just 40 seconds into the opening cue, “Crimewave”. The theme for Shredder, the Foot Clan leader, gets its initial statement in “Shredder’s Big Entrance,” and is a mass of ominous taiko drums, and aggressive and oppressive synth scraping effects. As one would expect, considering that they are the primary antagonists of the story, the Foot Clan motif is everywhere throughout most of the score, but it features most strongly in the numerous action and suspense cues. Interestingly, Du Prez’s action music is very much rooted in that of two other composers who have long histories with both Jim Henson and the Monty Python group – Michael Kamen and Trevor Jones. In many ways you could say that TMNT’s action music is a blend of Lethal Weapon and Labyrinth, with a dash of 1970s Lalo Schifrin jazz thrown in for good measure.
As implied above, the first TMNT soundtrack features a pretty wide range of cinematic influences; sometimes its a little more John Carpenter, sometimes a little more Miami Vice, sometimes Dick Dale. The main theme is a definite pastiche-of-a-pastiche Malcolm McLaren funk crossed with Harold Faltermeyer/Beverly Hills Cop-style synths. But the best examples of mid-’80s cyberfunk on TMNT 1 are “Splinter’s Tale 1 & Splinter’s Tale 2,” which I recommend highly and appeared on the original soundtrack tape.
It wasn’t until 1991’s TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze that the best pastiche-of-pastiche dribble-down cyberfunk would appear. (Released in full form on vinyl in 2021 by Waxwork Records.) At this point, The Chronic is out, and we’re several creative cycles past Malcolm McLaren’s early ‘80s relevance, the culture vulture accusations, et al. Nonetheless, John Du Prez has created what I would consider the single greatest slice of cyberfunk produced by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles property: “NY Pizza,” which accompanies the opening of the movie: