The first time I read a piece of art being described as a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox I had to guess the meaning from context. In the UK things sometimes have different names, and we just call them photocopiers. The idea of something that loses sharpness and detail as it gets replicated, and the replication gets replicated, is a useful one. The proper modern description might be a screenshot of a screenshot of a repost of a meme.
The chart-topping Commodore 64 version of Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles is a contender for the apotheosis of the series of increasingly jpeg-artifacted screenshots that was the ninja trend in the UK. Look at the number of steps it took to get here. Manga including Kozure Okami, by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima (Japanese) inspired (American) Frank Miller’s Ronin and stint on the comic Daredevil. These were among the chief sources for a parody comic by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird (American) called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Murakami-Wolf-Swenson (also American) changed the tone and emphasis of the comic for a massively popular, family-friendly, cartoon series. This then got taken up by Konami (Japanese) and turned into a couple of video games for the Famicom/NES that were the first time the Turtles made it to Japan. And, finally, Image Works (British, not to be confused with Sony Imageworks) converted the NES game to formats more popular in the UK, releasing them under the TV series’ British title Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles.
Yes, we are far enough away from ninjas that the word no longer even appears in the title, scrubbed out by the same kind of fear that saw the special edition of Last Ninja 2 helpfully banned from shops. The Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles that I watched on the BBC on Saturday mornings also had appearances of nunchaku removed, that weapon being considered more easily rigged up and imitated by impressionable children than big swords and not family-friendly enough. I don’t think I ever tried for my own home nunchaku but obviously I was totally unaware of them; QED.
I was a big enough fan of the show to have assorted TMHT merchandise, including some kind of illustrated story book and TMHT cutlery, though I might only remember the latter because it fork survived a decade longer in our house to be used for putting our cats’ food into their bowls. I’m not aware of ever giving much thought to the chain of origins of the show, being barely aware of its American-ness at most, since shows here were divided enough between British and American for neither to be particularly remarkable. I don’t remember that much about the show but could recall the names, signature colours and vague personalities of the four turtles and some generic messages about the power of friendship.
Not even that much survives into the computer game, an action platform game in which having characters with masks of blue, red, orange and purple proves too much of a challenge for the the Commodore 64’s palette. The turtles don’t appear simultaneously but when one is defeated another takes their place, Platoon style, which barely keeps the feeling of a gang there. The nunchaku make it back in, so it’s lucky for the safety of those near me that I never played it at the time. Nothing much beyond the selection of similarly-acting weapons marks out the thematic origins of the story at all, in fact. It’s a not particularly stunning version of a not particularly stunning game which was popular for its surface closeness to something else popular, which might once have resembled some other things. It’s weirdly melancholy as a result. The Commodore 64 version is clearly the same game as the NES one in a way which, say, the Spectrum Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins wasn’t, but the low-resolution sprites and faded palette make the jpeg-artifact resemblance more than metaphorical.
