Ninja Turtles and Writing Prompts
"It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation" - Gabriel García Márquez, '100 Years of Solitude'
The first pop culture I ever loved was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I’ve been politely indifferent to them ever since. The Turtles are perfectly fun, they are an excellent personality test (I’ve been a Raphael my whole life but can feel myself transitioning to a Michelangelo, this is what weed and therapy can do for a person), but they lost my interest around kindergarten. Maybe my mom’ll fact-check this, idk.
This past weekend, though, I fell in love with the Turtles again. Animation that looks like skateboarder graffiti, a soundtrack in love with 90s hip hop, and Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg writing will do that. My five-year-old has been enjoying the movie theater this summer, and even though he has shown no interest in watching Turtles content, he’s been excitedly pointing them out whenever they’re on TV, so it seemed like a way to fill a Sunday afternoon. He was moderately interested, refused to call Master Splinter anything other than “Rat-Man,” and this is not going to be a blog about father-son bonding.
No, I’ve been thinking lately about how much the old has become new again in my own life. Possibly because I have a five-year-old, possibly because one of my best defense mechanisms filtering all my memories through a “see, this was good, wasn’t it” lens, I’ve been doing a lot of backward-looking lately. When I talk about the music I listened to in high school, for instance, I am emphasize my love for goofballs and characters like Blink 182 or My Chemical Romance and de-emphasize my (lapsed) obsession with anti-abortion evangelical freaks like Slick Shoes or Underoath.
(just wanted to state unequivocally that this is a pro-choice, “ABORTION IS HEALTHCARE” semi-punk blog, but you can’t caption videos)
It shouldn’t be surprising that the guys who wrote Superbad are more into the “teenage” part of TMNT than the “ninja” part. The “mutant mayhem” part is even a little more about “finding your way as a mutant” than “chaos is its own reward.” Sitting in my seat, shushing my five-year-old (who was disrespecting Master Splinter), I was less interested in “would you rather fight with swords or sais” and more interested in “these kids can’t live in the sewer forever, they have to exist in the world, and I don’t want people to be mean to them, I want people to give them free pizza and skateboards.” Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising, that Local Father Of One wants the kids to be alright instead of playing with knives.
Where I’m going with this is a writing prompt: find something you loved as a kid. See how you feel about it now. What elements of it can you use for your own writing? Don’t write TMNT fanfic (or do, honestly, I won’t read it, but you’ll have a blast), instead write a story about friendship. Or if you thing was, like, Goosebumps, maybe instead of a horror story, just write about a person navigating an unfamiliar situation. Or a situation where no one believes them. Look at some personal longtime staple and then start writing something that is surface-level unrelated. See where your brain goes.
Eat some pizza in a sewer afterwards. Pizza dude’s got 30 seconds.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris