Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Movies Need More Moments Like Sam Rockwell’s Foot Clan Intro

Before he was an Oscar winner, and long before he dreamed of being an “Asian girl” on The White Lotus, Sam Rockwell introduced himself to millions by pushing cigarettes on children.

… Or at least that is how only his second speaking role in a feature film went during Gen X and Millennial touchstone, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In a sequence which would live rent-free in the imagination of millions of arcade and karate-loving ‘90s kids, Rockwell acts as grand ambassador for the Foot Clan, a literal army of faceless, fumbling ninjas who work at the behest of the Shredder, the most evil subterranean-dwelling cult leader this side of Bane. The fully radicalized Foot Clan wear green masks and red bandanas in the film, but as the friendly recruitment face, Rockwell attempts to woo runaways in his biggest scene with every vice a teenage boy circa 1989 might supposedly want: Skateboards! Electric guitars!! M.C. Hammer break dancing!!! Free martial arts classes!!! Poker tournaments!!!!!

Oh, and of course “regular or menthol,” as the man who would be Justin Hammer winks at two impressionable youths during his close-up.

This is a sequence that no Hollywood studio would dare put in a family movie today. Nor is it one they would have played around with in 1990. But then, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wasn’t a Hollywood production. It was a true-blue indie back when New Line Cinema was a New York City counter-programmer to the big studios (a bit like A24 today) and Hong Kong distributor Golden Harvest would make bold plays into the Western market by adapting strange kid-friendly properties like Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s initially obscure TMNT comic book series. For their efforts they were rewarded with the most successful indie movie ever released as of 1990—a record the O.G. Ninja Turtles movie held for nearly a decade until The Blair Witch Project nine years later.

The success of this tonal and aesthetic oddity speaks to the fact that we need more indies with the wide, general audience appeal that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles enjoyed 35 years ago.

Of course the indie market is still alive and even thriving today thanks to innovative and intelligent filmmaking championed by distributors like the aforementioned A24 or Neon—which between them have collected four of the past nine Best Picture Oscars, including last month’s Anora—as well as speciality labels attached to larger studios (think of the now Disney-owned Searchlight Pictures or NBC-Universal’s Focus Features). But by and large indie cinema has increasingly retreated inward and into the space of niche filmmaking. In many ways that is amazing, with these companies filling the void for adult-oriented films with diverse interests largely abandoned by the major Hollywood studios.

Yet other than our current and glorious glut of horror movies, be they “elevated” at the aforementioned distributors or something as twisted as Cineverse’s Terrifier series, indies have largely followed the path of Hollywood majors and streamers by abandoning the family/teen audience. Now young adult and kid entertainment is either exclusively the province of animation from Disney, Pixar, Illumination, and DreamWorks, or it’s a streaming series on Netflix.

No one is making something as provocative and sure to rile parents groups up as Golden Harvest and New Line’s first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles flick and its vision of Lost Boys chic.

Directed by music video maverick Steve Bannon (the guy who did A-ha’s “Take on Me” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” videos), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was not extensively test-screened, focus-grouped, or designed in a committee who wanted to put a locket around Donatello’s neck that included the four core branding terms that the marketing department settled on.

The film was made for $7 million and with the director getting near carte blanche to tell whatever story he and screenwriters Todd W. Langen and Bobby Herbeck might come up with while adapting Eastman and Laird’s strange comic book series. Granted by the time TMNT reached cinemas in 1990, it was a bonafide icon in American households thanks to the even more beloved cartoon series, Hong Kong producers at Golden Harvest secured the film rights to the Turtles before the cartoon became a phenomenon. As the production company behind Bruce Lee films like The Way of the Dragon and Fist of Fury, plus Jackie Chan’s Police Story series, Golden Harvest knew how to make a martial arts classic and indeed provided much of the choreography and stunt work on TMNT, including the men who wore the Jim Henson Creature Shop’s still impressive Turtles costumes.

But beyond that, they largely left Bannon and the English-speaking creatives to adapt the Turtles iconography of both the comic book and cartoon as how they saw fit. Hence Rockwell’s Foot Clan scene.

That sequence contains everything a ‘90s kid could want (or at least an adult’s assumption about “kids these days”). There were the skateboard ramps, the arcade games, and the karate duels; there was also just enough of an edge for families to think there is something dark here—like Rockwell’s box of menthols and Toshishiro Obata kicking some poor kid in the head when he is performing a bow. To even film the setting, Bannon admitted on the DVD commentary that they commandeered an abandoned warehouse in Wilmington, North Carolina (where most of the film was shot) and bussed in local kids from nearby high schools to do a bit of extra work for the day.

There is nothing in these scenes a seven-year-old couldn’t handle, but a bit like the Turtles using their weapons to lightly smack around Foot Clan members, or shouting the word “damn,” it is nothing conservative Hollywood money would let slide into a family product (hence none of the above appearing in the sequels). Yet we would argue the light edge, as goofy as it often can appear to the modern eye, is the charm that helped make TMNT a runaway hit 35 years ago and still the most memorable and successful film version of this property to date. 

Arthouse is wonderful, but indies like New Line Cinema of the 1980s and ‘90s, or a particularly hands-off Golden Harvest, created cultural touchstones for generations of young people who were trained to love going to the movies. This was also the era of Hairspray, House Party, Critters, Mr. Nice Guy, Rumble in the Bronx, and The Mask—as well as Glengarry Glen Ross, Wag the Dog, and Boogie Nights from the same studio.

There is room for all, but getting that middle-brow, kid-friendly movie with more shadow and edge than Disney is a market long since left abandoned.

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