When Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cleaned up at the box office in 1990, Hollywood learned exactly one lesson: ninja kids were bankable.
Sure animatronics are expensive and any big sci-fi elements would just complicate things. But kids doing martial arts? That’s just a bit of casting, some choreography and black pyjamas. Strip out the costly mutated amphibians and you’ve still got the real hook. Ninjas.
So Ninjas were in. Sidekicks (let’s call this one ninja-adjacent), 3 Ninjas spawned a 4 movie franchise, heck we can lump Double Dragon and Robocop fighting a robo-ninja into this fad. Even Chris Farley got to be a ninja.
The extra Turtle-cred connective tissue here is that it was also released by New Line, and Ernie Reyes Jr., who had done stunt work on the first Turtles film and played the pizza delivery kid in the sequel, is the main attraction.
It only made five million dollars and you can imagine what critics thought of it, but if you were the right age to catch this wave on video or cable, none of that mattered. Because Ninjas. -Pop
Surf Ninjas arrived on Home Video this week in 1994, after an August 20, 1993 theatrical release.
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