#His clock is in the inside is the Smurf cat

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[turtlethon]

Turtlethon Extra Slices: “Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue”

(CW for today’s post, which contains extensive discussions and depictions of drug use, as well as George Bush. Not that one, the other one.)

Before Turtlethon heads into season five, let’s take a step back to look at one of the strangest projects the 1987 Turtles were ever associated with. Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue was a half-hour anti-drug special produced by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation and Southern Star Productions, which was simulcast across the big four US TV networks on April 21, 1990. For our purposes, it’s worth noting that this was a few months after season three of TMNT was first broadcast, and the live-action movie was topping the box-office at this point.

Funded by McDonalds, Cartoon All-Stars is an extension of the “Just Say No” campaign that was the brainchild of the Reagan administration. Those fingerprints are all over the home video release, which opens with a treacly and seemingly endless advertisement for Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities, followed by a message by then-current President George Bush and his wife Barbara that amounts to little beyond explaining the cartoon’s premise and re-iterating that drugs are indeed bad. (Subsequent TV broadcasts in Canada, Australia and New Zealand would replace this portion with a message from each nation’s respective big cheese.)

The show proper kicks off with the piggy bank of a little girl called Corey being stolen while she sleeps. Watching this from inside a comic book are The Smurfs, who march out into the real world to alert her. Also coming to life is the cartoon version of ALF, who springs forth from a picture frame. He in turn awakes a Garfield lamp, who for the purposes of the show is now the famous cartoon cat himself. When Garfield announces he’s too lazy to help out, ALF threatens to eat him. I’ve gotta say this pairing actually has pretty great chemistry. Alvin and the Chipmunks are also here and for the moment have nothing much to contribute.

With the aid of Winnie the Pooh – formerly a stuffed toy – the various cartoon characters wake up an alarm clock of Kermit the Frog, seen here in his Muppet Babies incarnation, who in turn interrupts Corey’s slumber. Slimer from The Real Ghostbusters then passes through the wall into the bedroom, and as he wasn’t formerly a toy or some other household item, I guess he may be the actual Slimer. If you’re wondering why RGB wasn’t represented by at least one of the actual Ghostbusters, keep in mind that this was during the period where network executives had decided to push Slimer to the moon, to that show’s detriment. The green ghost swallows a desk lamp made to resemble some fruit, and subsequently shines a light on the spot where the piggy bank is now missing.

The toons sneak into the room of Corey’s brother Michael and watch him smash the piggy bank, scooping up the money inside; as Corey herself soon shows up to confront him without their help, they’re really only here to provide running commentary at this point. During the domestic squabble that follows between the two siblings, Michael hides his stash under the bed, unaware that the various cartoon characters are hiding there. This leads to one of the special’s funnier moments as Simon of the Chipmunks confirms Michael is in possession of “marijuana - an unlawful substance used to experience artificial highs!”

Michael storms out of the house, and the assembled cartoons head off to confront him. Winnie the Pooh stays behind to pursue his own sub-plot, but makes a point of wishing the others good luck.

At the arcade, Michael hangs around with a group of Cool Kids™ and is egged on by a ghostly cartoon pusher called Smoke to try harder drugs. The sound of approaching sirens leads the kids to split up, with Michael fleeing into an alley. He’s confronted by a police officer who turns out to actually be Bugs Bunny. After briefly containing Smoke in a trash can, Bugs lectures Michael about his behaviour, leading him into a time machine. Meanwhile Michael’s father notices some of his beers have gone missing, and Corey is pressured by Winnie the Pooh to confess everything she knows to her parents.

Bugs transports Michael to the past, where everything is in black and white and people prominently wear their initials on their clothes to aid in viewer identification. The rabbit shows Michael how he picked up his current habit and goes back and forth with Smoke debating the risks and benefits of his actions. 

Michael’s father is busy in the shed with his... “KLIY”(?) when Corey appears to further her own B-plot. She tries to tell him about Michael, but it doesn’t go well. Okay, enough of this, let’s get to the reason why we’re all here.

Michael has apparently been dumped back in the present day by Bugs, and is now hanging out with the Cool Kids again when they decide out of nowhere that maybe they could try crack. Smoke is also present to spur them on, and although Michael is hesitant, the others soon steal his wallet. While in pursuit, he falls into a sewer, where he’s confronted by Michaelangelo. As the animation for this special was handled by Wang Film Productions – who handled the visual oddity that was “Cowabunga Shredhead” - Mikey is bigger and puffier-looking than usual, looming over the other characters. He’s also angrier than we typically see him as he reads both Michael and Smoke the riot act. This segment ends all too quickly as Mikey yanks a giant plug-stopper out of the sewer waters beneath his feet, pulling the boy and his enabler into the drain below.

Michael and Smoke then find themselves on a roller-coaster ride with baby Kermit, Miss Piggy and Gonzo, who demonstrate the effects that drugs are having on Michael’s brain. After waking up in a park, Michael then encounters Huey, Dewey and Louie, who perform a song about the virtues of saying “no”. Some of the other characters who’ve appeared throughout the special also chip in to suggest excuses Michael could use to not take drugs; Michaelangelo eventually pops up to suggest “I’ve got too much homework”. (Mikey isn’t particularly well-drawn here, and has some funky-looking arms.)

Waking up in his bedroom, Michael is confronted by Corey, so I guess that last sequence may have been a dream, and the roller coaster scene was itself a dream within a dream. The two siblings bicker some more before ALF pulls Michael into a hall of mirrors, presenting a ghoulish reflection of the teenager which the alien insists is what he really looks like. All of this would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that we as viewers can see that Michael does not in fact look like the Cryptkeeper, so the whole thing comes off as if ALF is gaslighting him.

ALF then guides Michael to a room where a sign on the door reads “THE MAN IN CHARGE”. Inside is a crude, boxy approximation of Smoke, who then jump cuts to his normal character model. Wait, did the animators just draw some kind of fill-in figure and then accidentally leave it in the finished show? Roy Disney said at the time of this special’s release that the animation was done in eight weeks, which seems implausible, but there’s no doubt from looking at it that it was a rush job.

Corey enters Michael’s room and discovers his stash, which leads to her having an encounter with Smoke. Winnie the Pooh warns her that he’s bad news, only to get thrown into a nearby cupboard. Meanwhile Michael is having a bad trip, imagining that he’s being chased by Dewey on the Roller Coaster of Death, or something to that effect. He bounces through some more nightmarish scenes as discordant rock music warbles, before finally winding up outside a “SEE YOUR FUTURE” tent. Inside is Daffy Duck, who reveals the fate that awaits him, as a zombie-like Michael is seen writhing on a table.

The “All-Stars” then assemble once more and everyone again gets to say their own little bit about the importance of not doing drugs. Michaelangelo materialises, looking somehow even worse than in his previous appearance, and chips in by telling Michael he’s excellent “just the way [he is] - without drugs!” I get what he’s going for here, but it’s a confusing statement as he clearly is currently very much “with drugs”.

Having finally had his big revelatory moment, Michael returns home and confronts Smoke, who’s in the middle of trying to win over Corey. The teenager hurls the ghostly villain into a garbage truck passing outside, and the siblings vow to be ready should he return. They’re cheered on by the Cartoon All-Stars, who apparently now all reside on a poster even though that wasn’t where any of them started out. Michael and Corey decide to “go talk to mom and dad”, and the lengthy credits abruptly roll. Just in case you forgot who ponied up the dough for all of this, the Ronald McDonald House ad runs for a second time at the end of the VHS release.

Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue has developed a reputation as something of a cult oddity over the last three decades and it’s not hard to see why. There’s an uncanny quality to the whole thing – the bizarre sight of The Chipmunks and the like talking in detail about drug use. The project is emblematic of the wider “Just Say No” and contemporaneous D.A.R.E. movements, as well as the wider War on Drugs ethos of the time, all of which hinged upon the idea of educating otherwise unwitting children about the subject early on in the hopes that this would turn them off, when it actually turned out to have the opposite effect.

Beyond the novelty of your kid-vid faves rappin’ about drugs, the other obvious reason this special still gets talked about is the crossover element. While having characters from otherwise unrelated properties interacting with each other is commonplace now – particularly given that the vast majority of all major IPs are now owned by five or six massive media conglomerates – this kind of thing was almost unheard of in 1990, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? being the obvious exception. What we get as a result is a line-up of notable fixtures of Saturday morning network line-ups in this era, as well as some old-timers like Bugs and Daffy. It’s revealing, however, that Disney weren’t about to offer up their counterparts here, and that neither Mickey nor Donald – or even Goofy, for that matter – were up for use.

Further analysis of the line-up also demonstrates how much the pendulum had swung back by 1990, in that only Michaelangelo and Slimer represent action-adventure cartoons. If this project had been commissioned five years earlier, it’s easy to imagine the cast being dominated by the syndicated stars of the day, with He-Man, She-Ra, Bumblebee, Lion-O and members of GI Joe all making an unlikely alliance to scold Michael for his weed use. As it is, Cartoon All-Stars marks the first cross-over event between the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Ghostbusters, something we wouldn’t see again until IDW published a four-issue comic mini-series bringing the two teams together in 2014. Michaelangelo and Slimer have no real interactions with each other in this special, in fact poor Slimer is barely used at all. (The Turtles are on the rise at this point though and it’s arguably been at the expense of the now-waning Ghostbusters, a subject we’ll revisit another time.)

As an aside, I should point out that I’m not aware of any TV screening or VHS release of Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue in the UK. It’s hard to imagine the three major broadcasters at the time working together to simulcast something like this in the spring of 1990. The BBC in particular had gotten into hot water three years earlier for an anti-drugs storyline in Grange Hill that revolved around a character becoming addicted to heroin, and surely wouldn’t have wanted to go down that road again; as we’ve covered previously in Turtlethon, they also had an ingrained cultural resistance to US cartoon characters in general. The involvement of McDonalds in the creation of this whole affair couldn’t have helped either.

Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue is must-see viewing for any afficionados of eighties or early nineties TV animation, if only to experience how figuratively and literally trippy the whole misguided project is. Due to the spider-web of rights issues involved and the fact that this was a not-for-profit venture anyway it’s widely available online, and in fact a nice 720p VHS rip is now up on the Internet Archive for you to enjoy. On our journey through the history of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show it marks an interesting turning point, where the green teens are the biggest stars in all of animation, and not yet Saturday morning mainstays like the other characters here, though that would soon change.