So far the Viennale hasn’t featured many Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the big screen. KELTI is about to put this to rights: The young Minja is celebrating her birthday with a Ninja Turtles theme, which is why she and her classmates are seen running around a suburban living room in Belgrade dressed up like turtles.
Leonardo (the leader, blue bandanna, the most serious, and a man, or turtle, of honor), Michelangelo (the free spirit, orange bandanna), Raphael (the temperamental one, red bandanna, sarcastic and wild) and Donatello (tech wizard, violet bandanna): these are the superheroes created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in 1984. They have long since moved beyond the domain of comics and entered video games, toys, novels, sticker albums, and the pizza industry (pizza shakes, pizza soups) – in truth, everything where there is a profit to be made. The pretty disgusting pizzas ordered by the turtles (strawberry and anchovy sauce pizza, goulash pizza, to name but a few examples) are one of the cult aspects of the comic and TV series.
The quartet was originally envisioned as a parody of popular superhero comics such as the X-Men, but eventually developed their own, independent series. The Ninja Turtles, trained in Ninjutsu, “the art of endurance,” by humanoid rat Splinter, were well-known under the title Nindža Kornjače all across Yugoslavia thanks to the hit TV series which ran from 1987 to 1996. They fought against their arch-enemy Shredder on screens all over the world as well as in comics published by Mirage Studios.
By now, the karate-fighting ninja turtles exist in a nostalgic realm rarely given a satisfactory turn by new adaptations.