Video rental stores and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Before Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+, there were video stores. I'd like to say it seems weird now but it doesn't. I could imagine video stores coming back, even now. It seems like movies are more popular than ever and if someone somehow came up with a way to make physical video tapes a profit making business, people would go get them. Eventually the streaming services will merge and de-merge and monetise and throw adverts on what is already a pay-service, to a point where you find yourself locked out once again and marveling at the concept of being able to rent a single movie without signing up for a year's worth of streaming. 

In some places, though, video rental shops never really went away. Where I grew up, in Hamilton, NZ, you could map the city by video stores alone. There was Hillcrest Video Ezy, Hamilton East United Video, The Source just over the bridge in town, the big United Video on the way out of town and into Frankton, The Source in Frankton. That's three competing chains in one small town alone. A fourth, Civic Video, inexplicably joined them in the mid-2000s.  

Each store required its own membership, even within a chain, so you'd end up with multiple Video Ezy accounts if you found yourself stranded in a zone of Hamilton without a video store less than 300 metres from you. It could happen! 

We usually went to the United Video in Hamilton East, once a week, one video for a week's rental. It was on the way home from the central city, and probably had the best parking which was obviously a deciding factor for my dad. United Video also had a pretty large range, although they seemed to lose interest in having actual categories of films and instead opted to just bung everything in an ever-growing 'Highly Recommended' section that soon took up 3/4s of the shop. 

For some reason, we once branched out and went to The Source in Frankton. The Source was weird. There were fewer of them, they had a weird name, and they had the most constantly played TV ads despite having fewer stores. After years of United Video, The Source was a strange new world with strange new videos. An unfamiliar children's section located perilously close to the horror section, with a few adult cartoons like Heavy Metal randomly thrown in there by either some mischievous teenage employee, or someone who had no idea that they did cartoons for adults. 

Usually we would only sign up for a membership to a new video store if they had something we couldn't find anywhere else. This time, that something, was a previously unknown Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. I'd seen the first one, and Secrets of the Ooze, and even TMNT 3: Turtles in Time. But here, at The Source Frankton, was apparently a fourth TMNT film. I couldn't believe it. 

My dad duly registered for an account at The Source and I rented out this incredible new film, got home, and popped it in the VCR.

The first hint that something was amiss was the box art. I can only assume I was overcome with a kind of delirium upon sighting a new TMNT film and didn't sober up until I'd got home. As I looked at the box, I noticed the turtles themselves looked a bit cheap, a bit weird, and Shredder was wearing possibly the most revealing crotchwear since David Bowie in Labyrinth. It was, essentially, Shredder's junk pushing out of the box art at the viewer. 

We hit play and the red flags continued. The film opened with an introduction sequence, featuring Russell the Rooster, a poorly designed and assembled puppet from a New Zealand children's show. That's weird, I thought. I didn't think TMNT had any connection to New Zealand. Maybe this was just a NZ-only bit tacked onto the start? Something for the local audience. Yeah. Despite this self-assurance, a wave of dread washed over me as the tape rolled. 

There were crowd noises. An audience seemed to be in this movie somehow. OK. Maybe it started with a crowd number. Vanilla Ice was in one of the other films. It's not completely out of the ordinary. Except this time it was a static shot. Even as a child, I could feel the difference between a movie camera angle and whatever this was. Lights came on. A curtain went up. More crowd cheering, noises. An announcer whooped, and the turtles bounded out onto the stage to perform an excruciating rock-rap number. 

My sister and I stared at the screen as this madness unfolded, at first laughing at it, and then cowering in embarrassment by association (we made the choice to rent this after all), before the sheer sadness set in as we realised this was the film we'd wasted this week's rental on. We had this thing for a week. 

I stared at Shredder's freaky mound one more time before silently placing the tape by the front door for Dad to return on his next drive past the video shop.