Daily Cartoon: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles S050E14 “The Curse of Savanti Romero”

Hello and welcome back to another Halloween cartoon episode recap! We’ve been on a solid run of mostly highly enjoyable shows of late so let’s hope that today’s choice keeps things going in a positive direction.

Today, we’ll be watching an episode of Nickelodeon’s 2012 reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This should be an actual Halloween episode as the word “Halloween” does appear in the description on Hulu as opposed to yesterday’s Powerpuff Girls viewing.

I’ve never seen any of this series. Obviously, I grew up on the original TMNT but it was more my brother’s “thing” than mine. I still liked it and had toys and saw the movies, but my fandom for it never continued through the years like it did with other things such as Masters of the Universe or Thundercats. That’s not a bad thing. For all I know, I could end up loving this and start holding a candle for TMNT for the remainder of my days which wouldn’t be bad considering that this property has really never died or been in danger of going away in over 30 years now. To this day we continue to get cartoons, movies and some badass toys of our heroes in a halfshell.

This is the newest show we’ve checked out so far in the Halloween marathon we’re running here and I’m pretty excited about that. Let’s see what today’s kids are being molded by.

S05E14: The Curse of Savanti Romero

Original Air Date: September 27, 2017

It’s Halloween and trick-or-treaters are running around town collecting candy. We see April O’Neil and Casey Jones joining in the festivities, but suddenly stop when they start feeling some bad juju. They’re attacked by a pack of rabid dogs and then see some civilians huddled on the ground, a power overcoming them as a little boy jumps Casey from behind and vampire-bites money’s neck as we hit the opening credits. This shit got turnt up with the quickness.

Underground, we meet the Turtles who are planning their own Halloween costumes while watching a knockoff Star Trek cartoon. Their planning gets cut short, however, as April FaceTimes Donatello to tell him that Casey’s been turned into a vampire and is hunting her. Mikey things it’s a joke – “classic Casey” – but April’s line goes dead and the boys head out to help.

They arrive just in time to stop Casey from getting a bite of April, but it’s quickly learned that this is an epidemic affecting the entire city. When the Turtles thing they have things under control, April is jumped from behind and given a bite from another random citizen which turns her into a bloodthirsty, powerful vampire too.

The Turtles are now in a whole heap of shit salad when they’re rescued by Renet. Wait. Who in the fuck is Renet? I had to pause to type this into my Google Machine, but Renet is a recurring character in this series. She’s a time traveler from the future who works on the side of good, but is kind of young and immature so she also does a lot of dumb shit too. She’s the Michelangelo of time travel. Regardless, Renet shows up just in time to use her sorcery to float the Turtles to a rooftop to escape the angry, hungry mob of newly-minted vampires walking the streets.

Renet explains that Savanti Romero is the one who’s behind all this. She fucked up and Savanti stole her emergency time jumper which freed him from whatever kind of time prison he was being held in and now he’s back on the loose and causing ruckus.

At that moment, Savanti Romero appears floating in the sky like the goddamn Undertaker and explains his master plan like a Bond villain which is pretty damn cool actually. He plans to have the whole city infected in just a matter of days which I think is a bit soon. I mean, have you been to New York lately? It is so damn overcrowded that I can’t imagine even Savanti Romero wields enough power to get this all done that quickly. It’s a bit ambitious.

The Turtles attack Savanti, but he puts up a forcefield and is about to destroy them when Renet opens a time portal so she can escape with the Turtles. They end up in ancient Egypt where Savanti first came into power and started to build his monster army. Time travel seems like a lot of fun, but now Renet’s scepter is low on power and there’s no place in the late 5th century to charge anything. They’ll have to conserve power if they want to be able to get back to present day.

They head into an ancient tomb where, of course, they set off a booby trap, but Mikey becomes the unlikely hero by disabling it by mistake. Hey, whatever works. Savanti built his army with mummies and now the mummies protecting this tomb are becoming reanimated and attacking our heroes. Our heroes are able to break free and make it to the pharaoh’s chamber of the tomb and because they’ve gone back in time, they were able to make it here before Savanti had the chance to get here and unleash the curse to raise his dead army.

Unfortunately for them, Savanti has followed them in without issue since Renet and the Turtles have already done all the legwork to get to the main chamber. The pharaoh raises from his tomb and is not at all happy about it. I don’t know how long he’s been asleep, but it obviously wasn’t long enough as he’s now a grumpy Gus and taking it out on the good guys. Savanti appeals to the pharaoh to help him destroy his disturbers and we get a a fun fight scene between all involved parties that only ends when Savanti uses that stolen emergency time travel device to escape with the pharaoh to the middle ages and continue building his army.

Renet’s scepter – the source of her time traveling ability – is crazy low on power so she can’t afford to fuck this up, but they don’t really have a choice. She opens a portal to follow Savanti to the Middle Ages and…we hit the end credits.

What?!?! End credits?! But what’s going to happen?!

OK, so I was completely unaware that this was a multi-episode saga, but now since I’m invested in this, we’re going to pick up tomorrow with the next episode.

Final Thoughts

As I said earlier, this episode served as an introduction for me to this series as a whole. I don’t necessarily love the animation style, but the tone of the show feels very TMNT and is quite engaging.

I obviously had to stop and find out who the hell Renet is/was, but other than that, it’s easy to follow and seems like a very worthwhile reboot. The story was interesting, the voice acting effective and when it hit the credits at the end, I gave a very audible, “what the fuck”. I wasn’t ready for it to be over especially since I never even considered this could be a multi-part story.

But hey, we’re here and I was into this episode big time by the end of it so I’m just going to roll with the next episode for tomorrow’s blog. We’ve come too far to not see how this ends. This is a fun show and it’s no wonder that the Turtles are still big business to this very day. The only thing I worry about is that I get way too into this show and then start blowing a ton of money on toys and figures which has happened way too many times with way too many shows and toylines. Sigh.

Until next time.

Joe

Twitter: @MaxSexPow

Email: ShoesOnSports@gmail.com