Review: Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles “Tales of the Hidden City”

OVERVIEW

The Turtles, April, Splinter, and Baron Draxum all have a day out in the Hidden City, but split up and go on their own, sometimes intersecting, adventures.

First, in “Donnie vs. Witch Town”, Donatello and April go learn about magical chairs, but Donnie’s skepticism of magic gets them a cauldron of trouble.

Next, in “Raph’s Ride-Along”, Raphael ends up fitting the profile of a notorious criminal, but ends up courting the favor of several familiarly voiced criminals who he can’t seem to shake. This episode didn’t age well and it just came out.

Then, in “Hidden City’s Most Wanted”, Michelangelo, Splinter, and Baron Draxum (now in cuddly teddy bear form to avoid detection), spend some quality time, but Splinter and Draxum are still at odds despite Mikey wanting them to get along. Splinter ends up letting Draxum get taken but comes back to get him, the two making amends.

Lastly, in “Bad Hair Day”, Leonardo tries to relax at a spa but gets possessed by magic hair.

OUR TAKE

Unlike my last two times reviewing this show, these episodes are all part of a single story, which makes them a lot easier to review as a cohesive whole. Specifically, this seems to be a bit of a take off of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s “Tales of Ba-Sing-Se”, where all the characters go off and do their own things in little vignettes that sometimes overlap to show they’re happening concurrently. This is a pretty neat gimmick since it puts all the characters in the same location but still allows them to have stories that are just meant to showcase their own respective strengths, or sometimes lack thereof. Also might have not been a great move to start all of the four parts with pretty much the exact same beginning.

As for how I would rank each of these segments, I’d probably go:

4. “Donnie vs. Witch Town”
3. “Bad Hair Day”
2. “Hidden City’s Most Wanted”
1. “Raph’s Ride-Along”

The Donnie story is dead last mainly because I have seen the whole “scientist character is skeptical of magic” episode way too many times and nothing about this one gave me any reason to think it would be different in any significant way. It’s basically one of the ways to assure I will immediately mentally check out. I understand that Donnie is meant to be the “smart one” of the group and so this would be for him anyway, but it’s just spinning wheels at a certain point. Then there’s Bad Hair Day, which gives me reason to think the team working on this version of the series just really had a serious grudge against Leonardo with what they make him do in it, but I do have to give this episode credit for at least going all in with its weird and goofy premise, which is certainly NOT something I have seen very often enough to completely check out.

The remaining two feel more like they were the ones the writers actually wanted to put effort into. Mikey wanting his two dads to get along is something that’s been established a few episodes back, and the tension between Splinter and Draxum has been long developed throughout the first season, so to see them finally meeting in the middle for the sake of their “kids” is pretty cathartic. But Raph’s story inches out for the top spot primarily for fanservice. I’m pretty shameless but I was a huge fan of the 2012 series, so it was a real blast to see Rob Paulson, Seth Green, and Greg Cipes getting to team up with this version of Raph, though I am a bit disappointed that the guy Raph was impersonating wasn’t played by Sean Astin. Regardless, this was a pretty fun little experiment and I hope that the rest of the season shows more willingness to play around like these episodes did.