Revisiting a bizarre episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from 1992, starring a villain who pretty much IS Freddy Krueger!
Freddy Krueger and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Two pop cultural titans of the 1980s that obviously rest on opposite sides of the entertainment spectrum.
One was a horror franchise about a child-molesting serial killer and the other was about giant talking reptiles that fought crime with nunchucks. Empirically, there doesn’t seem like much wiggle room for overlap, but apparently … I was wrong.
Now, we tend to think of the original Ninja Turtles series as a VERY ’80s thing. In reality, though, the show lasted for ten seasons and wasn’t cancelled until 1997. With close to 200 episodes in the line-up, there’s a LOT of material I never caught back in the day. Including today’s featured episode, which gives us the crossover we never thought would happen in a million years … kinda, sorta, but for the most part.
“Nightmare in the Lair” is the ninth episode of the show’s sixth season. It initially aired on Oct. 17, 1992 — a time when the Ninja Turtles were more than a little passe. By then we had already moved on to “Batman: The Animated Series” and “X-Men,” and TMNT just felt gloriously outdated.
But this episode in particular DEFINITELY got my attention.
Like most TMNT episodes, it begins with Donatello messing around with some sort of high-tech device that not even Elon Musk and an entire continent worth of stolen labor could produce. Basically, he invents this helmet that allows people (or people-like turtles) to record their dreams. And remember, this episode came out in 1992, a good 18 years before Inception. Don’t at like we didn’t notice, Christopher Nolan.
So the Turtles take turns playing around with the dream helmet. Donatello fantasizes about winning a doctorate degree, Leonardo dreams about landing on the moon, Raphael dreams about all of his siblings being his personal slaves, etc. Well, through some sort of astral plane tomfoolery the machine also manages to conjure up our villain of the week … who TOTALLY doesn’t look, act and sound like the antagonist-protagonist of the “Elm Street” movies AT ALL.
So yeah, I know it’s a parody of Freddy Krueger and all, but good grief, they didn’t even TRY to mask their inspiration here. There’s no razor glove hand or fedora, but pretty much EVERYTHING else about the character is a one-to-one imitation of Freddy. Like, he even has the striped sweater and everything. Naturally, you might THINK that the writers of the show would try to deflect the obvious comparisons a little. Then you realize they LITERALLY named the character “Creepy Eddie” and you’re like “well, no, I guess they didn’t even give a damn.”
As you might imagine, Michelangelo — clearly the most obvious Ninja Turtle to become a stoner someday — decides to try the Dream-O-Vision helmet when nobody’s looking and yep, it allows Eddie to cross over into the real world, where he can cause all sorts of phantasmic chaos like Freddy did at the end of the second Elm Street movie. It eventually leads to Ralph and Donatello trying to take down Eddie in “the real world” while Leonardo and Mikey try to make their way through “Nightmareland,” which is basically just a toy-friendly version of Michelangelo’s subconscious, replete with a bunch of monsters that would look really cool sitting next to Shredder and Bebop in the action figure aisle at Kids R Us.
What’s kind of surreal about the episode — outside of the obvious answer, “literally all of it” — is that it actually DOES directly reference the Elm Street mythos in a few subtle (and potentially inadvertent) ways. Remember that part in the first Elm Street movie when Heather Langenkamp starts running up the stairs and they melt into gelatin? Well, Eddie pulls off a very similar trick in this episode, which definitely caught me by surprise. Granted, they couldn’t have given us an homage to Johnny Depp’s blood explosion bed, but certainly they could’ve thrown in a good, old fashioned sledgehammer booby trap to the face somewhere in there, couldn’t they?
Obviously the material is played light-hearted and there’s not really a sense of terror and dread to the episode. That’s evident by the ending of the episode, where the Turtles vanquish Eddie to the nether-realm permanently by … simply turning a light switch on? Yeah, I kind of get the feeling the writers wrote this episode on a VERY tight deadline.
It’s pretty silly stuff, but it is entertaining. There’s a lot of oblique references to awful monster movies from the 1950s and there’s this weird subplot about this intern at Channel 6 who keeps incurring severe injuries (which is probably scarier than any of the Creepy Eddie bits in the episode.) The cornball-cheese factor is off the scale here, and I mean that as a compliment.
To the best of my knowledge this is the one and only appearance from Creepy Eddie in ANY kind of TMNT media. Which is a shame, because I think he’s an excellent addition to the core Ninja Turtles rogues gallery. Granted, I have a feeling the lawyers at New Line Cinema weren’t so enthusiastic about the character; there are homages and then there are down-right rip-offs and like you even need me to tell you which one Creepy Eddie is.
It’s not exactly the most obvious Halloween-time viewing material, but it TOTALLY fits the seasonal mood. And unless there’s an episode of Power Rangers were they fight Michael Myers, it’s probably the most mind-blowing Saturday morning appearance from a fictitious slasher icon we ever got in the ’90s.
