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turtlethon · 1 year

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“Mr. Nice Guy”

Season 6, Episode 15 First US Airdate: December 19, 1992

A ray gun accident alters Raphael’s personality.

“Mr. Nice Guy” is the penultimate episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles season six. This is the only story in the series contributed by the team of Steve Granat and Cydne Clark.

Leonardo prepares a birthday cake for Raphael’s surprise birthday party, to be held the following day. Michaelangelo soon arrives, showing Leo and Donnie his gift: a pair of ferocious goldfish. After the furious pets devour a slice of pizza, Donatello identifies them as actually being Siamese fighting fish.

The impending arrival of Raphael leads the other Turtles to hurriedly conceal the birthday cake in a nearby cupboard. Raph is grouchier than usual as he performs laundry duty, unwittingly dropping a basket of clothes in the cupboard on top of the cake. After he stomps off to find the iron, the other Turtles lament his sour attitude whenever his birthday comes around, with Michaelangelo suggesting that Donatello use an invention to change his demeanour. Donnie refuses, bringing up the time that Leonardo’s personality was lightened up by a ray gun that he had designed.

At Channel 6, Burne tasks April with investigating why crime is on the increase in the city. After it’s pointed out to him that crime is declining, he reminds her not to confuse the issue with the facts, setting her on her way. A short time later, April happens to see two hoodlums breaking into one of the station’s news vans; she pursues the crooks on motorbike.

Raphael continues to grumble as he searches through a cupboard for the iron, mistakenly plugging what he thinks is its cable into the power socket. This turns out to be the power cord for Donatello’s mood ray, which activates when Raph’s back is turned, hitting him with a beam of energy as he irons. The other Turtles are stunned when he joins them in the kitchen moments later and is uncharacteristically chipper.

As the punks from earlier drive the news van through the front window of the Crosstown Bank and carry out a robbery, the Turtles are on their way to get pizza, hampered by Raphael’s insistence on stopping to carry out acts of kindness for everyone he sees. The team spot the robbery unfolding and head in to confront the criminals, with Raphael covering the back of the building. Our heroes are unable to progress as the vault doors are closed on them, and the men escape in the van. Raphael is waiting for them, but in keeping with his new personality, is so eager to be helpful that he instead offers up bags of money and kindly waves them goodbye. April arrives on the scene and joins the other Turtles as they meet up with Raphael: when pressed as to why he let the bad guys go, he explains that he’s “just spreading a little niceness... the world could use more of it.”

Act two opens with Leonardo asking Raphael to lose the nice guy schtick. Raph responds by feigning a tough demeanour momentarily, before offering milk and cookies to the team. Later, the Turtles are seen emerging from Vinnie’s, discussing how good the liver and bubblegum pizza was - I think the show’s roster of writers are in competition to see who can come up with the most disgusting topping combinations – when the news van passes by. The Turtles board a nearby sightseeing bus and, after explaining the situation, ask the driver to give chase.

The robbers head to a drive-in movie theatre, where “INVASION OF THE TURTLE OIDS” [sic] is playing. They’re eventually forced to lose the van and escape on foot, pursued by the Turtles through the drive-in. As Raphael breaks off to console a crying boy whose popcorn was knocked to the ground by the robbers, the other Turtles confront the men in front of the screen playing the Turtleoids movie for the paying crowd. Despite opening fire with laser weapons, the punks are swiftly defeated by our heroes, drawing the approval of the assembled cinemagoers. It’s only after the battle is over that the Turtles realise Raphael is now pre-occupied with gifting buckets of popcorn to the cinema’s patrons.

We skip forward as it’s explained April aided the Turtles in dropping off the crooks with the police and returning the money to the bank. As the group travel in the now-battered news van, they spot a billboard for the psychiatric services of Dr. Otto von Shrink, determining this may be the solution to Raphael’s personality problem.

Later, Raphael is seen visiting the Von Shrink Institute of Mental Health. He’s greeted in the futuristic complex by X12, a Johnny 5-like robot in a lab coat. Raph is shown around the facilities and watches the Institute’s innovations, such as shock therapy (a robot wearing a spooky mask scaring someone) and assertiveness training (a mild-mannered man is seen walking underneath a curtain and emerges following a flash of light, snarling with rage).

Raphael’s visit culminates in him meeting Otto von Shrink, a Dr. Wily-esque figure who sounds like Howard Cosell. Von Shrink places a headset on Raphael that recalls the events leading to his personality change: this is displayed on-screen from the perspective of someone watching Raph the same way we as viewers did when the incident unfolded, despite this making zero sense. Now von Shrink is aware of the existence of the personality-altering ray gun, he tasks Raphael with bringing him the invention so that he can study it further. After the Turtle leaves, the psychiatrist confides to X12 that he plans to use the device to get his revenge on the psychiatric community for shunning him as a quack.

Act three opens with Donatello tripping over the cord for the still-plugged-in personality modifier, which somehow is now nowhere near the cupboard it was stored in when it hit Raphael. It activates again, the Siamese fighting fish getting hit by its ray and becoming docile as a result. As Donnie heads to the living room to explain what must have happened, Raphael is seen wandering away with the device as per the instructions given to him.

Von Shrink performs modifications to the personality ray to make it fully portable, outlining to Raphael how he intends to use it to walk over any authority figure that stands in the way of his reign of terror; when Raph points out that it makes no sense to reveal this to him as a crime fighter, von Shrink responds that he’s “too nice to do anything about it”. This all goes as planned, with X12 seen carrying out a series of robberies alongside a group of other robots, firing the ray at any intervening guards and policemen each time to alter their personalities.

As the Turtles try to figure out where Raphael and the personality modifier have gone, they spot April reporting on the clearing out of an art gallery; she interviews the placid guard, who explains that he stood by and let the robbers get away as he didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Putting two and two together, out heroes determine that Raphael must have given the ray gun to Dr. Von Shrink.

Our heroes soon infiltrate the Institute of Mental Health and confront the psychiatrist, getting trapped in what appears to be a forcefield. Von Shrink explains this is a “Phobia Chamber”, an invention that forces patients to face their greatest fears. These manifest in front of each of the Turtles, with Leonardo battling a giant samurai warrior, Michaelangelo facing the prospect of being eaten by an enormous pizza and Donatello taking on a three-headed monster near-identical to the one seen in “Welcome Back, Polarisoids”.

As Raphael returns, Donatello flings his bo through the forcefield, knocking the dial on the personality ray being held by X12. The device fires upon Raphael, turning him back to his normal self. Raph wastes no time in disabling the Phobia Chamber, but von Shrink has an array of warrior robots ready to attack the reunited Turtles. Stepping in on behalf of the team, Raphael tricks the robots into firing upon each other, ultimately winding up as a pile of scrap metal. Using the personality ray one last time, Raph opens fire on von Shrink, turning him into a meek and compliant foe ahead of turning him over to the police.

We close out today’s adventure in the Lair, where the Turtles hold a (presumably belated) birthday party for Raphael, presenting him with Michaelangelo’s fishes before asking him to blow out the candles on his cake. Raph blows hard enough to splatter the cake in Donatello’s face, leading the team to declare in unison “that’s our Raphael!”

“Mr. Nice Guy” is a disjointed adventure, effectively two different stories built around Raphael’s change in temperament, the first a low-stakes chase with the team pursuing two bank robbers, the second a rushed tale of Raphael’s run-in with an evil psychiatrist as he seeks a cure to his niceness. Both are fine for what they are, but I think the two bank robbers overstay their welcome, resulting in von Shrink and his Institute feeling a little underdeveloped. While there’s little as a character to separate the psychiatrist from the mad scientist villains I always complain about, Hal Rayle’s performance makes him surprisingly entertaining.

Effectively this episode acts as a sequel to “Leonardo Lightens Up”, calling back to the events of that earlier adventure, particularly in the early goings. Much as Leonardo’s bossiness was played up in that story for comedic effect, here Raphael is depicted as more of a curmudgeon than usual, although this is explained away as being due to his unhappiness surrounding his impending birthday. There’s a bit of revisionist history going on here as Donatello’s personality ray was never tethered to a power cord in its original appearance; I suppose it’s possible that he might have modified it to require one in the intervening seasons, although this seems like a backwards step.

While season six has perhaps been the most visually consistent season of TMNT ever, presumably always being handled by the same team of animators, as we approach the end there are signs that either the budget is running out or everyone is asleep at the wheel. This episode has a glaring moment while Raphael is being evaluated by von Shrink where it’s clear the animation was never finished, pasted-over footage being used instead. It’s the kind of thing I associate more with late season three or early season four episodes, and it’s regrettable to see it popping up again now.

We now find ourselves set for the season finale, and as is now standard for the Saturday morning era we’ll conclude not with a big finish in the Technodrome, but with a story not involving Shredder at all. Join us next time as 1992 wraps up with the return of Aunt Aggie in “Sleuth on the Loose”!

#Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #TMNT #TMNT 1987 #1992 #Turtlethon #Ninja Turtles #Mr. Nice Guy #Mr Nice Guy #TMNT Raphael #TMNT Raph #Raph TMNT #Raphael TMNT #Otto von Shrink #Dr. Otto von Shrink

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time-is-standing · 1 year

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top 10 songs of october

aka it's time for spooky scary skeletons

1. astrid by glaive

this song is pure gold. I love every second of it. actually I'm sad because it's so short but I just can't get over it no matter how many weeks pass.

2. MISA MISA! by CORPSE, Scarlxrd, Kordhell

this song has already been on last month's list and I'm finding myself listening to it over and over again. there's something about corpse that makes all of his songs so enjoyable. his voice, the raspiness and this style is everything to me.

3. The Pretender by Foo Fighters

this song is the one that made me fall in love with my boyfriend all over again. even though I feel like I'm loving him more and more with every day that's passing by, there are super special moments like the one time we went to a party together. this song came on and he sang it all in such a passionate way that I still can't get it out of my head.

4. mr. nice guy by KAYDEN

this one I found from the same playlist that astrid came from. somehow I clicked on this one randomly and it was the happiest little accident in a long time.

5. Sick Of You by DNMO, Sub Urban

I started listening to it by the end of last month and it made it to last month's list. that in itself is a sign of how much I really love this one. it's such a great song with relatable lyrics and just the right amount of anger & rage to get me through these trying weeks.

6. Roadtrip by Dream, PmBata

this "old" gem made it on the list because of the dteam meetup and the vlog and other content they are making together. I don't even know how to describe the things I feel and the way it all makes me the happiest I've been in a long time.

7. Enough by charlieonnafriday

another one to cure my anger issues - because that's something I definitely have. sadly my bf gets most of it but I'm working on myself daily.

8. idfc by blackbear

I actually don't remember listening to this one, it just appeared on the list. I might've had a manic episode sometime this month because some strange shit has happened. but yeah, shit happens.

9. Heat Waves by Glass Animals

I still remember 2 years ago, just after I moved to a new city and started my own life without my parents. it was a trying time and it took almost all of my power to stay alive and get to work every day. one cold winter night I logged into ao3 and read a fanfic that changed my whole life. I smiled & I laughed again after such a long time. I was crying happy tears, I was just full of emotion while reading the lines about two boys who try to figure out who they are. and I'm sure that that lost little girl would be insanely proud of who she's became in two years time.

10. Still Waiting by Sum 41

"so am I still waiting

for this world to stop hating?

can't find a good reason

can't find hope to believe in"

this boy I'm dating makes me feel more and more secure with every day passing by. I can't imagine a world where I could feel this free with anyone else. and as we get to know each other and the relationship progresses, I'm getting some memories back from my past. and this song came with one of those memories. we went to a party and they played this at the afterparty and I finally was able to look my old self right in the eyes and tell her how sorry I was for what she's been through. I'm sorry I've let myself down.

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