Remember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze? Of course you do; it’s when Shredder became Super Shredder! Critics didn’t really care for it when it came out in 1991, since it was a clear money-grab after the success of the first Ninja Turtles movie, which came out just a year earlier. Kids loved it and absolutely juiced their parents’ wallets, making the movie the 13th highest grossing of the year.
The Turtles were a huge deal at the time: They were guests on Oprah’s show, for goodness sake. Please take a minute and watch this clip from that episode, because their mannerisms are a hilarious artifact of times far more tubular than these.
Anyway, you know who else loved that movie? Axl Rose–yes, of Guns N’ Roses. He loved it so much that before a Guns N’ Roses concert in Tampa, Florida on December 28, 1991, he started to watch it, but didn’t have the foresight to realize he wouldn’t have time to finish the flick before he had to take the stage. It’s always best to watch a movie in one uninterrupted viewing, so that’s exactly what Rose did, making the audience thirsty for some “Welcome to the Jungle” wait until he knew exactly how Leonardo, Donatello, Michaelangelo and Raphael ended up [1991 SPOILER] saving April O’Neil.
A local radio DJ recently told the surreal story, saying:
The DJ was an assistant to the owner of the venue, and needless to say the owner was getting pissed. When the owner asked why Axl was being late for the thousandth time, he said: “Axl’s management said he was watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, and that Axl’s attention was 100% on the movie and couldn’t be bothered.”
An easy fix for this problem would have been to bring the Turtles themselves on stage to perform alongside Guns N’ Roses:
Featured image courtesy of deviantArt // TheLefthandedLaugh
