It’s been a long time since the ’90s, an era filled to the brim with delightfully cheesy pop culture moments. Perhaps the most delightfully cheesy of them all was when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fought a troupe of baddies and then broke into a choreographed dance routine, all scored by an original Vanilla Ice song, in the 1991 movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze:
Twenty-five years later, there’s a new Ninja Turtles movie on the way, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, which just had its premiere at Madison Square Garden. At the event, Vanilla Ice decided it was time to reunite with his friends, opting to join them onstage in a surprise appearance. The Turtles were in full prosthetic costumes, similar to those seen in the movies, as they busted through a performances of “Ninja Rap 2.”
This actually wasn’t exactly a reunion, because Vanilla Ice and the Ninja Turtles actually perform together pretty often. Most recently, the Turtles joined Vanilla Ice (as well as Kid n Play, Coolio, Salt n Pepa, and others) for several dates on the I Love The ’90s Tour. The two entities were supposedly first reunited in 2014, and they’ve had a lot of joint concerts since.
The suits and the whole shtick might seem cheesy now, which makes it easy to underestimate how big an impact these characters and movies had in the ’90s. The original live-action film (released in 1990) earned over $200 million against a $13.5 million budget, and the characters got big enough to be guests for an entire episode of Oprah.
Shout out in the comments if you’d be down to see a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles concert, because you just might see us there.
Image: TMNT Movie
