When I was a young teenager, I hated the Ninja Turtles. Haaaated them. For one thing, they were freaking everywhere. In the late '80s through much of the '90s, it seemed that you couldn't turn around without seeing their green, masked, toothily grinning faces beaming at you from the sides of cereal boxes, toothpaste dispensers, candy bars, shirts, posters, birthday cards, kleenex boxes, disposable drinking cups, pillowcases, coloring books, stickers and a billion other cheap bits of easily marketed flotsam. It was more than that, though. I hated their catchphrases. I winced every time I heard "bodacious, duuude" or "let's have an awesome pizza party, duuuude" or "duuuuuuude, dude," or whatever the hell they were saying. I hated their weird, froggy faces. I hated their invincible ninja awesomeness. Most of all, I hated their gargantuan, unstoppable popularity.

Mainly this is because I was a teenager. Unlike the four teen-turtles themselves, who seemed to always be smiling, I spent much of my teen years sulking, complaining, sleeping, and being smugly cynical about everything under the sun. For something to be as successful as the Turtles meant that they had to suck, and only I was perceptive enough to know it. Now, to be fair, an awful lot of the Turtles crap that was being pumped into our culture was, in fact, pretty crappy. The cheap taint of shoddy quality control hung over many of those poorly manufactured plastic toys, badly drawn Turtles activity books, and awful rap albums like a green cloud of sewer gas. Toward the tail end of Turtle-mania (must have been around the third live-action movie), the four reptilian ninja heroes had been so thoroughly whored out that they didn't seem to have a reason to exist outside of hawking their own cheap junk.

But like I said, I was bound and determined to hate them right from the get go. When the first live action movie came out in 1990, I eagerly gave it a miss. True, the reviews weren't half bad, with many reviewers grudgingly admitting to having kind of enjoyed the flick, and there was also an intriguing amount of controversy regarding the film's dark tone and (to some eyes) excessive violence. But no matter... I'd been ticked off at the turtles for years, and I wasn't about to change my mind just because their movie actually sounded kind of interesting. I let that nagging little voice in the back of my head, the one that kept saying, "You know, you could just rent it, and maybe watch it late at night when nobody's around " go unheeded. Time marched on, I got older, and then the second Turtles movie came out and seemed to justify my distaste, with even hardcore fans bemoaning its goofier tone and gratuitous amounts of Vanilla Ice. I let the Turtles fall off my radar, content that I'd done the right thing in ignoring them all those years.

But had I done the right thing? Had I, really? Because the Turtles never really went away, and for many in my generation they continue to inspire the sort of toasty-warm nostalgia usually reserved for only our most cherished childhood memories. Mention the Turtles to a child of the '80s and you'll likely see them get a warm gleam in their eyes as they drift back to happy Saturday mornings spent huddled under a fuzzy Turtles blanket, eyes glued to the Turtles cartoon on TV as they clutched a bowl of marshmallowy Turtles cereal in their fingers. Even older kids (kids my age, the ones who I'd assumed should be sharing my disdain) seemed to think the Turtles were cool. In the years that followed my adolescence, I began to wonder... had I, in fact, cheated myself out of something I otherwise would have loved?

So here's me, in my mid-30s, finally sitting down with an open mind to watch the first Turtles movie. At first it takes a little doing, not least because the film itself is so very dated. Every poofy hairdo, spiky mohawk and garish '80s fashion disaster that pops up reminds me that I'm peering through a time capsule into the tail end of the Reagan era, and I have to remind myself to try and just watch the film. After a little while (and after getting past some inevitable, fan-baiting lip service about radical, bodacious pizza), I find that this is less of a problem... the story's kind of pulling me in, and the retro cheesiness of the late '80s trappings is rather charming.

What really strikes me, though, is how well crafted a movie it actually is. Sure, it's got plenty of clunky bits, with a few dodgy fight sequences and with some of the attempts at humor falling completely flat (that weird cartoon "boinnnng" noise the Turtles make every time someone says "pizza" is pretty annoying), but overall it's much better written and directed than I was expecting. Not a masterpiece, by any stretch, but for a commercial endeavor meant to capitalize on the Turtles phenomenon I'm impressed by how much care seems to have gone into the thing. The story at least attempts to put individual personality into the characters, giving them something resembling dramatic arcs. While much of what happens is standard action movie cliché (there's a troubled youth who falls in with the wrong crowd, one of the turtles has to deal with his anger issues, there's a kid-friendly version of romance blossoming between two of the characters and, naturally, past conflicts between bitter rivals come to the surface just in time for the big climactic showdown), but at least the clichés are dished out with sincerity, and with a modicum of restraint. Yes, it's all pretty silly, but at least it isn't treating the audience with open contempt, à la Michael Bay. If you're willing to just go with it, the movie’s actually quite a lot of innocent, high-energy fun.

So, do I get it now? Yes, I think maybe I do. The Turtles themselves, when you look past all the shoddy merchandise and media oversaturation, are a pretty appealing group of characters. They're literal outsiders (what with being mutated reptiles and all), forced to live hidden in the sewers, but they still comprise a close-knit family (presided over by their master/father figure, Splinter, a kindly sage who also happens to be a giant rat), and they still love to do all the cool stuff that teenagers do... plus, you know, they get to be ninjas. So there's that. Turtles purists like to grumble about how the Turtles got "dumbed down" into being pizza-loving goofballs, as opposed to the dark, uber-violent vigilantes they were in the original comic books, but honestly, I think the characters were greatly improved when they were made more accessible to the mainstream... they're certainly more likeable, and it's easy now to see why a whole generation of young teenagers found them so appealing. Given the choice between being a typically awkward, greasy, clumsy junior high student, or being a kick-awesome (excuse me, bodacious) teenage mutant ninja turtle having pizza parties in your underground hideout with your equally cool brothers and your doting, loving rat-dad-sensei, and then emerging from the shadows every night to fight crime... well, duh. No contest. Looking back on it, it's kind of ironic that I was being too much of a teenager to even understand the appeal.