Christmas
Toy Tie-ins:
Kid’s
Stuff
Street
Sharks #1
Completely
ripping off the Turtles
"Sharkbait”
Writer – Martha Moran
Comics Adaption by –
Evan Skolnick
Penciller – Nelson
Ortega
Inker – Jay Oliveras and
Phil Sheeny
Letters – Luke Marlin
Colorist – Kyle Hunter
Editor – Fred Mendez
Managing Editor – Victor
Gorelick
Editor-in-Chief – Richard
Goldwater
January 1996
I
don’t know if I can do this one, guys.
What
you see before you is a badly preserved copy of Street Sharks number 1, an
Archie publication that was built solely to sell toys. The concept rips off
much of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a marketing executive spending an
afternoon watching their cartoon taking notes with a clipboard would absorb.
Their similarities can be read like a checklist:
Humanoid-animal
mutation – check
Live
in a sewer – check
Teenagers
– check
Family
– check
Fight
against an evil mastermind – check
Mastermind
henchmen also humanoid-animal mutations – check
Surfer
sounding catchphrase – check
Merchandisable
vehicle - check
…
…and
on and on it goes.
There
is little original or even inspired about these guys.
However,
in researching this book I came across Sam Diss’ post on a site called shortlist.com.
Sam makes a compelling case for the bait smelling toy-clones, but it is this
last linked video that just blows the Street Sharks out of the water.
Yes,
that is the holy father of geekdom: Vin Diesel.
Riddick, the Iron Giant, Triple-X,
Dominic Toretto, Mr. “I am Groot” himself…Vin Diesel.
And
I’m sorry, the guy loves D&D. He looks like he has never skipped an arm or
leg day in his life and still his favorite pastime is one of the most heavily
nerd-approved of all time. And because the Street Shark executives somewhere along the line had the
good instinct to hire one of the fastest, most furious Suuuuuuper-mans
ever…I’ll go easy on the review.
We
begin on a dark, moonlight night in Fission City at the site of a long-abandoned
government facility. Seems someone is very keen on getting into the place.
Our
trespasser is Dr. Robert Bolton, scientist, a dedicated family-man to four
teenage-ish boys, and a man of high morals. Whom he is seeking in this unused
facility is a man by the name of…
…who
is making like Fish Tank Kings here. Either that or he’s got his own Sea World
starter-kit.
But
no, it turns out he’s experimenting on them. And whatever those experiments
are, it is something the good Dr. Bolton can’t conscience continuing.
Unfortunately Paradigm tosses Bolton…to the sharks.
Sorry.
Make that “across the room. Then he has robot arms give experimental
evolutionary shots to two of the tanked creatures which then expand out of
their tanks and apparently die.
This
upsets Dr. Bolton so much that he vows to stop Paradigm…and why do heroes do
that? Why don’t they just leave quietly and go tell the police?
And
since he is staying, Paradigm decides he has other users for Doc Bolton,
including getting a cocktail of evolutionary stuff that will make his head
swim. Literally, as it were.
Whatever
dear Doc Bolton turns into we don’t see as he bursts from the lab after
transforming.
As
for Paradigm, he steals Bolton’s watch from the floor and then turns around to
find those “dead” creatures aren’t quite so dead…
Meet
the Bebop and Rocksteady of the Street Sharks universe: Slobster and Slash. I
am not making those names up. Slobster. I need to say it one more time.
Slobster. There. I’m over it.
Next
morning, student Lena Mack asks Paradigm if he has seen Dr Bolton, mentioning
that she’s about to call his sons. Paradigm seems to delight in an idea asking
her to…
…yeah
we know where this is going already. How many sons does he have again? Four!
Yup.
So
here they all are, introduced so sloppily that we barely get all their names.
Which of course won’t matter soon as they will get new “code names” after they
are turned into grotesque giant landsharks.
And
this sets us up for a race as each one uses their unique talents at motocross,
skateboarding, rollerblading off a building while wearing a parachute and….
…owning
a jet pack (??? How is this a skill?) to beat the others to their own doom.
Once
at the plant, they notice Paradigm has their dad’s watch on too and are about
to throw down when suddenly…
Slobster
and Slash take the boys to the evil scientist’s lab...
...where they are strapped
down and given special injections.
The
boys appear dead, so Paradigm has the monsters flush them into the…you guessed
it…city’s water reclamation system.
Meanwhile,
Lena has gotten worried because neither the doc nor his sons have contacted her
back yet. She sends fellow lab assistant Bends out to look for them, which in
my mind would lead to him also getting experimented on. I mean there’s a pattern
emerging that anyone involved with Paradigm seems to get a shot of genetic
messer-upper stuff.
The
boys have washed up somewhere else and appear to be not dead, which is great
because a series of TV shows and comics based around four dead teenagers would
not be big sellers. (although I could see the ad copy reading “With ACTUAL rigor
mortis IN-ACTION”)
The
quadro are starving so they head to the nearest hot dog vendor where they
unexpectedly transform into monstrous shark-human hybrids…
Meet
Jab – lazy Hammerhead with a
penchant for boxing and mechanics, Streex
– ladies’ man and Tiger Shark who loves long walks on the beach (get that image
in your head) rollerblading, parachuting, snowboarding and playing the drums, Ripster – a Great White Shark acting as
both leader and an inventor, and Big
Slammu – our Whale Shark, football jock/skateboarder who likes to break new ground with
his fists.
All
this transforming has the boys powerfully hungry, so they eat the hot dog
vendor.
Ha!
Sorry…I meant the hot dog vendor’s inventory. I liked my idea better. Man-eating
killer man-sharks sounds about right, know what I mean?
Either way, their
lawless actions cause the police to quickly arrive and the boy-sharks jump into a
nearby pond to hide.
And
surface miles away by coming up in the middle of a paved road in the middle of
a city next to an accident. The chaps hear the cries of an April O’Neil
wanna-be and quickly mount a rescue.
A
word about destruction of public property: in any city in the US of A, the
Street Sharks would be a menace. The destruction of paved roads through their preferred
method of travel would bankrupt city coffers in little time and annoy citizens
to the extreme. This is something you would never see the Turtles doing.
Anyway,
they rescue the woman (causing street closures and thousands of dollars in road
work).
Its
about this point that Bends runs into the transformed Bolton boys and he
appears understandably uneasy to be trapped in a car with the transformed man-eaters.
I mean look at all those sharp teeth!
They
decide to try to lose the cops in a crowded fairgrounds which leads to the
introduction of their groan-inducing catch-phrase…
*cringes*
…ow,
that hurts. And that poor kid looks like he is crossing his feet in an effort
not to pee his pants out of fear.
The
four-pack of shark mutants are attacked by Slobster, Doc Paradigm and Slash,
which isn’t as exciting as you think. It is rendered pretty badly and looks
confusing as it involves some of large totem poles at the fair that Slobster lobs
at them.
The
sharks easily toss them back the bad guy’s way.
Followed
by the teaser for next issue, Bends hears an odd mechanical screeching that
ends up being…
…the
military in super-fast, shark-proof tanks! Not like shark tanks, but you know –
tanks that you use to attack sharks with. I’m not explaining this right. Here's a picture:
It’s
not a good issue.
I
mean that in terms of setting up the characters in any real sense. We have
motivations for the boys and the villain in a general sense, I suppose. But the individual sharks-guys
don’t really stand out from one another. They are generic and when you are trying not to be also-rans in a genre where there is already a leader and plenty of imitators, being generic gets you lost in the crowd.
This was the Street Shark's
three-issue mini series debut and more should have been done to make each one
unique. Instead they concentrated on packing in all the characters from the
show.
This
three-issue mini was followed by a regular comic series that lasted a paltry
three issues too. At that point the Street Sharks were fed a tank of compressed
air and shot from the crows nest of a sinking boat.
And
they didn’t get to eat any of the toy execs who ripped off the Turtles before it happened, which is the real shame.
Slobster. *smh w/ faceplam*
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