by Cian Hallinan

Christmas is coming up again and as far as I can tell there’s no clear must-have toy this year. Where are the Elmo’s and Buzz Lightyear’s of yesteryear? When I was about seven or eight years old, the crack of toys were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Or as us poor suckers over here on the East side of the Atlantic knew them, the Teenage Mutant HERO Turtles.

Man, I loved them. I really did. Would have killed for them. Killed bluntly and without stealth, for back in 1987 I wasn’t even aware of their connections to ninjitsu and feudal Japanese spies and assassins.

Apparently, the word ninja was too bellicose for us in the British Isles so, in a move that would have made Joseph Goebbels blush, the censorship boards in the UK and Ireland removed a noun redolent in Eastern mysticism, Japanese heritage and centuries of martial arts and replaced it with a generic Western term that simply meant ‘good’: HERO. Occidental moral absolutism replaced the complex shades and ambiguities of the turbid term ‘ninja’. If you can think of a finer example of Orientalism, well then get Edward Said on the blower and tell him. Oh no wait, he’s dead (an entirely non-ninja-related demise).

And that wasn’t the only change made to make the show more palatable to the blue-rinse set. The lyrics of the title song were excised of the gloriously nebulous word, resulting in lines such as "Splinter taught them to be fighting teens” as opposed to “Splinter taught them to be ninja teens” (fighting of course being better than ninja) and Michelangelo’s nunchakus were replaced with a grappling hook.

In fact all the turtles’ weapons were toned down and stripped of their relationship to the deadly arts (though apparently Bebop and Rocksteady’s laser guns were absolutely fine): their shurikens were phased out, Leonardo’s swords never left their scabbards and Raphael’s became nothing more than a means to climb up walls.

It was only in 2003 that the censorship boards, both here and in the UK, learned the lessons of the McQuaid years and reinstated the ninja back into the turtles. The comeback version featured the proper title given to them by their creators – Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird – and even had some violent elements, like actual fighting and bruising (though no blood).

To quote Potter Stewart, “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.” Ireland has always struggled with censorship. The very inception of the state in 1929 set off a celebration of independence that involved a “zeal in the cause of old-maidish prudery [that] achieved laughable, unimaginable, Platonic perfection.” It was only in the throes of national self-confidence and extremely high economic development here that the Turtles finally got back their throwing stars. Haven’t seen it since, but man I hope they fuck shit up…