Street Sharks - Sharkbite

Part 1 - Sharkbait

Since my last post of this show kind of sort of ended on a cliffhanger, I have to continue talking about this show or else the ghosts of cartoon sharks will haunt me in my sleep and suck on my bone marrow. God help me.

Oh, and very, very recently, this show became available for instant streaming from Netflix. Jawsome!

Although there's a very bitter voice inside of me going "Street Sharks is on Netflix but not
The Mask: The Animated Series? I hate everything." when I hear of this news.

This probably won't bode well if I say right off the bat that, out of all the posts I did in 2010, this show was one of the hardest to sit through. (the other being Captain Planet, but that goes without saying) At the risk of being totally insulting to a show that was a big portion of my childhood, I can safely say that Street Sharks was nowhere near as awesome as I thought I was when I was a kid and there's a pretty good reason why DiC is pretending they didn't make this when they freaking acknowledge Captain N. Some perspective here. Captain N is on DVD. This show isn't. Kind of makes you wonder.

But does that mean it's still not fun to watch? Hell no! I personally enjoy every stupid minute of this stupid lazy ripoff of a stupid show. After all, we live in a world where guilty pleasures exist and it's pretty cathartic to rip into things that bugged me even as a child. So to take another spin on the extreme, merchandise-driven, turtle-copying vehicle that is Street Sharks for a second time is just too much to pass up. I mean, for crying out loud, I'm talking about a show where one of the main characters mutates into a shark because the main villain tampered with a bag of popcorn. You can't hate this show because it's simply too dumb to hate.

But since this show does go in chronological order, follows a very coherent storyline from start to finish, and, again, I left the last post on a cliffhanger, if I want to talk about the time someone turns into a shark after eating popcorn (disclaimer: this totally happened in this show.), I'm gonna have to talk about this episode first.

So suspend all forms of disbelief when we dive into...

Sharkbite

Street Sharks- Sharkbait

There are some shows that just immediately open themselves up to mockery, immediately date themselves, and remain as testaments of bad ideas, of creative depravity, and just an overall willingness to piggyback off the success of others.

As you can probably guess from the fact that I'm opening this blog post with that kind of description, this show is one of them. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce one of the many TMNT knockoffs of the 90's, Street Sharks.

Produced by DIC Entertainment (who I noticed is appearing A LOT in this blog), it basically answered the question no person asked; "Hey, what if the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles weren't ninjas and they were sharks?". It even had a toyline in an attempt to compete with the TMNT toyline. Problem is, the fact that it was trying to compete with TMNT, a show that, at the peak of its popularity, had more merchandise and more fans than Pokemon (I'm dead serious, the TMNT craze was HUGE), Street Sharks was the equivalent of bringing a knife to an atomic bomb and planet-sized space station fight. It had 40 episodes but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who cared about this show.

Needless to say, it's now a show the TMNT fans point and laugh at, because frankly it deserves the laughter. To call it stupid would be an insult to other stupid shows like Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. See, that Sonic show was fun stupid. This is just stupid stupid.

I went with this show because, in some bizarre twist of fate, I actually watched this show and somehow didn't watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the show it was ripping off from. It wasn't until I was in college that I watched the 1987 version of TMNT and realized that wow, I was missing out on one of the most cracktastic awesome shows of all time and a part of my childhood was wasted watching pale knockoffs.

Yeah, they didn't even hide the fact that they're were stealing ideas from TMNT.

Okay, it'd be unfair to write this show completely as a knock-off. It did some things differently. For example, instead of the main villain having two dim-witted half-animal minions trying to capture or kill the main heroes, the main villain has three dim-witted half-animal minions. And instead of having an Archie series that lasted for a pretty long time, the Archie comic tie-in lasted like 6 issues. And the covers made this show look waaaaaay more badass than it really was.

In the actual show, the guy with the exosuit is a joke.

I figure the best way to cover this show would be to look at the first episode, which is, as always, the origin episode of the show. So grab a pizza burger, shout "Cowabunga!" "Jawsome!", and cheer for your favorite turtle shark, because this is...

Sharkbait