The History Of Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit

I usually do something for Thanksgiving, but honestly, after 16 years I’m not sure what to add. There’s always new Christmas music and specials, but Thanksgiving specials now tend to lean towards the food and not the origins. It’s not hard to do a search for Thanksgiving posts I’ve done in the past, including specials. Some of those videos might actually still work! Maybe. This year I decided to do something different, which may be a relief to my non-American readers. Plus I was never heavy into Thanksgiving, important as it is to US history.

So…YouTube recommends the above video, or rather a recent repost by The Line, a YouTube animation channel without the closing credits. Well forget that. Give me more of that rockin’ intro, and I’ve made clear that I love my suit-up transformations. So I was going to make it a Daily Video and call it a day, but then I watched the documentary by the animation group for the short. Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit wasn’t just showing off. It was a passion project based on the creator’s history watching the same cartoons growing up that I did. It’s probably why I gravitated to it so much, as apparently have many others.

This sent me down a…pun totally intended…rabbit hole into the short. Not only was work put into the intro, but they made a whole experience for it. Like, there’s a lot of effort in this, and me being me, I just have to show this stuff off. Note that there is occasional cursing in the documentary.

At this point I was expecting them to say they made the porn for it. That I did not look up. I did, however, go hunting for the “UK edit”, a level of detail the project didn’t need but was totally welcome. In case you missed it, in the 1980s the UK had issues with the word “ninja” for reasons I can even begin to speculate about because certain levels of insanity are beyond me. So if the show had aired over there they’d have to change the name.

Creating a whole channel for the sake of the gag? Nice. There are other cool intros in there, probably other inspirations for this one, and some gameplay footage to really sell the channel.

The little details are amazing, but with the studio being from England they clearly knew to include them. The frog guy’s nunchucks formed from the staff are edited out with a “clip” of him that would be elsewhere in the episode, leaning on his tech skills. Yes, the UK also had issues with nunchucks. I don’t get it. The change in the logo reveal to a fancy fade-in to cover the “ninja” part with “mega” is also a nice touch, which Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles also did. I would show you but Nickelodeon already ruined my Ninja Turtles intro retrospective by blocking all of it was I was putting the article series together. Thanks a lot, Paramount! The Line did make their own Ninja Turtle short.

Back on topic, they talked about a VR game. Well, there’s a trailer…

…and footage of the game from Only VR. Sorry for the presentation, but it’s usually the only way to record that kind of footage.

And for the animation nerds, a shot breakdown.

So ace job, Wesley Lewis and his team at The Line. You guys did something amazing. Now give us the full episode, or even better–a series. Check out more of their animation work on their YouTube channel.