Tuesday 23 May 2023

Today Is...World Turtle Day

I wish the people who come up with the animals to have a National Day would pick some better animals but they have decided that it's Turtle's turn today so let's dig deep and see what we can do about the swimming version of a tortoise. 
To be honest i have been sitting here looking the blinking cursor for a few minutes and i'm coming up empty handed except for four Turtles, pizza eating Teenage Mutant Ninja ones or how they were known in the UK, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles to get around the strict violence in children's programming at the time.
Shouting 'cowabunga' and eating slices of pizza may not be typical of Turtles but where once they would be called Flippy or Snappy by parents who thought they were being original, now almost every Turtle purchased from a Pet Shop since the mid-80s would now be called either Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo or Michaelangelo which would really tick them off if they knew.
Would Michelangelo have painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling in such pain staking detail, spending four years laying on his back with a paintbrush trying to painstakingly capture the most absolute expression of beauty, creation and perfection imaginable only for hundreds of years later, kids would shout Cowabunga and hit each other with imaginary nun-chucks at the mention of his name.
In the cartoon's the turtles are named by their ninja teacher from a book on Renaissance art he found in the sewer but in real life the creators couldn’t come up with anything that sounded Japanese enough, so they named them after artists whose names conveniently ended with an 'O' and then ran out of them and went with Raphael instead.
Picasso dodged that particular bullet obviously.

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