Post by serpentnight on Feb 11, 2022 19:12:00 GMT
I’ve been looking into something recently for a while about a piece of media that turned up a few years ago. It has to do with the somewhat infamous Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles production The Mystery of the Cliffs, which has some unanswered questions about it that make for interesting reading/listening/whatever.
It is not exactly a quality piece of Turtles media, but it’s possibly the most obscure example of one because it looks like to me no physical fan copies exist. Its credits note its production year as 1992 but no one I’ve talked to in various TMNT groups across social media had ever heard of it before it surfaced on Youtube around 2019. Some of its notoriety spread thanks to YT personality Phelous (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsR15xsT32g) who overviewed it in his comical style but neither he nor anyone else I’ve seen comment on it seems to know anything about it or it’s background that you can’t learn from watching the video.
Similar to the 1990 production Operation Blue Line it’s basically a PSA, this time pertaining to heritage sites in the United States and was sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Like in -Blue Line the voice cast of the then current animated series contributed to it. The suits however appear to be from The Coming Out of Their Shells Tour and it includes a musical sample composed by John Du Prez for the 1990 movie. Unlike -Blue Line however, which received a limited VHS release, -Cliffs seems to have never been distributed publicly. Google searches have uncovered no images of marketed VHS tapes and I’ve had it listed under ‘Saved Searches’ on my ebay account for nearly two years now but have not had a single hit. Maybe there was a legal issue over the use of the music from the first movie. Maybe the franchise seemed flatline after the third movie tanked in theatres; who knows.
Obviously though a physical copy has to exist somewhere. The project made it through the editing phase at least and there had to be something to upload to YT. But what complicates things is the original YT post has been taken down. I’ve managed to find its URL from digging up an old Facebook post I made about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35_UCzaDNSw&t=38s) but that isn’t helpful on telling me the name of the channel, which I didn’t think at the time to take a note of. I tried the Wayback Machine but no screenshots were found.
-Cliffs has since resurfaced on the YT channel “venomouscarnage” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpvcIKuE1J0&t=647s). The channel doesn’t provide any contact info but the moderator commented on the -Cliffs vid that he “found it online and downloaded”. I suspect that he’s referring to the original YT post and probably doesn’t know anything more.
I haven’t had much luck looking into the names in the credits. The only one on IMDB that seems to stand out is the writer/director Jacques Guérin. He at least has a page on the site (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0350217/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1) and most of his credits are of French productions. What’s interesting is that he is listed as contributing to the third season of Counterstrike (1990-93) a French/Canadian production made primarily for American consumption, thus connecting him to a North American production roughly the same time that -Cliffs was in the works. This does really lead to anything though and he hasn’t had any credits since 1996 so it appears he’s either retired or deceased. No contact info available to my knowledge.
Not much more to say on my end. There is an “Atlantic Video” named in the credits and I’ve contacted the proprietor of an Atlantic Video based in Florida, confirming it is not the same one. I sent emails asking about -Cliffs to Surge Licensing Inc. (the licensing company responsible for almost all things TMNT at the time) and the U.S. Department of Land Management but not surprisingly I haven’t heard back from either of them. I’ve thought about contacting Cam Clarke and the other voice cast members but decided not to since their contributions would have been in a sound stage and probably wouldn’t know anything about where copies of the production were sent.
If anyone finds this interesting please comment on anything you can think of that I might have missed.
It is not exactly a quality piece of Turtles media, but it’s possibly the most obscure example of one because it looks like to me no physical fan copies exist. Its credits note its production year as 1992 but no one I’ve talked to in various TMNT groups across social media had ever heard of it before it surfaced on Youtube around 2019. Some of its notoriety spread thanks to YT personality Phelous (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsR15xsT32g) who overviewed it in his comical style but neither he nor anyone else I’ve seen comment on it seems to know anything about it or it’s background that you can’t learn from watching the video.
Similar to the 1990 production Operation Blue Line it’s basically a PSA, this time pertaining to heritage sites in the United States and was sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Like in -Blue Line the voice cast of the then current animated series contributed to it. The suits however appear to be from The Coming Out of Their Shells Tour and it includes a musical sample composed by John Du Prez for the 1990 movie. Unlike -Blue Line however, which received a limited VHS release, -Cliffs seems to have never been distributed publicly. Google searches have uncovered no images of marketed VHS tapes and I’ve had it listed under ‘Saved Searches’ on my ebay account for nearly two years now but have not had a single hit. Maybe there was a legal issue over the use of the music from the first movie. Maybe the franchise seemed flatline after the third movie tanked in theatres; who knows.
Obviously though a physical copy has to exist somewhere. The project made it through the editing phase at least and there had to be something to upload to YT. But what complicates things is the original YT post has been taken down. I’ve managed to find its URL from digging up an old Facebook post I made about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35_UCzaDNSw&t=38s) but that isn’t helpful on telling me the name of the channel, which I didn’t think at the time to take a note of. I tried the Wayback Machine but no screenshots were found.
-Cliffs has since resurfaced on the YT channel “venomouscarnage” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpvcIKuE1J0&t=647s). The channel doesn’t provide any contact info but the moderator commented on the -Cliffs vid that he “found it online and downloaded”. I suspect that he’s referring to the original YT post and probably doesn’t know anything more.
I haven’t had much luck looking into the names in the credits. The only one on IMDB that seems to stand out is the writer/director Jacques Guérin. He at least has a page on the site (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0350217/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1) and most of his credits are of French productions. What’s interesting is that he is listed as contributing to the third season of Counterstrike (1990-93) a French/Canadian production made primarily for American consumption, thus connecting him to a North American production roughly the same time that -Cliffs was in the works. This does really lead to anything though and he hasn’t had any credits since 1996 so it appears he’s either retired or deceased. No contact info available to my knowledge.
Not much more to say on my end. There is an “Atlantic Video” named in the credits and I’ve contacted the proprietor of an Atlantic Video based in Florida, confirming it is not the same one. I sent emails asking about -Cliffs to Surge Licensing Inc. (the licensing company responsible for almost all things TMNT at the time) and the U.S. Department of Land Management but not surprisingly I haven’t heard back from either of them. I’ve thought about contacting Cam Clarke and the other voice cast members but decided not to since their contributions would have been in a sound stage and probably wouldn’t know anything about where copies of the production were sent.
If anyone finds this interesting please comment on anything you can think of that I might have missed.
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