Originally published in: TMNT New Animated Adventures #14
Publication date: August 13, 2014
Story: Landry Q. Walker
Art: Marcelo Ferreira
Colors: Heather Breckel
Letters: Shawn Lee
Edits: Bobby Curnow
“Mikey & the Machine”
Summary:
In the kitchen, Leo and Don are giving Mikey a hard time
about his lack of focus. Mikey takes it
personally and storms out of the lair.
Raph, of all Turtles, tells his brothers that they were being too hard
on him.
On the rooftops, Mikey is pouting when Baxter Stockman
attacks him in his remote-controlled Turtle Catcher 3000. The big tentacled robot grabs Mikey up and
stuffs him inside its barrel-shaped body.
Down in an alley, the other Turtles are looking for Mikey
so they can apologize. Suddenly, they
get a call on their T-Phone from Mikey, telling them that he’s trapped in a
robot. Right on cue, the Turtle Catcher
3000 bursts through a brick wall and begins pounding on them. Leo and Raph start to fight back, but their
attacks rattle Mikey inside. They’re
helpless to destroy the machine from the outside without hurting their brother.
Mikey then calls Donnie and tells him that he can
deactivate the robot from inside if Donnie just guides him through it. Donnie doesn’t think Mikey has the focus to
follow his instructions, but concedes that there’s no other choice. Donnie begins trying to tell Mikey which
wires to cut, but soon overthinks the situation and can’t come to a consensus. He then gets smacked by the robot and loses
his T-Phone.
On his own, Mikey has to decide which wire is the most
important. He eventually comes to the
conclusion that ALL the wires are important and pulls them all out. The robot deactivates and releases
Mikey. The Turtles compliment their
brother on his focus and Mikey begins to explain how he solved the problem…
until he’s distracted by a penny on the sidewalk. Ha ha ha.
Turtle Tips:
*This story is continued from “The Swarm”. The story continues in TMNT New Animated Adventures #15.
*Given Baxter’s face on the robot’s TV monitor head,
this story has to take place before the season two episode, “The Lonely
Mutation of Baxter Stockman”.
Review:
This was the stronger story in New Animated Adventures
#14, I think. It has a lesson to be
learned, yeah, but it works the moral or whatever into the plot a bit better
than other attempts at the same formula.
Sure, it’s convenient that every major conflict the Turtles encounter just
happen to thematically connect to something they were personally struggling
with just minutes beforehand, but hey, the cartoon is guilty of that shtick,
too.
The comics, both from the US and UK, seem to treat Baxter
as a bit more of a menace than the cartoon ever has. I don’t mean “threat”, because his schemes
are always shallow and easily overcome, but “menace” in that he certainly
bothers the Turtles with his giant robots and Stockman-pod armor much more in
the comics than in the show. It’s
good to see more of him, don’t get me wrong, but it’d be nice if he would do
something other than just pop up in a robot at random.
“Mikey & the Machine” is the 8-page B-story of the
issue, so there isn’t much more content to discuss in something so thin. Between the giant parasitic wasp and the
Turtle Catcher 3000, this was sort of an all-Baxter issue (well, he DID create
the wasps, after all, even if it was going solo). For a guy whose
inventions fuel the conflict of both stories, he hardly participates in them
directly.
Grade: C (as in, “Can’t wait until New Animated
Adventures catches up with season 2 of the cartoon and maybe we can start
seeing all those one-off toy-based villains that the season was inundated with
show up for more stories”.)
