After serious contemplation, I think my favorite cartoon growing up in the 80s was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There were a lot of cartoons to choose from, but the Turtles were my favorite. They were great characters, their show was just a lot of fun, and I loved the toyline, which had even more awesome mutants. I loved that there was this endless supply of funny, cool, and radical mutants to collect.

So I’m pretty excited to see the new live action Ninja Turtle movie, even if it threatens to be as soulless as Michael Bay’s Transformers.

Be brave, old friends; you will get through this

But there’s a dark side to my love for the Turtles as well, and that is my love for all of their crappy knock-offs too. Like all successful franchises, the Ninja Turtles spawned more than their fair share of crappy rip-offs. But whereas other companies can’t steal the Transformers without being obvious, it wasn’t that hard to make an action cartoon about anthropomorphic animal superheroes.

Join me after the jump for the best (or crappiest, depending on your point of view) Ninja Turtle knock-offs!

6. Battletoads

Turtles are always better than frogs

The original Ninja Turtles arcade game is one of the greatest video games of all times. An arcade in the 80s and 90s couldn’t really be considered an arcade if it didn’t have the Ninja Turtles game (or the X-Men game, for that matter). Because even back then, the Ninja Turtles were everywhere, not just in cartoons. So what’s a video game company supposed to do when you can’t use turtles? How about frogs! Or toads, I guess.

Three toads instead of four – Rash, Zitz and Pimple – were the stars of a pretty popular console game in 1991, a game that is infamous for an impossible to beat speed dash level. But they became popular anyway, spawning a few more games, and a crossover with Double Dragon at one point. The Battletoads even managed to get one episode of a cartoon show made, but their hopes of success popped as easily as the facial bunions for which they were named. Now the Battletoads are stuck just sort of hoping for some kind of reboot in the modern era, a demand that has been made by no less than Forbes magazine, if Wikipedia is to be believed.

5. Wild West C.O.W.-boys of Moo Mesa

Just because you can acronym does not mean you should

If ninjas + turtles was a success, surely that sort of combination of two things would be a hit no matter what, right? That had to be the hope of whatever cocaine-fueled TV executive came up with the C.O.W.-boys of Moo Mesa. On the surface, it was just a show with a bunch of anthropomorphic cows playing cowboy, but the series actually had an insane origin that involved an irradiated meteor that transformed normal cows into people, who then decided to base their way of life off the wild west. Because ‘mutants’ were cool at the time, and logic was not.

The C.O.W.-boys (for Code of the West, obviously) were Marshal Moo Montana, the noble leader,  The Dakota Dude, the strong, silent type, and The Cowlorado Kid, the smarmy young one. They fought evildoers who also stuck to the western theme, and helped mentor a little kid named Cody Calf. That’s how cartoons worked back then. Everybody had to have the young, impressionable ragamuffin onto which to impose important life lessons.

The C.O.W.Boys also rode horses. Because of course they damn well did.

4. Extreme Dinosaurs

That name is repetative

Four anthropomorphic animal-men who fight bad guys? Check! No girls? Check! Dinosaurs? Hells yes! The Extreme Dinosaurs (or Dino-Vengers) are as dyed in the wool as they come. In the toyline, they were a bunch of college kids turned into mutant dinosaurs, but in the cartoon show, they were aliens. Either works. It doesn’t matter. There’s T-Bone the T-Rex, Stegz the Stegosaurus, Bullzeye the Pteranodon, and Spike the Triceratops. There was also an Anklyosaurus named Hard Rock, which is cool, because that’s my favorite dinosaur!

The Extreme Dinosaurs fought the villainous Raptors, who were all raptors, because Jurassic Park. The bad guys wanted to take over the world, the good guys fought them, and it was all just madness to varying degrees. Somehow, there were 52 episodes of that cartoon show, which means it was probably made under some kind of slave labor.

Also, the Extreme Dinosaurs were a spin-off of another brand later on this list. But first, more dinosaurs!

3. Dinosaucers

Not all puns are worthwhile

If you thought the Extreme Dinosaurs were cool (and of course you did), then you haven’t seen anything yet. Suffice to say, dinosaurs in general are cool enough to warrant multiple franchises. The Dinosaucers came first in 1987, and involved the battle between the heroic Dinosaucers and the evil Tyrannos, because every single god damned cartoon in the 80s had the good guy team and the bad guy team. It must have been written in stone somewhere! They all came to Earth from the planet Reptilon to wage their war here instead. Jerks.

The devil is in the details. The Dinosaucers and the Tyrannos weren’t just anthropomorphic dinosaurs, oh no, they also had gimmicks out the wazoo! First up, each character had their own personal flight craft, which resembled their dinosaur. You’d think that would be perfect for toys, but the show was cancelled before the toyline was ever even made. Second, the heroes could ‘dino-volve’ into the actual dinosaurs for an added boost of power, and they did so by pressing a button on the front of their outfits. The Tyrannos didn’t have this technology, but they did have a special ray-gun that could devolve anybody who was shot. It was incredibly complicated.

For some reason, the T-Rex, named Genghis Rex, was the leader of the bad guys, and the leader of the heroes was Allo, an Allosaurus. Nobody in the world prefers the lame Allosaurus to the badass T-Rex! Why would you make your show like that?!

Also, the Dinosaurcers had some human children friends called the Secret Scouts because, again, the rules of kiddie cartoons in the 80s were set in freakin’ stone.

2. Biker Mice from Mars

Dart board cartoon making

I find that one only has to look at the cartoons of an era to understand what pop culture was like. We’ve learned a bit about the 80s already. So behold the 90s in Biker Mice from Mars! Why mice? Why Mars? Who knows! But it’s probably the most ‘extreme’ concept some coked-up executive could come up with that guaranteed him more coke! Throttle, Modo and Vinnie were three rad mice dudes who rode motorcycles, because the people of Mars were hip to motorsports. Why the Curiosity Rover hasn’t found evidence of all these motorcycle-riding mice is beyond me.

They fled their home planet to Earth to escape/combat the Plutarkians, a bunch of evil aliens that wanted to use up all of Earth’s resources. Sounds diabolical enough. But again, why saving the planet fell to a bunch of alien, humanoid mice on motorcycles is anyone’s guess. But they did it, time and again, and now they live in infamy. That’s got to count for something.

Also, did you know they were rebooted into a web cartoon in 2006? What a world we live in.

Want to know what else was insane? The freakin’ 90s, man…check out this next entry.

1. Street Sharks

All sharks have six pack abs

The Street Sharks are my great geek shame. I loved the Street Sharks with a passion in the 90s. I loved them like I thought they were the second coming of the Ninja Turtles. I collected Street Shark action figures, I watched their cartoon show, I daydreamed about being a Street Shark, and I even used them in some of my creative writing projects for school. I…I don’t know what was wrong with me.

The Street Sharks were such a bald-faced attempt to recreate the Ninja Turtles with a ’90s attitude. One of them even had roller blades. Roller blades! They said things like ‘jawesome’. Oh man. It was a ridiculous time. The four Sharks were Ripster, Jab, Streex and Big Slammu, names that will likely haunt me for the rest of my days. Feel free to automatically assume their personalities based solely on their names.

They had a super-villain like Shredder, called Dr. Piranoid, who had his own mutant henchmen, like Killamari and Slobster. And there was a limited supply of other collectible mutant toys. My personal favorite was Moby Lick the killer whale mutant, because even as a young man, I could appreciate a good pun. And clearly this franchise was built on the backs of noble, hard-working puns.

The 90s were an interesting time in all of our lives. And if the Discovery Channel is ever looking for some filler material for Shark Week, they could do a lot worse than the Street Shark cartoon.

Or wait, I’ve got it: Sharknado vs. the Street Sharks!

Someone get me Syfy on the phone, now!

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