Last night, NBC Â aired a historic, all-remote episode of Saturday Night Live, with a full run of sketches from performers who, due to the novel coronavirus, couldn’t actually be in the same place. And the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles played a significant role, for some reason.
In the sketch “Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles,” we see a bleak and strange animated rendition of the turtles grow up to be, largely, unlikeable and sad adults. I’m not sure how I feel about it.
It’s certainly one of the more distinct attempts at humour I’ve seen on SNL in a long time, and the Whole Foods gag made me laugh. Animation is probably a pretty strong medium during the age of social distancing for stuff like this”you can make something ambitious without people needing to be in the same room together. And this has a sort of Adult Swim late-night energy to it, though that might just come from the fact that it doesn’t have the laughs of a studio audience behind it.
What other bleak parodies does Saturday Night Live have for us next? Who can say. Poor Shredder. Â