Listen Up: Have You Ever Seen a Turtle Get Down?

In 1991, Vanilla Ice had some tough decisions to make. Really, how do you follow up the release of an album like To the Extreme, which not only spawned the hit single “Ice Ice Baby” but also became the fastest-selling hip-hop record of all time? Apparently, the answer is you both appear in and record a song for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

I guess the answer could also be “release a fraudulent, ghost-written autobiography," but Ice by Ice didn't figure into my Friday night plans quite the way “Ninja Rap” did, so I haven't been obsessing over it all weekend—we'll save it for another time.

“Ninja Rap,” though—“Ninja Rap”! I had never heard of the song until a friend of my boyfriend's gave him a used copy of the VHS “video single” for his birthday a couple years ago; until then, I'd never actually heard of a “video single,” either, but apparently both are Real Things. The tattered cardboard sleeve of the cover displays the smirky-faced rapper flanked on all sides by the Turtles themselves, all throwing up hand-signals with varying numbers of amphibian fingers. Ice is wearing a white T-shirt with some kind of writing on it that may or may not be Russian; he's also wearing a couple of gold chains and his hair is styled in some unbelievable way that I can't fully discern because a faded price tag is stuck on the cover, fully obscuring his coiffure, and I'm afraid of marring the twenty-year-old packaging in an attempt to scratch it off. The price on the dirty white sticker reads “200¢,” which may or may not be the original retail price; I'm not sure where the tape was first purchased from, although it seems to assume that it was a store with a not-quite-fully functioning tagger gun.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time admiring the tape from afar from its position propped up on a knick-knack shelf in our dining room until Friday night, when we had some friends over and just enough beers and sangria had been consumed that watching the “Ninja Rap” video single seemed like the only natural thing to do. Fortunately, ours is the only apartment occupied by people under the age of 30 that contains a VCR player in the metro Atlanta area, so this was something that could actually happen. Everyone gathered around in the living room; I removed the VHS tape from its ancient sleeve and inserted it into the VCR, plastic ground against plastic, the machine groaned, the tracking (remember tracking?!) adjusted itself and then we were promptly regaled with the most excruciatingly dull six minutes of music involving a multi-platinum artist, four grown men in turtle suits and a keytar player in a mini-skirt ever committed to tape.

Having never seen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, it had to be explained to me that the content of the “video single” was actually just an edited version of a scene in the movie where the Turtles are fighting some similarly-mutated forest creatures (man, did this series make irresponsible toxic-waste disposal sound fun or what) in a flimsily-built warehouse, during which they bust through some construction-paper wall into a large, adjacent room where Vanilla Ice happens to be performing for a suitably grungy collection of fans who look like they might actually live full-time in said warehouse. Maybe it's some kind of charity event, some community outreach something or other? No idea!

All that's for sure is that Vanilla Ice's stage prowess is enough to lull the battle-crazed Turtle minds into funky submission; while their enemies are left to, I guess, just get bored and wander off to parts unknown and grow fifth legs or whatever, the heroes in a half-shell mingle amongst the crowd, break-dance a little, but mostly stand in awe of what's happening on stage, which happens to be some of the absolute worst dancing I have ever seen performed by an ostensible entertainment professional. God only knows how many 1991-1992 school year elementary school talent shows were infiltrated by ten-year-olds copping Ice's moves from this scene; whatever the number, the exact same amount of elementary school talent shows likely had to be temporarily shut down thanks to ten-year-olds copping Ice's moves from this scene, because the dance mostly just involves a whole lot of pelvic thrusting. A whole lot! Also, lots of weird stiff arm movements. It's like the choreographer watched all the Oompa Loompa dance scenes from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and then was like, “Yeah, yeah, let's make it like that, but hornier.”

The chorus is, of course, “Go Ninja, go Ninja, go!” repeated over and over again, which I guess is supposed to be some kind of battle cry for the Turtles whenever they decide to wander back into the fight they just wandered out of? But coupled with Ice's dancing, which really just amounts to his continually frustrated attempt to make brief, impassioned love with his cordless mic, it's kind of weird! I mean, regular ninjas don't even have sex, do they? And especially not the teenage mutant ones that also happen to be turtles? I guess that's why Ice thought they could use some encouragement.

And then there's the girl holding the keytar whose sole function seems to be having legs.

In addition to an extended performance of the song, what the “video single” offers is a brief interview with Vanilla Ice himself, during which he offers some insight into his songwriting process: “They sent me a script and everything telling me what was going on in the movie and they told me all about this whole scene and they had it wrote down and everything. They told me to write and make it Ice, so I did. Hyped it up and put the funky beats behind it, made it Ice. And they told me to keep it clean, you know, for the kids and everything, which is me anyway. So.”

Actually—that's all he offers. That, plus a seven-second a-capella performance of the song's chorus, is the extent of the interview portion; the whole “single” is just over six minutes long. And that's what baffles me the most—how was this even worth it? Did anyone enjoy this? I mean, I guess I can say for sure that at least one person in the world thought they might care enough to actually buy the thing (or at least steal it) just because somehow the copy wound up in our hands, and I wish I knew who it was, who owned it before shuttling it off to the used CD store where my boyfriend's friend worked and picked it up for free, so I could call and ask them so many questions: How old were you when you bought this? Who got it for you, or did you buy it yourself? Where did you get those two dollars? How excited were you? And how pissed were you when you watched it and it was just... that?

Maybe I'm all wrong; maybe this totally would have done it for any kid in 1991 with two bucks to spare and a certain amount of love for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and/or Vanilla Ice—or maybe the target audience was folks who loved Vanilla Ice but couldn't bear to sit through the other parts of the movie that didn't feature him, and couldn't be bothered to just fast-forward to the showdown scene? Either way, the period of time where “video singles” might have been considered an A-OK idea just seems strange and far-away; I guess it might have been a functional way to make some royalties cash and get videos out to fans of artists who'd likely never show up on MTV or VH-1, but the idea of it just seems so awkward and greedy. With a cassette single, at least, you could play through one side, flip it, play it, flip it, play it in an endless loop; but “video singles” had no side B, no easy way to sit and cycle through a near-endless loop. They weren't portable, they weren't mix-tapeable. They just seem really sad—so I guess it's no surprise they followed Ice himself into obscurity not long after. By the time I was making my own record-store purchases five or six years later, I don't remember seeing them at all.

Still, the lameness of the “video single” format is integral to the overall experience of watching “Ninja Rap.” The whole thing is on YouTube now, of course (including the rolling credits, which lists Vanilla Ice and his frequent collaborator Earthquake as writers, with “additional lyrics” by Todd W. Langen—which means these words are the work of three individual adults), but it's just not the same. To get the full sense of the strangeness of this thing, you really need to feel the weight of the VHS tape, feel the dog-eared cardboard corners with your own fingers, hear the rattling of the plastic spools when you shake it, fully consider the faces of the four grinning turtle and the dead-faced rapper. Hold it in your hands, look into their eyes; you can almost see the people inside.

Watch the entirety of the "Ninja Rap" video single: