While this summer’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film reboot cost tens of millions of dollars, the latest homage to our favorite heroes in the half shell is decidedly more low budget.
Producer Mike Matei of Cinemassacre Productions has taken 1987’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and reanimated the intro using Mario Paint for Super Nintendo. The intro remake also includes an impressive true-to-era cover of the theme song by video game music cover and video creator James Ronald.
The remake is a pretty impressive feat, seeing as Matei animated the intro by drawing freehand frame-by-frame on an animation program released more than 30 years ago.
After the video, Matei explained the Mario Paint program is controlled using a computer mouse. It took him anywhere from 30 minutes to one hour to draw each frame, and he used a separate screen with the real intro frames as a reference. Matei worked on the project from the end of July 2016 to December, taking a little more than four months to complete the animation.
He even included a 47-minute-long video of him drawing one arduous frame. Considering how long we spend playing video games or binge-watching Netflix, an hour doesn’t seem like much, but listening to this intro music for days on end could surely turn into a personal level of hell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeXWzLPCqZE
Nonetheless, both the intro and theme cover look relatively legit compared to the original animation.
Matei wrote in the video description that he’s open to making more Mario Paint intros for ’80s and ’90s cartoons—perhaps Christmas is coming early for all you retrophiliacs out there?