A Trip Through Time

It was all sparked by a cheesy birthday gift. The video was about a 30 minute commercial for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles “newly” formed rock band. With that group, they hosted a stage show and put out an album. The 1990 debut album, “Coming Out Of Our Shells,” was to introduce to the world the amazing subterranean sounds of the green fab 4.

I watched the video with great amusement. The acting was corny, and the clips of the stage show performances were just awful. Only a five year old would enjoy the show. And there were several five-year-old boys shown in the audience, going bonkers over the experience.

Through that video, I heard snippets of the songs. I remembered being young, and pestering my family with requests to go to Pizza Hut (this album was only available at the restaurant, and not sold in record stores!), and make the required purchase in order to secure my copy of the cassette tape. I thought hard, trying to remember if they offered a CD at the time – not that it would have mattered, as we didn’t own a CD player. But I did get my cassette tape, and I did listen to it enough times that the songs sunk into my brain.

I started searching around, wondering if there were a CD available, how much it would cost me to get one today? eBay and Amazon didn’t get me very far. Seems that most folks who knew about the band didn’t have high opinions of it. I knew I could dig out my old cassette tape, and convert it to MP3’s, but a CD would give me a cleaner digital transfer. After trying a few different search terms, I finally hit upon it. A site that offered me downloads of the MP3s. I trained my favorite Firefox plugin, downthemall! onto the site, and in a few minutes I had my own collection. I don’t know the source of these songs (from tape or CD), but they sound pristine and perfect to me! And since I still own that old tape, I don’t feel terribly guilty for taking advantage of somebody else’s efforts to transfer them to MP3 for me.

So then came the unexpected part. I listened to the album. I hadn’t heard it for years. But suddenly, I was a young man again, reliving a moment of childhood when those four ninja brothers were totally awesome! The music took me back to a place for a moment, and I enjoyed being there. Oh, the songs themselves are not all that great. But the feeling and the moment they took me to was nice.

So thanks for the birthday gift that started my journey to my past! To quote Master Splinter, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze… “The past returns, my son.”

2 thoughts on “A Trip Through Time”

  1. So, did the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ever make it on the Silly ‘ol Ryan show? You should have posted the music on here to greet our 2 visitors!

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  2. Ah, the Silly Ol’ Ryan show! As I see it, I was just ahead of my time. I was making “podcasts” before they were invented or there was any good way to distribute them.

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