Since when were ninjas so bad at hiding?

by Thom Yee

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows images courtesy of Paramount Pictures

I don’t know what kids today do after school, what with their STEM programs and their social responsibility and their parents who actually pay attention to them, but back in my day, a lot of us kids took martial arts classes after school, and no matter what our parents may have thought about us getting good exercise or developing a hobby built on a system of discipline, respect, and honour, most of us were only taking those classes for one reason: To beat up other kids.

The thing you have to understand about being a kid in the early ‘90s is that we were coming up only in the afterglow of the truly great action movies of the ‘80s, and so that spirit of almost mindless killing was slowly being eroded while also being finely tempered against the more spiritual elements of what we assumed was the Eastern philosophies of violence as a last resort.  For kids who took martial arts, that usually still meant a lot of fighting, just not fighting with the intent to kill. Continue reading →