Michelangelo's Review

MIKEY. LOVE. MIKEY. Especially here. Greg Cipes, who I believe also played Beast Boy in Teen Titans, was the best choice for voice actor ever.

Michelangelo, also commonly referred to as 'Mikey', is the youngest of the four (in order of Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and then himself), and is the most easy-going out of all of them. Unlike the other three who are in constant need of some level of control, Mikey is completely fluid and extremely adaptable. Much more so than his siblings, I would even say, which can be a real advantage since it makes him completely unpredictable in a fight. Of course, he's also got the IQ of mustard, so he's not particularly a massive threat either. There's not much that makes him get overly upset, besides the likelihood of his family being hurt.

At first glance it doesn't really look like Mikey is all that necessary in battle. Like Donatello, his fighting skill is... not as impressive as Raph and Leo's. This doesn't mean that he's a pushover, of course. I myself would hate to have to go up against his nun-chucks. Those things can SMART, let me tell you. However, now that I have a new appreciation for him, I realize that he's actually pretty vital to the group, and I don't just mean combat-wise. When things get too serious, he's there to lighten the mood. When someone is feeling down, he's there to cheer them up. He's the guy who is there for you when you feel like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders. For a family who grew up in the sewers out of fear of being slapped onto a table and dissected because you're different, having someone there to make you laugh is a huuuuuge deal. Mikey's role is very important to the family, and keeps them together when things seem to difficult. The funny thing is that he probably isn't even aware of it himself. He probably really is spacey enough to not realize how important he is to the family. Heck, they might not even realize it themselves.

Anyway, in the 1987 series, the one I grew up with, Mikey was probably the most noticeable out of all four with his surfer-dude way of speaking. As far as I can recall, he was the coolest out of all four of them since he always had some neat phrase to use. I think a lot of kids picked up on his slang when we went to school. Those fads went out pretty quickly of course, as a lot of things do in school. But his reputation as the clown and goof-off has stayed with me after all this time, and his current incarnation lives up to his former ones.

What I'm really hoping for in regards to Mikey is an episode when he and the others really start to appreciate his natural disposition. I hope that at some point they write an episode where something happens and he becomes (temporarily) hardened towards things, so that his brothers who tease him about being an idiot can see how great he usually is, and thus so he can see that he's actually very much appreciated normally.

(I wanted a picture of Mikey and Kala together like I had for Leo and Raph and their respective beaus, but I couldn't find one. Sorrow of sorrows!)

I'd also really like to see a return of '87 Mikey's crush, Kala the Neutrino. I'll go more into the Neutrinos in a later post. All you need to know about Kala is that she's from Dimension X, and is an outspoken opponent of the Kraang's tyrannical rule. Not that she uses those words exactly. She's more on Michelangelo's wavelength when it comes to terminology. I have a strong feeling that at some point the turtles are going to end up in Dimension X, so it'd be super easy for Mikey to meet up with her. And even if they don't go there, with the introduction of (SPOILER ALERT) the Dimension Portal in episode seventeen, she could easily wind up in our world by accident.

So far I'm really enjoying Mikey and his little escapades that occur out in the corners of the screens. Sometimes I re-watch episodes just to see what he's doing because his antics make me laugh. Whoever writes and draws him are wonderful, as is his voice actor.