YouTube personality Mike Matei created this truly impressive tribute animation using nothing but this 16-bit era Super Nintendo game!
For people of a certain age, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remains a beloved, if somewhat bizarre, pop cultural touchstone. So what happens when you combine that with the Super Nintendo, a similarly beloved retro artifact? Basically something like a nostalgia overdose.
▼ Geez, now I think I’m going to have to play this again!
Well, let’s offer our thanks to this devoted fan for a fond trip down memory lane. Matei, who’s a well-known fan of the iconic ’80s franchise and retro video games, created this impressive work of animation with determination, hard work, and a copy of the 1992 16-bit SNES masterpiece, Mario Paint, plus the help of musician James Ronald of Epic Game Music, who created the cover music for the video.
▼ Check out the video for yourself!
As you can see, the creative pair have lovingly, and somewhat obsessively, recreated the original intro sequence to the 1987 cartoon series with an almost distressing degree of fidelity using the drawing tool from Mario Paint to approximate each part of the opening.
For those not familiar with Mario Paint, a bit of an explanation. In 1992, this unique game stood apart from other console offerings in that it gave users the chance to use a mouse to create musical compositions and short (admittedly crude) animations. It might bear mentioning that the famous flash Internet cartoon, Homestar Runner, also got its start with a short made using Mario Paint.
So how much time did this take, you might be thinking to yourself? If you watch to the end of the video, Matei helpfully reveals the details surrounding this video’s inception. He explains that each frame took a whopping 30 minutes or more to create, a painstaking process that pushed the relatively simplistic functionality of the game to its technical limits.
“The way I did it was, I had the original cartoon intro on a television next to me, and then I paused the cartoon and would redraw each picture frame by frame.”
Now let’s take a look at the original opening sequence to get an idea of how impressive this labor of love truly is!
▼ Great, now this will be stuck in my head all day…
Not bad at all! While many of us that played Mario Paint game back in the day likely used the game to cruder, more scatological ends (ah memories), Matei’s work is really a sight to behold, especially to those of us with fond recollections of the turtles’ many teenaged antics and quips.
Source: Youtube/Cinemamassacre
Top image: Youtube/Cinemamassacre
Insert images: Rocketnews24, Youtube/Cinemamassacre