Anatomy of a Street Shark

Back in the early 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles exploded into the homes of children all over America. The show was awesome, giant green turtles who kick ass! All merchandising you can possible think of was created and sold to hungry fans wanting more and more giant anthropomorphic animal-human hybrid creatures!

this obviously led to the next logical step, copying it.

Among the top offenders are Creepy Crawlers, Biker Mice from Mars and my all-time least-favorite copycat: Street Sharks.

Instead of going on about why DIC Entertainment tried to copy the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, let’s just talk about the end result, an incredibly illogical, disjointed mess of a show that was only thrown together because they had a toyline they wanted to sell.

What makes up a Street Shark

Plenty of people could probably look at a picture of a Street Shark and figure out what it is at its base level, a guy with a shark head.

In the series, four brothers are kidnapped by a mad scientist and turned into half-shark freaks. The reason for this is never quite made clear. The evil guy already turned the four brothers’ dad into some hideous monster, so it’s not like he couldn’t have just killed these four brothers instead of giving them the power to stop him from evil-doing every week.

So these four brothers are turned into shark-men! Oh noz!!!

Let’s look at the details, and here is why pretty much NONE of it makes ANY sense…

Problem 1: The hands

Many less anatomically accurate cartoons opt to have all humans have 4 fingers instead of 5. Perfect examples: The Simpsons and Family Guy.

In this form, everyone has four fingers, there are no real exceptions (other than God on the Simpsons). Such cartoons make it clear from the beginning that nobody has 5 fingers, the world they live in is filled with 8-finger problems.

The Street Sharks seem to be having a problem where their world is filled with 10-finger problems, and they are 2-fingers short.

Let’s play a game, it’s called Count The Fingers!

Count: 5 fingers!

Count: 4 fingers..

Count: 5 fingers!

NO FINGERS

Notice the problem anywhere? It seems like the conversation went something like this in the early stages of the show’s development:

Person 1: Hey guy’s, I have a problem, I’m trying to concept what these shark guys should look like, but I’m not sure about the hands.

Person 2: Well we want them to hold things in their hands, so they should probably just have five fingers like they did when they were human.

The Douchebag in the room: Well, I dunno guys. Four fingers seems like what cartoons do, right? And they are going to be really big guys, so bigger fingers look cooler than dinky fingers!

Person 1: But it doesn’t make any sense, if we are going to give the shark guys 4 fingers, shouldn’t the humans have 4 fingers too for consistency?

The Douchbag in the room: Who cares?! We already have them swimming through solid ground like it’s water!

Person 2: Good point. Just go with four fingers, douchebag is right, it looks cooler.

Even the Ninja Turtles had SOMETHING to back up the fact that some turtles have three toes.

Problem 2: Teeth and the Digestive System of a Shark

This is a diagram of the anatomy of a shark:

As far as I can see, there’s nothing there that says anything about being able to eat or process metal, cement, rocks or any other non-edible substances.

I think this is closer to what the creators of Street Sharks thought the inside of a shark looked like:

In the show the Street Sharks can be seen swimming through the street (thus their name! OMG!). In order to do this great feat, the sharks eat through the ground while at the same time kicking with their arms and legs, creating a swimming-like effect.

This must mean their teeth are made of magic, and their bodies poop seconds after eating, because there’s no way they could get more than a few feet without their stomachs EXPLODING from the massive amounts of non-digestible matter being launched into it at like 15 miles per hour.

In closing:

Now I know most of you at this point are saying to yourselves, “Why is this guy even wasting the time to point out how stupid some cartoon was?”

There are two reasons,

1. Even though Street Sharks was a poor, half baked idea from the start, they gave us a powerful word that I use every day,

2. Street Sharks will never be as awesome as the original badass anthropomorphic team of crime fighters, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Therefore I must resort to a bit of delightful childishness:

NINJA TURTLES RULE! STREET SHARKS SUCK!

Street Sharks can SUCK IT.