Hey, dudes > It’s Mutant mania

The hottest things to come out of a shell since Aesop’s tortoise passed the hare, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will be off and running tonight when their first feature film debuts in Bangor and across the nation.

Turtle fans — an excitable crowd in any case — have been humming with anticipation of their off-beat heroes hitting the big screen, and cash registers are jingling to the same tune.

“They’ve been cleaning out my stock,” said Arlie Adams, owner of The Wizard of Comics, a Bangor store specializing in comic books and related paraphernalia. Adams says his patrons have made a run on Turtle books, T-shirts, posters, role-playing games and the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles novel — anything that bears an image of the mutant fab four.

If the movie is a hit, Adams says, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fever will rise still higher: “Turtle fans are going to get a little crazy.”

For those who are out of step with the world of comic books and cartoons, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are a quartet of oversized reptiles who speak teen, watch television and fight evil with the martial arts of the Orient.

Westbrook native Kevin Eastman and partner Peter Laird created the turtles in 1984 as a black-and-white parody of the Daredevil Comics. The mixture of hip humor and old-fashioned heroics caught on immediately. By 1987, the Turtles had been transformed into a television cartoon series, with toys and a whole battery of marketing merchandise in tow; along the way the campy reptiles became superheroes.

“The original Turtles were a parody. Then it sort of got a life of its own beyond the parody,” Adams says. While some older teens who made the comic books popular look down on the softer cartoon series, he says, the cartoon has brought up a new generation of Turtle fans who are now graduating to the more violent and less reverent print Turtles.

The word among Turtle fans is that the new movie will be true to the original comic books, filled with flips, punches and martial arts, and spiced with satire. Adams says that should be ideal for Turtle fans like his daughter, a 9-year-old who just got her yellow belt in karate.

“A lot of the Turtle fans tend to be more active kids — some of them are skateboarders, others are good in school, some do other things. But they tend to be the active type,” he said.

While the movie “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” may not have the broad base of appeal that made “Batman” last summer’s runaway hit, Adams says that the Turtles may end up converting some of the adults who think they are just along for the ride.

“The Turtles are cool,” he says. “They have a cool attitude. They play pinball. They love pizza.”