6 Ridiculous Kid-Friendly Adaptations of R-Rated Material

Rebuilt as a cyborg powered by baby food and justice, RoboCop brutally steamrolls his way through the criminal underworld while all manner of stomach-roiling gore explodes around him. A rapist gets shot in the penis, a man gets mulched into wet, quivering pieces by the artillery cannons of an evil walking tank, and Miguel Ferrer snorts lines of cocaine off of two sets of prostitute breasts before getting his kneecaps blasted apart and then blown up with a grenade.

In short, it is one of the finest motion pictures ever made.

The Kid-Friendly Adaptation:

The 1998 cartoon RoboCop: Alpha Commando throws all of that out the window and recasts RoboCop as a dime store Inspector Gadget trying to catch criminals with a healthy dose of hijinks, including one episode where he dresses up as a snowman to save Christmas:

And here he is going undercover in a Carmen Sandiego hat, disappearing so completely into his disguise that we almost didn't recognize him.

RoboCop, the dick-shooting, neck-stabbing, rocket-launching peace officer with the face of Buckaroo Banzai and the agility of the old Chinese shopkeeper from Gremlins, became a wisecracking slapstick goofball fighting crime with nets, a grappling hook, a glue gun, and a freaking ping pong paddle.

He also has a disposable-towel dispenser installed in his iron gauntlet, because apparently people take a lot of dumps in front of RoboCop.

Instead of the biting Reagan-age satire of the film that birthed him, RoboCop finds himself mired in increasingly ridiculous fantasy conflicts designed to sell action figures to children who have no idea who Ronald Reagan even was.

RoboCop seems to resolve each of these ridiculous situations by being even more ridiculous himself, clobbering the bad guys and saving the day on a jubilant wave of children's laughter. The show barely lasted a year, however, which seems to suggest (alongside the original film's two sequels, the live-action series, a previous cartoon series, and the impending reboot) that perhaps RoboCop should remain in the 1980s where he belongs.

The Kid-Friendly Adaptation:

The 1991 cartoon spinoff James Bond Jr. stars James Bond's teenage nephew (who for some reason is afforded the "Junior" title despite not actually being the superspy's son) trying to juggle his high school life with titanic battles against a bunch of iconic villains from the film series. However, every single villain has been "reimagined" to look like they all fell into a vat of 1990s toxic waste. Oddjob became a member of Run-D.M.C., for some reason:

The already ridiculous Jaws was made even more so by his subtle transformation into a He-Man villain:

And Dr. No became a Chinese zombie wizard with Dr. Claw gloves, because apparently they both went to the same medical school:

We understand that selling action figures to children is a huge business, but we have to wonder precisely what aspect of a middle-aged government assassin perpetually loaded with an equal amount of gin and STDs made the creators of James Bond Jr. see nothing but dollar signs. The end result is a weird mix of G.I. Joe and Scooby-Doo drowning in early '90s youth culture.

That isn't to say that Melvin doesn't get superpowers -- he totally gets atomic Hercules strength, which he uses to graphically dispatch the city's criminal element, including smashing a drug dealer's head with a weightlifting machine:

The Toxic Avenger (and all three of its sequels) are intensely violent to the point of being grotesque, and like any good independent horror/comedy without an official MPAA rating, there is loads and loads of nudity to bridge the gaps between the hellacious killings. There's even a sequence where a woman has sex with the melty-faced sludge ogre himself:

The Kid-Friendly Adaptation:

As you have probably guessed by this point, someone watched the movie we just described and thought it would be an excellent idea for a children's cartoon. Thus, the 1991 animated series The Toxic Crusaders was born, which recast the Toxic Avenger as a pollution-fighting superhero with a sentient mop sidekick.

He was essentially a Captain Planet knockoff, leading a team of similarly afflicted mutant superheroes who had all come into contact with toxic waste due to the most wildly improbable set of circumstances ever conceived by a professional writing team. One character, Junkyard, is literally a homeless man who was struck by lightning, a junkyard dog, and toxic waste, all at the same time.

The Toxic Crusaders were sworn to defend the planet from evil aliens from the planet Smogula who sought to pollute the Earth's environment for their own nefarious purposes. We're not really sure why the Crusaders would feel so beholden to a planet whose own cavalier attitude toward pollution had directly caused all of their hideous disfigurements, and we'll never get a chance to find out, because the show only lasted 13 episodes before everyone came to their senses and realized they were trying to market an X-rated film character to third graders.

And to chop James Earl Jones' head off:

He is the image of the nomadic fantasy hero, wandering through a mythical world opposed on all sides by monsters, sorcerers, and warlords, and drawing all of his problem-solving skills from a resource pool of sex and murder. In the stories, Conan eventually carves out his own kingdom by strangling the current ruler to death on his own throne, because Conan is a stone-cold motherfucker.

The Kid-Friendly Adaptation:

In the early 1990s, Conan embarked on a series of animated adventures in Conan the Adventurer along with his faithful magic parrot sidekick Needle, who was presumably there to make sure Conan didn't have sex with anything or chop anyone's head off.

Rather than the wandering blood-and-semen dispenser from the movies and original pulp novels, the Conan in Conan the Adventurer recruits a team of heroes to help him fight against an alien invasion of snake people who have turned his family to stone.

The opening theme song may well be the most insane thing ever recorded for any program in the history of television, because the lyrics just kind of stop for a 20-second breakdown during which a man with a doomspeak voice excitedly screams out the entire backstory of the show and then immediately resumes singing the theme as if nothing has happened.

Conan has a sword crafted from a fallen meteor, which admittedly is pretty awesome. However, the cartoon gets around the inevitable violence that typically results from swinging edged weaponry into the collarbones of other living beings by giving his meteor sword the mystical ability to banish all the snake men back to their home dimension the instant the blade touches their skin. All of Conan's friends also have meteor weapons, so every fight scene looks like a bunch of dudes turning into snakes and then disappearing in a supernova of disco lights.

As the Mask, Stanley not only is invulnerable, but has the ability to conjure any kind of prop or physics-defying sight gag he needs to escape any potentially dangerous situation on a crest of pure yucks. Like here, when he ties a bunch of balloon animals to avoid getting stabbed to death by a gang of muggers. Or here, where he makes the entire police force dance to a salsa song instead of cutting him down in the street with a hail of gunfire.

The cartoon series that followed was pretty much the same as the film, with the addition of the requisite absurd supervillains to fill their action figure quota.

The Mature Source Material:

The original comic series The Mask is still about Stanley Ipkiss, a loser who finds an ancient Nordic mask that gives him superpowers. Except Stanley is an extreme right-wing lunatic, and instead of using his magic to dazzle would-be assailants so he can make his escape, he creates guns, knives, and bombs to murder every single person who has ever wronged him.

For example, here he is bursting into someone's garage and violently slaying everyone inside for virtually no reason:

And remember that balloon animal scene we talked about earlier? Yeah, here it is in the comic:

Stanley also strolls into his old elementary school and kills his first grade teacher in front of all her students.

And here he is unloading an Uzi into a policeman's groin, which is only slightly more humiliating than dressing up like a Chi-Chi's waiter and making him dance:

Stanley's girlfriend (who is not Cameron Diaz) eventually puts on the Mask herself and shoots Stanley in the back, ending his reign of terror. Hollywood evidently saw potential in a story about a living cartoon character, but was understandably reticent about making a movie about a wisecracking spree killer with magical powers. So they cleaned up all the comic's cruel brutality and replaced it with spastic Jim Carrey-ness, which is arguably no less cruel.

The Kid-Friendly Adaptation:

If you grew up in the '80s or '90s, odds are you have seen at least one episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the rhapsody of four humanoid karate reptiles who speak exclusively in surf culture buzzwords from the 1980s and eat nothing but takeout pizza despite having no clear source of income.

The Turtles punch, kick, and quip their way through armies of robots and a dimwitted rogues' gallery of comical villains. Their archenemy, the Shredder, spends more of his time delivering exasperated one-liners about the competency of his underlings than actually being threatening.

Even though there was a reasonable amount of action in the series, it took an emphatic back seat to lame jokes and ridiculous sight gags. Make no mistake -- this was a comedy show, with occasional fight scenes.

The Mature Source Material:

The original comic book Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was created as a parody of Frank Miller's work on Daredevil (Daredevil fights a ninja clan called the Hand, whereas the Turtles fight the Foot). However, despite its conception as a comic industry in-joke and the obvious cheekiness of its title, the Ninja Turtles comic is one of the grittiest goddamned things ever published.

The slapstick monkeyshines we know and love from the cartoon series are nowhere to be found in the source material. And rather than the frustrated recurring comic relief character he is in the show, the Shredder is a brutally intense and powerfully formidable villain who only appears in a single story arc because the Turtles stab him in the chest and toss him off a building with a live grenade.

The comic is in black-and-white, which is just as well, because if we were to see the horrifically gory aftermath of Leonardo cutting his way through a wave of Foot soldiers (who are human beings, incidentally, and not robots like they are in the cartoon) in full color, we would never sleep again.

The jokiness of the cartoon is especially absent in scenes like this one, where Splinter finally succumbs to his old age and dies of a freaking heart attack:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is one of those rare cases when the kid-friendly adaptation actually makes way more sense, because after coming up with the idea of a crime-fighting squad of radical reptiles, why in the hell would your first impulse be to put them in a hyperviolent pulp noir comic book instead of the bombastic 193-episode toy commercial the universe clearly intended for them?

Henrik M. also enjoys posting the random crap he passes for comics here and random art in general here.

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