Four karate-leaping, pizza-scarfing, sewer-dwelling and mutated turtle dudes fighting crime with a rat for a mentor and a leggy human gal sidekick? Sure … that could work.

What started out in 1984 as a black-and-white comic out of Massachusetts with a microscopic print run grew to become the improbable kiddie phenomenon of the ’80 s and ’90s, and a money-printing juggernaut to this day. Armed with a tax refund and a small loan, artists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird turned an inside-joke of then-current comic-book fads into toys and cartoons. The fighting amphibians reached critical mass with this winning 1990 big-screen debut, featuring animatronics from the Jim Henson company, but it wasn’t until the sequel when Vanilla Ice dropped the immortal, "Go Ginja, Go Ninja Go!"

Midnight on Friday and Saturday July 31- Aug. 1 at the Landmark Main Art Theatre, 118 N. Main St., Royal Oak; 248-263-2111.