Street Sharks: Quattro pinne all'orizzonte

Street Sharks is a cartoon from DIC and Bohbot Entertainment that originally aired on the latter's "Amazin' Adventures" syndicated block in the Mid-1990's.

The series follows on the adventures of Ripster, Jab, Streex and Big Slammu, four half-human, half-sharks who were originally the Bolton brothers John, Clint, Bobby and Coop, who thanks to the evil Dr. Paradigm's gene-slamming device were injected with the DNA of different Shark species, but to the point they thought for good instead of evil which Dr. Paradigm wanted, but he soon gets injected himself with piranha DNA and became Dr. Piranoid, and episodes followed on this formula - Paradigm creates new creatures with the device and the Street Sharks must beat them all down, while still being like humans and scaring everyone along the way due to Dr. Paradigm's smart and lying ways.

The animation in the show is your typical standard DIC-quality animation, so at times it may look cheap, or it may look decent. The voice acting is good as well and was one of the few DIC toons where they mostly went with voice talent from Omaha, Nebraska who have done little, if any well known work.

The tone of the show is a bit like Mummies Alive!, it's a bit serious at times but it's not meant to be taken seriously, if at all. It's just silly campy fun with four Human Sharks kicking tail and being Jawsome.

The music, especially the theme tune, is catchy and cool. It certainly gives that nineties feel to it.

And now, the fact that this show is normally classified as a big Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ripoff, and yeah, there are many similarities with the turtles, but it also does its own things as well that still make it unique, abit uninspired at the same time.

Overall, Street Sharks is a fun and campy show that's worth watching for a good nostalgia trip.

Hello people. Me and my buddy, Aaron have been avid Street Sharks fans since I can recall. It is the ultimate T.V. experience ever for kids and adults alike. When my kids get old enough, they're going to watch it, easy, hands down. It not only rocked my world, but taught me new slangs(CAN ANYONE SAY JAWESOME?), and taught me how to fight crime when crime fights me. All I can say is 'What would Ripster say?' to all the downers and nay-sayers of the Street Shark Nation? Street Sharks, they're fintastic! We bite, we fight. We're street sharks. The world as we know it today is crumbling and I want you to know Street Sharks will be back because Aaron and I will remake it. Expect the bite!

Stay sweet, sharkies.

I'm not saying it's really bad, just plain bad. And I'm not even comparing it to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of which this is one of the many ripoffs made in the 90's.

The continuity is really sketchy - I mean restoring status quo is/was a popular thing to do in these cartoons, but considering the series kind of established itself as continuity actually mattering at all early on, it's really jarring when Piranoid finally gets arrested with the President of all characters giving a full expose on his activities, and he's shown trying to escape from prison at the end...and then in the next episode, he's hosting some trade symposium as if nothing had happened.

And the animation is really bad, with the framerate frequently dropping way below the television animation standard of 12 frames a second, leading to characters moving in a very choppy manner, and the characters' body parts occasionally miscolored or left uncolored entirely, like Ripster's jaw disappearing in one frame but the outlines are still there (and considering the low framerate, all the errors are very easy to spot). The show does a lousy job at conveying action on-screen sometimes, making it confusing to figure out what exactly is going on - such as when Piranoid is about to crash the van he's driving in, he's shown screaming, and it cuts to a backdrop painting which doesn't give you a faintest idea about what he's supposed to be crashing into...and then it cuts back to him, screaming again, and a brief pause, and he screams AGAIN as if to inhale between screaming, all before finally actually crashing, it's like the steam roller scene from Austin Powers except I'm not entirely convinced they did it deliberately since it's the kind of meta humor the series rarely dwells in.

And don't get me started on the weird montages that replace action scenes where they just play clips in split screen not only from earlier in the episode but even after the montage, while some second-rate song plays in the background - and once the montage is over, it rarely has made any difference, clearly existing only to pad out the episodes.

The animated animal-themed superhero TV series "Street Sharks" (which aired from 1994-1997) was one of several animated animal-themed superhero TV shows to air during the 1990s - probably to cash in on the craze for such properties created by the wildly successful "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." Like more than a few of such series, "Street Sharks" was co-created by Ron Askin and Phil Harnage to cash in on an already-existing toy line (by Mattel).

I eagerly collected the Street Sharks action figures as a nine-or-ten-year-old growing up during the mid '90s. I still have those Street Sharks toys, too. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to watch the TV series that was inspired by the toys that came before it. Fast-forward two decades and lo and behold, the wonders of TV-on-DVD: "Street Sharks" is released on DVD and I'm able to finally watch the series I remembered so fondly growing up - even if I never actually got the chance to watch it.

"Street Sharks" was very obviously influenced by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and so were so many other such animated children's TV shows produced during that time. So, try to imagine this series as "Jaws" meets the Fantastic Four. "Street Sharks" concerns the Bolton Brothers - John, Clint, Bobby, and Coop - who are transformed by the insane, megalomaniacal and power-hungry university geneticist Dr. Luther Paradigm, who kidnaps the four siblings and injects them with an experimental serum that transforms them into massive half-man/half-shark mutants:

• John becomes Ripster, a Great White Shark and their "de facto" leader of the four and is the most brilliant Street Shark; Clint becomes Jab, a Hammerhead Shark and is the tough-talking fighter of the group who often charges, quite literally, head-first, into battle; Bobby becomes Streex, a Tiger Shark and is the most fun-loving of the bunch and is always seen wearing a pair of trademark roller blades; and Clint becomes Big Slammu, a Whale Shark who is the resident jock and proves to be the physically strongest of them all.

Together, the four of them team up as one, as the "Street Sharks," to fight crime and all manner of evil in their native Fission City. Of course, Dr. Paradigm becomes their primary nemesis, who has an insane scheme to "gene-slam" the entire human population into nefarious "Seaviates," hideous genetic mutants based on marine animals that will exist only to serve him. Paradigm himself becomes a victim of his own sick and twisted experiments when he is accidentally injected with his own "gene-slamming" serum and is transformed into "Dr. Piranoid," whose face assumed an inhuman piranha-like form during moments of extreme emotion. The Street Sharks are aided in their battles against Dr. Piranoid by Bends, their genius human friend, and other "gene-slammed" human/animal mutants like Moby Lick (a Killer Whale) and Rox (a Mako Shark) and later, the Dino Vengers.

"Street Sharks" is not a particularly deep or involving show. The animation is pretty simple and straight-forward, with no other underlying theme other than the theme of brotherly camaraderie amongst Our Four marine Heroes. Seeing the show in my adult years, it's not as mind-blowing as I thought it was going to be - but perhaps that's just the 31-year-old adult in me. But remembering back to my nine-/10-year-old self, it's easy to get lost in a show that promises nothing more than just great fun and "Jawsome" one-liners.

7/10.

I grew up watching the street sharks. they were and still are one of my favorite cartoons. I thought it was a pretty good show as far as quality went, considering the other cartoons that came out at the time and I think it's a lot better than shows we see now. It seems like now they don't try anymore. There's a quality that went with this show and others in this time period that has been lost some how. Yes, it's unrealistic and a little campy, but that's what's fun about it. It was just that, fun and I think the story, characters and topics fit. I just wish they would give it it's recognition already...if the Mario brothers super show can have seasons' and volumes on DVD, why can't the street sharks?