Ninja Training

If you were a child in 1990, then you wanted to be a ninja. I actually suspect that this is true for literally every child of every era who has known what a ninja was, but I can really only speak from my own experience, and that experience had a lot to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There were other ninjas of course, but while Snake-Eyes never really did much on TV and Sho Kusugi required a trip to the video store, the TMNT were swinging katanas and nunchuks around everywhere you looked. They were everything my eight year-old self wanted to be, and since growing a shell proved difficult, ninja training was obviously the next step. Sadly, I never had a copy of 1986's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Authorized Martial Arts Training Manual, or else I probably would've grown up into a life of silent assassination and smoke-bomb escapes, rather than just sitting in my office making jokes about comic books. But with a new theatrical movie and ninja interest returning to an all-time high, it's worth looking back now, to see if we can't find out a few ninja tricks to apply to our day-to-day lives. Spoiler warning: Unless your day-to-day life involves the proper handling of a sai, we will not.