That Weird Time The Toxic Avenger Became a Kid-Friendly Saturday Morning Cartoon

Later this month will see the release of The Toxic Avenger, the reboot of the beloved splatter comedy that introduced the world to the visceral joys of Troma. Starring Peter Dinklage in the title role, the movie is a proudly gory superhero pastiche with pitch black humor, cartoonish bad guys, and a total lack of good taste. All in all, it’s a worthy successor to the original. 

The Toxic Avenger is perhaps the most famous work of Lloyd Kaufman and Troma Entertainment, the indie company that made its name with exploitation flicks that typically included more sex, violence, and surrealism than could ever make its way to a mainstream Hollywood release. In The Toxic Avenger, a weedy janitor works in a nightmarish New Jersey town populated by yuppies, bullies, and total psychos before falling into a drum of toxic waste. Afterward he is mutated into a hulking hero with a melted face and hunger for justice.

The movie is gross, mean, funny, and fascinatingly political; trash with a purpose. It’s also 100 percent not for kids. There are way too many scenes of underage prostitutes, disembowelment, and attempted castration for that! So it’s a fascinating quirk of pop culture that this extremely adult film made by an exploitation company somehow managed… to get its own Saturday morning cartoon. Thus enters the tale of the Toxic Crusaders!

From Sleaze to Saturday Morning Hijinks

The 1980s and ‘90s was a wild time for kids TV. Morning cartoons dominated, often made cheaply and based on familiar IPs like toys and movies. During this era, there was a curious increase in children’s animated series being adapted from deeply un-child-friendly properties. There was a RoboCop show (in one episode, he solves the crisis in the Middle East!), as well as a Police Academy one. There was even a controversial but ostensibly child-approved version of Rambo (but not approved by Sylvester Stallone.) Still, they all felt tame when compared to a Toxic Avenger spinoff.  But Kaufman and Murakami-Wolf-Swenson, the company behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, found a way.

Toxic Crusaders opens with a pilot that is surprisingly faithful to the movie. Melvin Junko is a meek janitor working at a health club in Tromaville, New Jersey, the most environmentally toxic place in America. After falling into a drum of toxic waste, he becomes Toxie, the green-skinned mutant with incredible strength. This is where the plot makes a shift to something less exploitative than the source material. New additions included a whole team of Toxic Crusaders, fellow mutants with various powers who seek to save the folks of Tromaville from the bad guys. The villains are cockroach-like aliens from the planet Smogula where pollution is prevalent, and they have names like Dr. Killemoff and Czar Zosta. Their plan is to make Earth habitable for themselves but deadly for everyone else. 

Take out the Troma of it all, and Toxic Crusaders is pretty standard Saturday morning kids show stuff. There are colorful heroes, cackling villains, lots of silly jokes, and an encouraging message about looking after the environment and standing up for your community. Imagine Captain Planet with more mutants (again this is the production company behind TMNT). The show is also pretty fun in that grungy early ‘90s way where subtlety is for losers and grossness rules. There’s a weirdness to it all that feels authentically Troma, even without the shameless nude scenes and penis monsters.

The heroes look like villains, there’s a sentient mop, and in one episode, the Toxic Crusaders start their own taxi company and Toxie grows a bit too attached to his car. They had some good people working behind the scenes to make this oddness happen too, such as D.J. MacHale, a writer on Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and the future king of network comedy Chuck Lorre. Some jokes maintain the Troma love of bad taste, such as when Toxie says his weekend plans include “polishing his chicken.” Think about it. But by and large, it was harmless stuff.

Toxic Waste Reduced

Alas, Toxic Crusaders didn’t last for long. It ran for 13 episodes and only aired in Canada on YTV from 1991 to 1992. It wouldn’t even screen in America until 2009. But it was enough of a hit (or attempted one) to inspire a string of merchandise and collectors’ items that sell for a hefty price on the resale market today. Toxic Crusaders was but one part of the unexpectedly mighty legacy of The Toxic Avenger. Like the superhero stories it was parodying, it became a bona fide franchise, complete with three sequels, a video game, a novelization, a Marvel comic book, and an off-Broadway musical (with music by the keyboard player from Bon Jovi!).

The Toxic Avenger has withstood the test of time far more than its B-movie contemporaries, because aside from its balls-to-the-wall approach to the grotesque, it’s essentially a classic underdog tale of heroes and villains. The good guy is a working class schmoe who takes on bullies who are polluting the world and making it a worse place to live, all in the name of getting rich. Toxic Crusaders keeps that strain of blue-collar pride and ups the environmentalist ideas, albeit with more cockroach aliens and remote-controlled smog. Sometimes the hero we need is a New Jersey mutant with a sentient mop.