2 out of 5

So not that this was all that different from the TMNT Magazine movie III issue (also published by Welsh publishing) – previous flick recap, a still-image telling of the movie with captions, a couple behind the scenes features – but this edition seemed just a tad lazier in presentation, even though its ‘interviews’ with Paige Turco, Ernie Reyes Jr. and Vanilla Ice push the extra content to more pages than the Turtles in Time issue got.  There’s a production blurb that talks about the sets, and that fits with the vibe of the Welsh stuff – actually interesting info compressed down to kid reading levels without talking down to the audience.  The actor features are a bit silly, just getting one or two quotes and then filling the rest with what, nowadays, would read like a wiki summary.  Vanilla Ice’s in particular has almost nothing to offer about his part in the movie and instead talks about his music, ahem, career, making his inclusion here probably just to put his face on the cover and sell some more issues.  Reyes and Turco fare better, though don’t dispel the lazy vibe of the mag’s majority content – the picture summary of the movie.  While I guess the full page color images are cool, the Turtles III version of this at least added some spice to the lettering and caption placement and image arrangement, breaking up the reading a bit.  This is just big image and a plain looking caption, with the picture not always directly relating to the text.

The Welsh mag series can actually be a fun browse, but this official movie mag feels mostly like a cash-in, unfortunately.  A couple bits of interesting info suggest there could have been just a tad more effort put forth to make it worth tracking down, but as it is, definitely just a collector thing.