Like Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine and Inspector Gadget’s Gadgetmobile, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Party Wagon is one of the all-time great cartoon vans. Since the original show in 1987, it’s always been depicted as a generic yellow-and-green box on wheels that doesn’t resemble any real-life model. Now in a new movie installment, however, we finally get to see that the heroes in a halfshell’s famed conveyance is a Subaru Sambar.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is a new animated movie with lots of new character designs for the fab four and their extended crew. It’s a pretty cool animation style that’s computer-based but very stylized. The Party Wagon appears at the 2:16 mark of the trailer, where it executes some moves that in real life aren’t quite possible with a 64-horsepower kei van.
The van looks to be a mix of several different generations of Sambar. The dip in the front side windows looks like that of a sixth-gen, while the headlights resemble those of a facelifted fifth-gen. The rear side glass is definitely not that of a fifth-gen’s, but it’s pretty generic so we can give it a pass. Also, in this airborne shot it seems to be rear-engined, a very Sambar-like layout. Being from New York it would be cool to see them to be in something like a Dajiban, but it only makes sense for a team of ninjas to be driving around in a Japanese van.
