BRIEF STORYLINE : April’s work-mate Irma, has a birthday coming up, and Michaelangelo is preparing her party, but he’s foolishly forgotten to invite the birthday girl herself! He contacts April, who’s in the middle of interviewing Professor Von Zifflin, who has discovered a meteorite that has recently crashed within a local area. What the Professor finds striking about the meteorite is that it has a core constructed of a very rare isotope called “Exaporon”.
The turtles are at the same time watching April’s interview on TV. They then witness to their surprise when a noxious gas fills the room and a figure is seen snatching the meteorite. The thief with confidence, goes up to the front of the camera. It is then revealed as the Shredder, who is urging the turtles to track him down, due to his actions.
Shredder returns to the Technodrome to a pleased Krang. Krang wants to use it’s powers and will use a technique which will increase it’s effectivness.
Krang crystallizes the Exaporon and demonstrates to Shredder when the crystal are merged with his enlarging ray. The power is that it can grow subjects to six times their normal size. He uses Shredder as his guinea pig. Krang is content with the positive but not perfect results, but decides to do more testing on Shredder up to the surface.
During these evil plans, April has found Irma, who is gagging for something to eat. Shredder props up in the pneumatic modules. On his com-link, he tells Krang to “send up the Exaporon probe”. The probes quickly crashes up through the ground, getting caught in April’s path, leaving hanging onto the large probe in mid-air. She contacts the turtles to put a stop to this wrong-doing.
Shredder is getting impatient for Krang to implement the ray’s powers on to him. He tells him to hurry up. However, April’s weight on the probe makes it malfunction, and zaps Irma instead of Shredder. Shredder then evacuates along with the probe, and lets the turtles and April deal with this mess of a giant Irma.
Donatello is busy in his lab analysing the crystals found at the spot where Shredder and the probe was. He tells the others Irma is in big trouble. April contacts Donatello that a ten foot monster is terrorizing the city. Donatello exclaims that ten foot monster is Irma!
With Irma getting larger and larger as time goes on, the army hunting her down, can the turtles get the other piece of meteorite that wasn’t stolen, before Shredder, Bebop & Rocksteady get their dirty mitts on it?
TMNT REVIEW HQ COMMENTS: Not an impressive episode. There’s quite a lot of bad editing but nothing very bad. The whole episode is focused on clumsy, nerdy Channel 6 girl Irma, not everyone’s favourite character. But one of the few episodes that gives more depth and underlying story about her, and on the other hand, makes her a warmer person than you might think. Although the portrayal of her being this ineffective clumsy person does make the episode drag at times.
It does have a sort of heart-warming ending as Irma now back to normal size, can eat happily now, knowing she’ll never be 50 foot again, and that she’s lost hundreds of pounds in weight, so dieting doesn’t interest her, which can be of course, great concern to a woman. April discovering Irma’s made a hole in the wall after the giant growth spurt started is a memorable moment. Some of Irma’s eccentricity is shown to good effect, as she only takes medicine with ice cream, as well as Irma ending up in tears over her size and the turtles making it worser for her by mentioning words like “big” and “biggie”. Some people will find it funny, some will find it quite touching. Best of the action includes Michaelangelo knocking out the live wires broken from the satellite dish and the enlarging ray rising up to the surface but getting April caught onto it. One other good scene is the love-hate relationship between Krang and Shredder, where Shredder is moaning that the exaporon sensor is rubbish, while Krang tells him the turtles are trying to get that second piece of meteorite at the planetarium.
Irma being clumsy with Vernon and as a giant aren’t the best of moments. The fight scenes for the second piece of meteorite between the turtles and Bebop, Rocksteady & Shredder is flimsy and not really any physical contact is made, just throwing objects at each other. The way they show you Irma shrinking is badly edited. Other bad spots was Shredder stealing the first meteorite. This episode was quite close to a 2, but just made it into my good section.
"ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT IRMA" GETS A: 3/5 RATING.
