The question that broke the Turtles` backs came a few weeks ago.
”Dad, when will my shell grow?”
”Your shell?”
”Yeah, so I can be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle when I grow up.”
”I thought you wanted to be a writer like me.”
”Well . . . maybe I`ll be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Writer.”
”But the Turtles aren`t real, we`ve told you that.”
”Yes they are, they were on `Oprah.` ”
When your 4-year-old checks his skin color first thing each morning to see if it has begun to turn green, when he begins talking about a trip through the city sewers, the time has come to de-mystify the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
But my wife and I were at a loss. How to do it gently, wisely, with the sagacity of our own fictional heroes: Ward and June Cleaver and the Huxtables The answer came with a news tip from the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in a matter of days, the boy, Andrew, and I were on the road to his grudging enlightenment.
His mother sent fresh cookies, to ease the journey.
I took him to meet the men behind the reptiles, or more accurately, the men inside the reptiles. Genuine Stunt Turtles.
Ho Young Pak and Ho Sung Pak are Chicago brothers and U. of I. students whose national renown in the martial arts won them movie roles as fight-scene stuntmen in the new movie ”Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze,” to be released this spring.
In scenes requiring ninja-like skills, they wear the costumes of Raphael and Donatello in this sequel to the first Turtles movie, which brought in more than $139 million and has been the biggest moneymaker of any independent film. The Pak brothers were the answers to our parental prayers. We hoped they might provide living, breathing proof that the Turtles were nothing more than mugger Muppets, and thereby convince our son to drop his dreams of becoming a ”lean, green, fighting machine.”
I quizzed the boy as we neared our campus rendezvous with the brothers.
”Do you remember the names of who we are going to meet?”
”Uh-uh,” he replied into his Turtle comic book.
”Ho Young Pak and Ho Sung Pak,” I repeated for the third time.
”Oh yeah, that`s right,” came the bored response.
”And the Turtles aren`t real. Right?”
”They were on `Oprah,` Dad.”
Ho Young Pak, 25, awaited us at the Intramural Physical Education Building on the U. of I. campus. He was clean cut, polite and friendly, but not physically imposing in street clothes.
When he rose to greet us, Andrew sized him up skeptically. The kid was not going to be an easy sell.
But as Ho Young led us down the stairway, a look of wonder displaced the skepticism on my son`s face. His eyes riveted on the back of Ho Young`s jacket.
It was a flashy ”Turtles II” movie jacket, featuring neon-bright embroidered Turtles on the back and the name of the movie stitched on back and front.
Andrew did not say anything, but the first alerts were sounding inside his brain: This dude might actually have something to do with the Turtles.
Toughening the mind
Ho Young led us to the phys-ed building`s ”combat room,” where martial artists, wrestlers and boxers work out. His brother, Ho Sung, 23, sat stretching on the padded floor.
Ho Sung, too, was clean-cut, polite, friendly and fit, but in sweat clothes he did not strike awe in the eyes of a Turtle-attuned 4-year-old. Even when he presented Andrew with a scrapbook from the movie set, including photos of the brothers in Turtle costumes, but not the Turtle headgear, the kid accepted it suspiciously.
But he quietly pored over the photographs, as the brothers explained their transition from mild-mannered martial arts masters and honors students into the Stunt Turtles.
It was a story that, for a parent, had more weight and inspiration than even the most totally awesome Turtle tale.
The Pak brothers were encouraged to study the martial arts by their father, Jin Kyu Pak, vice president of a suburban Lincolnwood real estate company, who in 1972 had moved his young family to Chicago from their native Korea.
Though their father had no formal martial arts training, he considered its discipline good for his sons, and his theory proved out. Ho Young is a candidate for a doctorate degree in electrical engineering. Ho Sung is working toward a master of business administration degree. Both have near-perfect grade-point averages, which they attribute largely to powers of concentration learned through martial arts.
In 1990 tournament competition, Ho Young was ranked as the top overall martial arts competitor in the nation by the North American Sports Karate Association.
Ho Sung held the same rank in 1989 in the rival Professional Karate League, but last year he competed mostly in independent tournaments as a member of the elite Trans World Oil Karate Team.
The Paks began in the martial arts as grade schoolers, first with tae kwan do and later kung fu, but they have reached their maximum potential through an ancient Chinese discipline, they said.
Wu shu, a theatrical version of kung fu, is the national sport of China and an increasingly popular martial art in the U.S. The brothers switched to it while enrolled in Sullivan High School on the city`s North Side, and each spent a summer vacation in China studying with wu shu masters.
They were attracted to wu shu by its demanding acrobatics and its dramatic flying kicks and splits, features that also make it popular with competition judges.
A weighty role
The Paks were competing in the Battle of Atlanta tournament last spring when Ho Sung was approached by Pat Johnson, fight stunt coordinator for
”Turtles II.”
The Turtles movie employed three teams of human Turtles; actors for non-action scenes, martial arts experts for fight scenes, and professional stuntmen for the most difficult and dangerous stunts, Johnson said in a telephone interview from California.
A renowned martial arts master who worked on ”The Karate Kid” and
”Turtles I” movies, he searched the country for technically skilled young men up to the rigor of performing martial art fight scenes in ponderous Turtle costumes, he said.
”I know of Ho Sung and Ho Young by reputation, and when I saw Ho Sung in Atlanta, he was so talented he stood out. . . . I knew I had to have him for the movie,” said Johnson.
Though he was equally impressed with Ho Young, Johnson did not have a slot for him in the cast until two months into filming, when the original Stunt Donatello was injured on the set.
”The work was extremely rigorous, and all of my boys except Ho Sung had injuries at one time or another,” Johnson said. ”Ho Sung was obviously the best-conditioned and hardiest, so when one of my guys got injured and had to drop out, I thought of Ho Young.”
Ho Young, who is a lab research assistant at the U. of I., only had to take a few weeks off from his work for Turtle stardom, but Ho Sung had a lay- off of three months. His academic adviser was not easily convinced that he should drop out of graduate school for an entire semester just to participate in ”The Secret of the Ooze.”
But Ho Sung said he was ”on a roll” at that point.
In the same week he signed on as a Stunt Turtle, Ho Sung learned he was to be featured on the cover of Karate Kung Fu Illustrated magazine, that he had received straight A`s the previous semester, and that he had been awarded an athletic-academic scholarship.
”Of course, my dad was most impressed with the straight A`s,” he said.
Lost 10 pounds
Before filming began last September at studios in Wilmington, N.C., Ho Sung was dispatched twice to London, all expenses paid, for Turtle costume fittings at the late Jim Henson`s Creature Shop.
”The first time I put the costume on, I was pretty excited, I couldn`t wait to get into it,” he said. ”But by the end of the movie production, I didn`t want to be green anymore.”
The costumes were 30 pounds of sticky, sweaty latex with few accommodations for either breathing or seeing. Several of the Stunt Turtles
”freaked out” from the physical and mental demands of the work, the brothers said.
”Just the psychology of being in that costume and not being able to breathe and having to do so much physical stuff is very demanding,” said Johnson. ”It really drained some of the other boys, but Ho Sung went through the whole show with no breakdowns.”
On one particularly arduous day, Ho Sung dropped 10 pounds from his already lean 152-pound frame. ”Even though I drank a six-pack of Mountain Dew, two liters of water, another couple cans of Coke, and two liters of Gatorade, I still about fainted. One whole side of my face got numb,” he said.
If his scenes in the movie appear authentic, it is partially due to blind luck, Ho Sung said. ”We could see through only tiny slits, and you`d lose all depth of vision so that if you were in a scene fighting a bunch of Foot Soldiers, you had to guess which one you were supposed to hit,” he said.
”But we had rehearsed so much that everything was actually pretty mechanical . . . and if you hit the wrong person, or somebody got hit in the wrong place, the costume was soft enough that it was like getting hit by foam.”
A break for real life
In spite of injuries and stress, the welfare of the fighting unit was a high priority on the set, the brothers said.
”They really did take care of us,” Ho Young said. ”If one of the Turtles got exhausted and had to take his Turtle head off for a break, everybody on the set would have to wait for us.
Johnson enforced a rule that all Stunt Turtles received 12 hours of rest after each 12 hours of work, Ho Young said. ”We really were like spoiled babies, because they knew how exhausting it was fighting in those costumes.” In three months of filming six days a week, Ho Sung said he earned enough money ”to keep me going for a year” and also learned a great appreciation for Sundays, his only day off.
”Not that we didn`t have a lot of fun on the set and after work,” he said, noting that often after ”wrap” was called 50 pizzas would appear in the studio and a party would break out.
”Any time you have 30 martial artists together, there are bound to be some sparring matches. There were a few romances on the set, too, but there is an unwritten rule that what happens on the set stays there. So I can`t tell you about those,” Ho Sung said.
Though Ho Young spent only a few weeks as a substitute Stunt Turtle, he did manage to skip out one day to devote himself to life after show business, in electrical engineering.
”I did a shooting one day, then flew across the country to Sunnyvale, Calif., that night for an 11-hour job interview with 14 people the next day,” he said.
”After the interview, I caught a red-eye flight back to Wilmington and was on the set for filming the next day. I`m still waiting to hear the results.”
Turtles only a shell
Athletes. Scholars. Gentlemen who ”are obedient and faithful to their family,” according to Jin Kyu Pak. Now these are two Turtles that a parent can put forth as role models.
Andrew was silent but thoughtful on the way home. He had examined every page in the Pak brother`s scrapbook. He had watched them perform amazing martial arts feats. He had demonstrated his own Turtle moves for them, and allowed them to teach him a ”chambered side kick.”
But had he turned in his Turtles for these real-life heroes?
I went to check on him that night before going to bed myself.
As I approached his bed, Andrew sat up sleepily, looked at me and said,
”Ho Young and Ho Sung” then dropped back into his pillow, asleep.
Four sets of beady Turtle eyes glared down at me from a poster over his bed.
That`s how the shell crumbles, dudes.
