Toxic Crusaders
Troma took the Toxic Avenger, the mop-swinging mutant from its gory 1984 cult film, and turned him into a kids' cartoon hero leading a squad of fellow mutants against alien polluters. Thirteen syndicated episodes aired in 1991, and Playmates, fresh off the Ninja Turtles, sold neon action figures with glow-in-the-dark accessories under the tagline "They're gross, but they still get girls!"
The Toxic Avenger was the flagship of Troma, the New York studio behind Class of Nuke 'Em High and Sgt. Kabukiman, N.Y.P.D.: a scrawny janitor named Melvin falls into toxic waste and comes out a "hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength" who takes revenge on industrial New Jersey in bloodbaths. Toxic Crusaders, created by Troma's Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz, kept the premise and lost the gore. Melvin Junko, a health-club janitor humiliated by a prank involving a tutu, stumbles into a drum of waste, turns green, and finds that his mop has mutated too and now thinks for itself. He assembles a team in Tromaville: Nozone, a test pilot with a wheel for a foot, the plant-controlling Major Disaster, the two-headed Headbanger and the half-man-half-dog Junkyard. Against them stand Dr. Killemoff and Czar Zosta, cockroach-like aliens from Smogula, a planet where pollution is as natural as fresh air is on Earth, plus Tromaville's corrupt Mayor Grody. Michael J. Pollard voiced Psycho, the henchman who correctly predicts how every scheme will fail and is never listened to.
The show rode two trends at once: the eco-cartoon wave of Captain Planet and Swamp Thing, and the odd practice of turning R-rated films into children's programming, as RoboCop and Police Academy had been. It was tamer than the films but slipped in jokes aimed over kids' heads. After a trial run in the summer of 1990, it officially debuted in first-run syndication on January 21, 1991, and finished its thirteen episodes on May 20. Chuck Lorre co-wrote the theme and scripted the first episode. The merchandise outran the show. Playmates Toys, the company behind the Ninja Turtles figures, released nine similarly styled Toxic Crusaders figures in 1991 in bright neon colors with glow-in-the-dark accessories, five vehicles, and a canister of slime labeled Toxie's Toxic Waste, its answer to Retromutagen Ooze. Some figures came packed with "Toxic Tips" instructing kids how to make messes at home. Marvel published an eight-issue comic, and Bandai and Sega released games for the NES, Game Boy and Genesis.
A live-action Toxic Crusaders movie was set up at New Line Cinema and never made; Kaufman has speculated that New Line bought the rights as leverage while negotiating its Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequels, and Troma sued. The cartoon became a cult favorite anyway. Troma boxed all thirteen episodes with the four Toxic Avenger films on April 29, 2008, released a Blu-ray of the series on December 10, 2024, and a new Retroware beat-'em-up announced for December 2025 was pushed into 2026. It remains the strange moment when an unrated splatter icon was selling slime to eight-year-olds.
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