With Easter passing by for another year, families everywhere are settling into the spring season. Candy, toys, games, and goodies have been distributed, and colorful eggs were found hidden all over the house (and will continue to be found into the summer months). It’s a great holiday to celebrate many different things, and certainly it’s a treat to be visited by the Easter Bunny. It’s even more fun when springtime has the rabbit in a favorite TV show, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yes, the turtles have gone on many adventures over their 30 years, and that has included getting up close and personal with a large rabbit that stood in as Easter’s spiritual guide.
In the 1987 animated series, April O’Neil and the crew at Channel 6 were preparing an Easter egg hunt – until Bebop and Rocksteady arrive dressed as Easter Bunnies and blast everyone with Krang’s Docilizer Ray. To save the city, Leonardo and Raphael enter the Fairy Tale Dimension via Donatello’s dimensional gate, and search for the Cyranium Crystal. In the new world, they encounter characters from children’s fairy tales, including the hare from “The Tortoise and the Hare” – Hokum Hare. Hokum doesn’t take kindly to the turtles, and follows them on their mission. After a run-in with the giant from “Jack and the Beanstalk,” Leo and Raph secure the crystal and get back to Earth with Hokum in tow. Successfully stopping Shredder and Krang, the turtles find April and the others safe, and Hokum Hare helps out everyone by standing in for the Easter Bunny to make the news station’s egg hunt a total success.
In the spirit of Easter, the episodes featuring Hokum Hare were released together on a tape titled “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Turtles’ Awesome Easter.” However, Hokum Hare was no friendly bunny, and he was not the nicest ally that the turtles ever met. He was suspicious, unhelpful, and a little cowardly. He only wanted to keep an eye on the turtles so they didn’t beat him in the race yet again (thinking they were tortoises). However, Hokum proved that he had the makings of a great ally when he secured the Cyranium Crystal and when he stood in for the Easter Bunny. He even proved that he could be a hero, when he discovered Shredder’s plan to travel through time and helped the turtles thwart his future follies.
The turtles have had some odd allies over the years, but Hokum Hare is in a unique category. Brought to audiences during season five (though the episodes didn’t air until a 1991, thanks to scheduling and rights issues), Hokum Hare showed that he was something of a forgettable character. Not only is he a fairy tale character, but between his helping hand and the marketing on his episodes, he was meant to serve as an Easter character for the show. He certainly had competition from another rabbit in Miyamoto Usagi. If he had some sort of useful gimmick like the rabbit ronin, then perhaps the Easter Bunny would have been more usable.
Hokum was a nonsensical character who did not make any appearances beyond his two-episode story, and he never showed much promise in the way that other allies did once introduced. But when kids needed a few episodes that they could enjoy with a holiday or theme or something else that added a little specialness to a particular day, it was good to have the catalog available and the oddball character to go with them. So for all the fans out there, Happy Easter – now go and enjoy a little Hokum Hare!
