Street Sharks S1E1: “Shark Bait”

This review was commissioned by @krinsbez 

Perhaps you think that the modern videogame and ebook industries have issues with imitators and copycats running unchecked. If so then you must have been born after the early 1990's, because they have nothing on the toy-driven children's cartoons of the eighties and nineties. Take the case of 1984's "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." By the height of this franchise's popularity at the end of the eighties, the ninja turtles were everywhere, from lunch boxes to candy wrappers to preachy PSA's on daytime television. And, within the next few years, there were dozens of punky teenaged mutant teams fighting comically incompetent villains in surreal versions of America and Canada while minimizing their deformed bodies' exposure to the eye of the public, often with a single media-employed female informant like TMNT's April O'Neill.

The turtle epidemic did some good for the animation world. The excellent "Gargoyles" series, for instance, took a lot after Ninja Turtles and its imitators while changing the premise and atmosphere enough to keep it fresh, and in terms of quality most watchers would agree that it blew TMNT out of the water. But, I think that's illustrative of the difference between taking inspiration from something, and just lazily copying a proven cash cow. Unfortunately, there were many, many more instances of the latter. Few of these lasted long. Fewer still were remembered a decade later. Possibly the most shameless of all these knock-offs, and almost certainly the most visually unappealing, was "Street Sharks."

I don't think I ever actually saw an episode of Street Sharks, but it was one of many such things that sort of floated past my childhood media ecosystem closely enough for me to catch the odd glimpse. Nothing that I saw made me want to learn more. But, I'm about to, because I have not just one but THREE episodes of this show in the queue! As always, I will go in with as open a mind as possible. If this show turns out to be better than everything (including the person who commissioned these reviews) indicates, then I'll gladly admit to having misjudged a book by its cover. So, today I'll be watching the pilotfish episode, "Shark Bait."

And, right off the bat, this is one of the worst OP's I have ever seen.

From the opening title screen with its hideous shark teeth making the words themselves almost unreadable, to the even more hideous set of shark teeth that then closes around them, to the "song" that consists of the same three notes over and over again and someone shouting a total of about fifteen words without any sort of beat or rhythm...fuck, just compare these two:

While the latter obviously had a much smaller budget, that doesn't even begin to excuse the difference in quality. I find the...erm..."song" especially egregious. The TMNT intro uses the repetitive "teenaged mutant ninja turtles" chant as a background chorus for the much more melodic and complex lyrics and instrumentals. The Street Sharks intro uses its equivalent as pretty much the entire damned song.

This is not giving me the impression of anyone on the production team having cared even the tiniest bit about what they were making.

I'd take He-Man talking at the camera over this shit. That show at least tried to work within its nonexistent budget.

The show proper begins with a hulking, poorly animated fellow breaking into a government facility under the cover of night. Meanwhile, inside what I assume is the same facility, an eyepatch-wearing mad scientist sort is babbling about how he'll show them all for calling him mad and denying him. He's got a lab full of fish and mollusks in tanks, and he's simulating some rather ambitious gene-splicing procedures on a computer.

He kinda slurs his speech in a way that makes him hard to understand, but the visual communication here is solid enough to compensate.

After completing his recombinant gene map, Dr. Eyepatch opens a cabinet to peruse his selection of human gene samples and choose the best candidate. He needs someone strong, ruthless, and cruel, because he's evil or whatever. Also, he apparently has intact gene samples from Genghis Khan, among other historical figures. Maybe he just reconstructed that one piece by piece by melting down hundreds of captives from around Asia or something. He also describes a notorious pirate captain as a "loner," which must have made piracy a difficult business. Before these questionable bio-historical musings can continue, an alarm sounds, and Dr. Eyepatch is alerted to the intruder.

So this is a government facility that Eyepatch is in. I guess that's your tax dollars at work. :/

He recognizes the intruder as one Dr. Bolton, apparently a longtime rival or critic of his. Eyepatch doesn't seem all that concerned about this. He simply muses that this is going to make things "interesting," and puts his selection of human and animal genomes into a large machine which I imagine will separate and splice the desired nucleotide sequences and start growing the chimera. Eyepatch says a bunch of biology-themed technobabble as the process begins, which actually comes slightly closer to making sense than I'd have expected. So, good job?

I guess this thing works really, really fast, if he thinks it's going to be born in time to be relevant to this break-in.

Bolton finds his way into the lab, and kind of looks around at the captive animals before finding Eyepatch at his computer and racing over to...scold him.

-_-

It looks like he was surprised to find Eyepatch here at this hour, but it's not clear at all what he'd been planning to do in the first place. Sabotage? Espionage? Theft? Whatever it was, he decides to just walk over to Eyepatch and tell him to stop using his research for these purposes. I guess he knows what he's using them for already, then.

He keeps whining at Eyepatch, who he names as Dr. Paradigm. Paradigm admits to stealing Bolton's research, but otherwise ignores him until he starts sort of ineffectually tugging at his arm, which prompts an annoyed shove. Paradigm hits the final key, and a pair of robot arms inject the retrovirus he made into a pair of test subjects: a swordfish and an unusually large lobster.

Okay, I thought the big machine was also an incubator, but I guess it was just a gene splicer.

Bolton howls that using his research for this is wrong, you can't tamper with nature like that. Yes, mister cutting edge genetic engineer, tell us how tampering with nature is wrong. Why would someone who feels that way ever go into this field? How could he have possibly learned enough to get even close to this kind of procedure without "tampering with nature?" Also, why exactly can't one tamper with nature, and how much of modern technology falls on the wrong side of whatever arbitrary line you're trying to draw?

Sorry, this kind of insincere pseudo-luddism was the bane of children's media from this era, and I just have absolutely zero patience for it.

Paradigm rambles about the perfection of the human species (via the genetic uplifting of marine ectotherms. Somehow), and Bolton whines about how this is wrong without saying why he thinks so. Aside from the stolen research, obviously, but the tone doesn't suggest that his main objections hinge on academic ethics or copyright. The swordfish and lobster grow several times over until they break out of their tanks, which Paradigm says was not supposed to happen.

Paradigm muses that he may have been going about this the wrong way. Bolton tells him that he's crazy and disgustedly tries to leave, but Paradigm locks the door on him. Bolton demands to be released, and Paradigm tells him that he knows he can't do that.

Why does Bolton want to leave? He went through a lot of trouble, climbing a fence, cutting barbed wire, picking a lock, and risking felony charges or worse, to get in here. He hasn't done anything besides watch Paradigm abuse some random lab animals. He hasn't really learned anything new, since he apparently knew that Paradigm had stolen his research before he got a good look at what he was doing (he accused him of it well before seeing what was on the screen or in the machine). Again, why did he come here, and what's changed since then?

Why does Paradigm think that Bolton "knows he can't do that?" What would be the consequences of Bolton being allowed to leave?

Well, it turns out that whatever other inscrutable reasons Paradigm has, the failure of his project has convinced him that he should try human experimentation next, and Bolton is a convenient human who he happens to not like. He forcibly injects the serum into Bolton, who collapses on the floor in agony. As Paradigm lectures him about how honored he should be to become the vanguard of human perfection, he grows into some hulking monstrous form that the camera avoids showing. Paradigm is rather put out when the mutated Bolton Kool-Aid Man's his way out through the wall and flees.

Paradigm consoles himself with getting to steal the wristwatch that Bolton left behind on the floor, saying he's always wanted it. Okay. This guy has access to all this high end (government? or not? IDK) equipment and workspace, but a digital watch is something he's long coveted. Right. His attention is called away from his invaluable prize, however, by a question from his last two test subjects. Turns out that the experiment worked on them too after all, it just takes longer than ten seconds. Also, they already speak English apparently. Meet Rocksteady and Bebop.

Cut to next morning's Fission City news report. The city is coastal and has a bad air pollution problem, but other than that it doesn't tell us much. We then zoom in on a local university's genetics department, where some grad students are asking Professor Paradigm if he knows why Professor Bolton didn't show up this morning.

So they work in the same university department, apparently. And they're spiteful at each other to the point of attempted murder over authorship credits. God, this brings back so many annoying memories. This show is getting a little too real for me.

One of the students, a lab coated girl named Lena, suggests calling Bolton's sons to ask them what's going on. Paradigm looks alarmed for a moment when he's reminded that Bolton has sons.

Another thing I can give this show credit for is black representation. Two out of four named characters are black, and not in stereotypical roles. That's pretty impressive for the mid nineties. Hell, it would be somewhat impressive even today.

He tells her to call Bolton's sons and say that Bolton wanted them to meet him across the street from a nearby nuclear reactor. That's a really weird place to meet. Also, she asks when the hell Bolton could have told him that if it's still morning and he hasn't seen him yet, but Paradigm just says he'll tell her later, and that in the meantime she should cancel all his appointments for the day as he immediately turns and walks out. Also also, he's wearing Bolton's watch.

Some of us are just not cut out for crime.

He leaves, and another grad student who is most certainly not dressed appropriately for labwork comes over and tells Lena that Paradigm is weird and that he doesn't trust him. Lena shrugs and tells him that she doesn't have much choice, since he's her thesis adviser. Once again, #relatable.

So, the boys get the call. They look like they're supposed to be in their late teens or early twenties, but at least most of them appear to live separately. Not sure what the story there is supposed to be, assuming there actually is one. They all have the perpetual obnoxiously smug smiles that afflicted the faces of so many American cartoon characters from the time, and the athletic builds to go with it.

Also, they're all white. Like, not even tan. Either they're adopted, or their mother was Chechen or something.

First we meet the inventor one, who is reading an engineering book and has cooked up a contraption that allows his pet rat to power a toaster, coffee maker, hotplate, and robot arms to put everything onto his plate simultaneously. Either he's cracked the first law of thermodynamics, or he's been feeding that rat nothing but high grade crystal meth.

The rat is named Hillary, which is idiosyncratic enough that I remember it even after forgetting his own almost immediately. I'll just call him the first name that comes into my head that feels appropriate. How about Donatello? No particular reason, it just felt appropriate somehow.

Don relays the message to his preening, roller blading, younger looking brother, Michelangelo. Mike in turn tells another, much beefier, brother who manages to answer the call despite being in the middle of a football game. I'm not sure which Italian Renaissance artist he reminds me of, so in the meantime I'll call him Cakes, because dayum:

He abandons the football game, which I'm sure is just fine with his teammates, and calls the fourth brother, who is asleep in bed and irritated at having to wake up before noon. His sarcasm and irritability make me think Raphael, but he's way lamer, so I'll just call him Scrappy.

The four boys have a very strange, energetic, and lifethreatening journey to get to the reactor, each with their own outlandish modes of transportation. Cakes and Mike are the more mundane of the two, arriving on a skateboard and a motorbike respectively. Although to be fair, Cakes did skateboard off the roof of a skyscraper, into a piece of tubing that a construction crane was in the process of lifting, and out the other side of the tube to launch himself over multiple city blocks only to land safely with no loss of momentum, so "outlandish" definitely fits in his case. Meanwhile, Mike rollerbladed into a piece of awning and wrenched it free to use as a glider, and Don just straight up rode a jet pack he invented....hold on, Mike was on the motorcy...or, no wait a minute, Scrappy is the one with the jetpack, while Don - despite having just been established as the inventor - is riding the motorbike.

So, the reason I was confused here is that Don both completely changed outfits and also covered his hair after we saw him for just a few seconds, while Scrappy - who first appeared half-naked in bed and without a distinguishing outfit - totally vanished until suddenly arriving by jetpack at the end, after Don was already established as the inventor.

If I'd already seen each of these characters for at least, like, a minute apiece, I might have been able to recognize them by their faces (not their builds though; most of them are pretty much identical on that front). But as it is, yeah, I had to rewatch that several times before I was sure of who was who and what each of them rode.

I guess Scrappy just manifested a jetpack out of sheer force of laziness to avoid physical exercise, or something.

Paradigm meets them there, and tells them that he'll be bringing them to their father. And starts leading them toward the nuclear plant, because that's exactly the sort of place that a geneticist would have access to and randomly ask to meet his children at. They notice that that doesn't make any damned sense, and also that he's wearing their father's watch, which was apparently a present from their late mother. Paradigm continues to be extremely bad at this whole villainy thing. When the boys threaten him physically, he sics Bebop and Rocksteady on them, who were...hiding nearby? I guess?

The boys have the most understated reaction to being attacked by monsters that I think I've ever seen. "Ugly," says one, with the air of someone talking about something he stepped in. "Double ugly," another concurs, with the same tone. Then they just sort of wriggle in the chimeras' grasp and almost apathetically say things like "hey, put us down" as if trying to talk down a drunk friend who's getting mildly obnoxious or something.

Dr. Paradigm doesn't seem to find these reactions surprising or unusual, so I don't think it's intentional comedy. Or at least, not mostly.

Also, I guess Paradigm secured the chimeras' loyalty since creating them last night. Somehow. I doubt that's a question that the show wants us to ask.

They drag the boys into a helicopter. Paradigm has a helicopter. To be fair, most college professors do. Once they're brought to his maybe-government-i-don't-fucking-know laboratory, he prepares them for his next experiment. Why did he want to use Dr. Bolton's sons, in particular, for this? Why did he even feel the need to act against them at all? Your guess is every bit as useless as mine.

Looks like he's splicing them with a great white shark, a tiger shark, a...whale shark? maybe? silhouette is off for that, maybe it's supposed to be a leopard shark...and a hammerhead shark.

The boys continue to have really weirdly understated reactions to everything. As if this is the sort of thing that happens all the time in this world. Which, I don't know, maybe it is, but it's still weird and off putting.

Paradigm injects them all, they thrash around in pain for a while, and I swear the music that plays here is a knockoff of the Jaws theme, I kid you not. Finally, the boys appear to die. Paradigm waits all of eight seconds before declaring this a total failure and ordering Bebop and Rocksteady to dump the bodies somewhere they won't be found. For an alleged scientist, Paradigm is not good at learning from experience. I guess that's why he had to steal Bolton's research. The chimeras drop them in a wastewater ditch where they'll soon be flushed out to sea.

A random jogger lady sees this happen, and starts screaming. And keeps screaming. She just stands there holding her face and screaming for a while. It's not clear if she's reacting to the apparent murders, or to the existence of the chimeras; the Boltons seemed very nonchalant about the latter, but then their dad might have exposed them to more stuff like that in the past. Part of his respect for nature and so forth.

She finally runs to get the cops. In the interim, the ditch fills up, and the boys float away into the sea. By the time she returns with the police, the bodies are gone,and the ditch is all wet. She seems totally mystified about what could have happened. 

Some time later, perhaps saved from drowning by their genetic modification, the brothers wash up on a local beach. All near each other, conveniently. The first thing they do, after being kidnapped, experimented on, and left for dead by the man who they believe has murdered their father, is go get some hot dogs to casually sit down and eat. As they sit around eating their street food, the mutation suddenly sets in. "Hey, look at my hand." "That's nothing, just look at your face." This is a place where the visuals and the voice acting just directly clash, because they LOOK pretty horrified at what's happening to them, and the script COULD be reflecting that if it were delivered differently, but...once again, they sound almost uninterested in what's happening, let alone horrified.

They get over it quickly, and decide that they're still hungry, so they eat the hot dog stand that they just bought their lunch from. Not the hot dogs, or the man selling them; the stand itself. They eat the wood that it's made out of. Cookie Monster style.

One of them (I'm not sure which. I barely got a chance to make out which boy turns into which wereshark) does apologize to the vendor afterwards, but that doesn't calm him down. When the police arrive, the boys decide to flee into the water instead of risk being shot. They're adjusting pretty quickly to the loss of their white privilege, but then I suppose their (foster?) father might have helped prepare them for this.

Meanwhile, Lena the grad student is more worried than ever about the Boltons. The professor missed two more classes and counting, and the boys and Dr. Paradigm are now unreachable themselves. She gives her unfittingly dressed coed a call (actually, it looks like he might be the lab technician. He still shouldn't have been dressed like that if he was working in the lab though) and asks him to abandon his work and go randomly drive around town looking for the Boltons. He has a crush on her or something, so he agrees. His name is Ben, I think? Bens? Binns? Ben for now.

Cut to a major traffic accident, not involving Ben. An oil truck somehow got sprawled across the road and ended up T-boned by an SUV. The woman driving the latter can't get out, because the front door is jammed and she's too stupid to climb out the back, and a fire from her engine is slowly spreading toward the oil truck.

The boys find this disastrous scene when they come swimming toward it. Through the pavement.

O. Kay.

I guess STREET sharks is more literal than I thought. They can swim through concrete. Somehow.

...and they decided to swim into the city, tearing up the streets behind them, to avoid the cops.

I don't know which of these two things bothers me more.

They pull themselves out of the...pavement...and help the terrified woman out of the car before anything can explode. She's still terrified of them even after they help her though, because they're just that ugly. Seriously, look at those things. The way that they keep those smug grins even on their oversized shark faces and even in completely inappropriate situations is just...ew.

The news reporter is hovering overhead in a chopper, and covers all of this live. Also, he made another comment about the air pollution before the sharks showed up. The show trying to have a limp, shallow environmentalist message to go along with its limp, shallow anti-science one I guess. The sharks apparently can't dive/burrow very deep under the pavement, because they're staying shallow enough for their dorsal fins to tear through the surface, and some very very confused police are in pursuit.

Back at the university, Lena has been following this on the radio, and calls Ben to tell him to tune into the news in his car. He hears about the pavement-swimming shark monsters moving down a certain street, and his first instinct is to GO THERE.

For some reason.

Like, he hears about shark monsters being chased by the cops, and he just heads directly there.

Why.

He almost runs them over, until a couple of them leap out of the pavement and use their superhuman...shark...strength to stop his car before it can hit. He freaks out for about one second, before just sinking back into "okay, weird, but manageable." I guess he's worked with Bolton and Paradigm for some time, so he has a good chance of having seen shit like this before too.

More bizarrely, the sharks are able to convince him that they're the Bolton boys almost instantly. He's not skeptical. He isn't even surprised to hear them speaking English. It's like, once he's gotten used to the idea of anthropomorphic, concrete-burrowing shark monsters existing, them being able to talk is simply to be expected, I guess.

They give him the five second version of what happened, and he tells them to get into the car. So that he can flee the cops.

For...some...reason?

The police have been chasing the sharks for a while now. They have yet to open fire. They've seen them rescue someone from a traffic accident, and now they've seen them talk to a driver and peacefully get into the back of his car. It's pretty clear at this point that the Fission City PD are not a trigger happy department, and that they're giving the sharks every chance to stop and explain themselves. Also, if they want to keep fleeing the cops, there's no reason for them to do so with Ben, since they seem to be doing an okay job on their own and being in a car is not going to make it easier to hide.

If they were all panicking and not making clearheaded decisions, that would be understandable. But none of them are. They seem to think that this will be fun. Which...given their personalities so far, sure, it probably would be for them, but wouldn't cooperating with the police help them against Paradigm? Aren't they worried about their father anymore? Apparently not.

They end up ditching the police by hiding their car inside of a billboard (yes, really. No, there's no explanation for how the news helicopter that was watching them at the time failed to notice this) and waiting for things to quiet down.

Unfortunately, Paradigm and his bargain bin Shredder Gang show up in their own helicopter, and are able to identify them in hiding instantly and begins the chase. Also, Paradigm's helicopter is armed.

That's not such a surprise, actually. Most college professors' helicopters are heavily armed and armored. My own thesis adviser had like, three Apaches, and another of my lecturers flew her Cobra to the university every day.

Paradigm scolds Bebop for shooting at them when he wants them alive for whatever reason. Bebop insists that these are all warning shots. They continue flying after them and raining down volleys of warning shots all around them. It's pretty clear that the warning is not being heeded, but I guess they keep doing it anyway because...um...boredom, I guess, I dunno.

Ben and the sharks flee the legally-mandated-nineties-cartoon laser blasts into an amusement park full of children and families. Nice move, assholes. Somehow, despite having been raining legally-mandated-nonbullets down all around them until literally one second ago, Paradigm and Co are nowhere in sight when the gang get out of their car and try to lose themselves in the crowd while pretending to be advertisers for an upcoming new ride, the hastily named "Street Sharks" roller coaster.

IE, actually encouraging kids to gather around them.

When they know they're being hunted by someone with an aerial view and a lot of firepower they're willing to use liberally.

-_-

Sure enough, Paradigm looms overhead a minute later. How did they even get ahead of him in the first place? And, sure enough, he's firing more warning shots indiscriminately at the area around them. We don't see anyone get hit, but the damage to the grounds and structures is significant, so...I'd say it's well implied. Good job, heroes.

Paradigm lands, and has his minions burrow under the street sharks (guess they can also swim through the ground. Because of course they can) and collapse a pit under their feet to trap them. Because apparently he forgot that they have that exact same burrowing ability themselves, and therefore a pit means less than nothing to them. Because of course he did.

Although...they DON'T burrow themselves out. Instead, they chew their way through the pile of debris that the bad guys dumped on top of the pit. Erm. Same difference, I guess, but why not just take the obvious solution to the problem?

Well. Once they're standing on the ground again, Paradigm fires another laser blast from the underside of the chopper to get their attention, and then makes would could have been a real turning point for the series that would have distinguished it much more from the many other low budget TMNT clones. He tells them that there's no way they can survive in the wild, and that they need him to keep them alive now. Also, if they come peacefully, he'll do his best to reunite them with their father.

Okay, so, that offer makes a ton of sense. Regardless of whether or not what he's telling them is true. The intent is probably that he's lying, but I think it would have been better if he wasn't, and they actually did need some sort of periodic booster shot from him to keep their new biology from killing them. If they actually WERE forced to cooperate and return to his captivity, but were too strong and dangerous for him to push too far once they're there, that could be a REALLY interesting dynamic at least for half a season or so. It would take the show in a darker direction at least temporarily, sure, but it would have been memorable as all hell even if the execution was as bad as everything else so far, simply because none of the competing shows were doing anything like this.

Unfortunately, instead of that, we get the most inane action set piece so far in a pilot that's been chock full of them.

One of the sharks (I don't even know which of them is which, none of the street sharks have had a chance to show any unique personality traits since their transformation) shouts "get him," and we see them charging. Then we see Paradigm, still standing behind his laser turret, but looking terrified. As if he doesn't have any recourse for enemies running directly toward the laser gun he was just menacing them with. Then, we see that the sharks were charging in the OPPOSITE direction, moving away from Paradigm and toward a ferris wheel that they promptly chew off of its pylons and roll at him.

Somehow, when that one shark shouted "get him," all of the others somehow knew that he meant "run away from him and weaponize the nearest amusement park ride." And Paradigm was frozen with fear behind his lascannon at the sight of them appearing to run away from him.

I feel like something must have gotten cut here.

Also, in the next shot...holy fuck this is some RWBY tier shit wow. Okay. So. We see them rolling the ferris wheel at Paradigm and his chopper. Paradigm sees it coming toward him, and turns around to flee under the belly of the chopper. For juuuust a second, we see the wheel about to impact the chopper behind him:

It also seems to have dramatically shrunk, based on the curvature of the part of the wheel onscreen and its scale to Paradigm, but still. It's crashing into the chopper, Paradigm is fleeing the imminent impact.

Then the very next fucking shot is this:

Did the ferris wheel crush the helicopter into dust without taking any damage or losing any momentum itself?

Did it shrink even smaller and roll under the belly of the chopper before growing again on the other side?

Did the chopper spontaneously vaporize before it could hit?

Paradigm tries the Prometheus Technique to escape the ferris wheel, and ends up surviving out of pure luck when it finally breaks down and collapses. Bebop and Rocksteady suddenly exist again, and seem to have lost the sharks. Somehow. Then, a moment later, they've apparently found them again (they don't say anything to acknowledge this; they're just facing them now) and try to push a roller coaster over on them. The sharks just stand there and watch them do it, and then catch the falling ride and push it back.

Then the national guard arrives, and this time the sharks and Ben finally do the sane thing and surrender.

Are Paradigm and his minions also being surrounded, or did they disappear into another of those inexplicable creases in spacetime? Who knows. End episode.


Believe it or not, this was quite a bit better than I was expecting.

I'm not saying it was good. Or even average. It's still a very bad cartoon. But where I was expecting the unwatchable grinning sharkmen to just be the tip of the iceberg of awfulness, their visual design ended up being probably the single worst detail. Everything else ranged from just regular everyday badness to actually kind of creative in a few rare moments, with only a few other exceptionally terrible bits.

The show as a whole...it's more than the sum of its parts. The parts are almost all bad to one degree or another. Their combination doesn't do them any favors either, exactly. But...there's this emergent, almost certainly unintentional weirdness that's almost profound. If you got rid of even a single idiosyncratic detail - like the newscaster's air pollution obsession, or the stoically unshakable grins that the main characters are all wearing even when being experimented on, or Scrappy's blink-and-you'll-miss-it jetpack - it would fall below the critical weirdness threshold and just be a generic bad cartoon. As it is, it manages to just barely accomplish "trainwreck you can't look away from" status.

Except when the sharks are grinning directly at the camera, of course. You look away from it then.

I think the single biggest problem with this pilot as a whole, rather than any particular scene, is how undeveloped the characters were. Each of the boys had a distinguishing trait telegraphed during their introductions, but most of the rest of the episode had them either acting interchangeably, or just riding in a car or being strapped to a vivisection table and unable to act at all. So, I still don't know which boy became which shark, and what each of their "thing" is supposed to be. Compared to TMNT's simple but very tightly executed "serious guy, silly guy, tough guy, smart guy," Street Sharks' four man team is extremely flat and flavorless. The villains have the same problem, kind of. TMNT had a generally competent, imposing main villain paired with a couple of inept comic relief henchmen. That meant that battles could be silly and slapstick when the turtles were going up against the rival manimals, but also create some stakes and tension when Shredder took to the field (Shredder had plenty of silly moments himself, sure, and occasionally he played the buffoon outright, but generally). Dr. Paradigm and his own Rocksteady and Bebop knockoffs are all equally incompetent and farcical, which not only makes them uniform and indistinguishable in kind of the same way, but also undermines the entire conflict.

So, overall? Bad, and bad in a weird enough way to be somewhat entertaining in spite of itself. But with a little more attention to characterization and just one or two key plot changes, it could have been actually sort of decent.