A mysterious garbage truck is abducting homeless people and the Turtles look to find out why.
First appearance of The Professor and The Garbageman.
This episode provides examples of:
- The Bait: Mikey bemoans the fact that he's always the bait.Mikey: ...especially when we're hunting 'shark'!
- Chain-Link Fence: Two men in the Professor's group escape from the Garbageman by scaling a chain-link fence, while a third is grabbed after climbing halfway up.
- Disposable Vagrant: The Garbageman is taking homeless people to work on his island as slaves because, as Don points out, most people don't notice, or care if vagrants go missing.
- Down in the Dumps: The primary setting for the episode.
- Dramatic Shattering: As the Garbageman abducts two homeless men in The Teaser, there's a closeup of the bottle they had painstakingly salvaged from a trash can falling to the ground and shattering.
- Fat Bastard/ Fat Slob: the Garbageman is literally a ''big'' bad...
- Gas Mask Mooks: The thugs at the Garbageman's landfill wear yellow gas masks and carry cattle prods.
- I Choose to Stay: Even after the Garbageman and his soldiers are defeated, the Professor and his fellow vagrants opt to stay on the island, as it has both food and shelter for them.
- Island Base: The Garbageman's home/base of operations is a literal island of garbage in the city harbor. As Leo puts it, he could be up to anything he wants to and no one would notice.
- King of the Homeless: The Professor
- Lame Pun Reaction: Mikey just can't seem to find a good catchphrase in this episode. Even the Garbageman wants to shut him up..
- Never Found the Body: Following the Garbageman's Disney Villain Death, the turtles dive in to look for him and possibly save him, only to find his empty chair and the man himself no where to be seen. Also doubles as a Sequel Hook, as he returns in a later episode.
- New Era Speech: The Garbageman gives one to the homeless people he has kidnapped to make them his slaves.The Garbageman: Before I brought you to this island, you were nothing but human garbage. No home, no purpose, no value. But now, I have recycled you, given you work sifting through the refuse that this city stupidly squanders to build my fortune. Behold the birth of my empire, invisible to the outside world until it is too late!
- The Reveal: We find out where the Turtles get all the stuff for their lair without jobs or money: by scrounging at the dump.
- Running Gag: Mikey keeps trying — and failing — to come up with a good catchphrase or Pre-Asskicking One-Liner, and bemoaning how his brothers can actually pull them off.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Leo assumes that this is how the Garbageman has been able to operate unhindered. A few payoffs to the right people, and as long as he doesn't draw too much attention to himself, his island is off the radar.
- Shout-Out:
- Don starts the episode off by saying "Here's another fine mess we've gotten ourselves into."
- When the garbage truck as the "shark" comes to pick up Mikey's "bait," he explicitly calls out the theme from Jaws.
- Mikey says that if the Garbageman is right that "garbage is power," then he must be Superman.
- Sophisticated as Hell: The Professor.The Professor: May I take this opportunity to encourage you to kick that so-called Garbageman’s stinking derrière!
- Trash Landing: When the Garbageman unloads his latest batch of homeless slaves, they go down a long slide into a pile of garbage.
- Villain Has a Point: After the Garbageman's defeat, the Professor says that the former's New Era Speech was correct on one thing; a lot of valuable items are thoughtlessly disposed of by the society.
- Visionary Villain: The Garbageman wants to force the kidnapped homeless people to build for him an empire out of the trash.
