Somebody’s Getting Fired Over This Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Poster

Public relations is a delicate thing. You have to be aware of so many things that might accidentally give offense, or that the more insensitive among us (yo) might find hilarious. Like, say, for example, this poster for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, from Australia.

Here’s the full poster. It seems fairly typical, until you get to the release date:

Yeah, needless to say, some people found it a bit insensitive that you’ve got the Turtles jumping out of a burning tower that looks like something just crashed into it on 9/11. Personally, I can’t get too worked up, because it’s so obviously a mistake. It’s not like they’re jumping off a Malaysia Air flight or announcing Michael Bay’s 9/11: The Revenge or something.

No, this one just slipped by the PR team. Action heroes have been jumping out of exploding buildings for decades on posters, and these are Australians. Why would we expect them to remember 9/11 as a day that lived in infamy? Nothing happened to them. It’d be like expecting us to remember the Granville rail disaster or something, which I only know about because I looked it up on Wikipedia.

It is, on the other hand, always enormously entertaining to laugh at PR mistakes, which we will now do. Or speculate on the Turtles’ role in Al Qaeda.

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