There comes a point in any nerd’s life where he or she has to revisit beloved childhood media and realize it was terrible. Yes, it filled your life with joy when you were eight, but it doesn’t hold up. So it is with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, which is being readapted to film courtesy of Michael Bay and Jonathan Liebesman.
To Bay and Liebesman’s credit, it’s been a remarkably tight-lipped production, although the Turtles did leak. But they have to show a trailer eventually, as it’ll be tagged to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Cinemablend has put up a description:
The voice-over continues, but there are also flashes of Shredder out of costume talking with April, and shots of the legendary ooze that will eventually transform the titular heroes. Shredder then drops the biggest bomb of all and perhaps the movie’s biggest change in TMNT mythos: knowing that heroes are not born but rather created, Shredder actually worked with April’s dad to create the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
If you actually do view this as a “bomb”, take solace in the fact that it’s not the Scientifically Accurate Ninja Turtles. That appears to be the only material change; there’s still the ooze, there’s still the pet turtles, and so on. It’s just now Shredder is the Darth Vader to the Turtles, sort of, along with some dumpy guy the movie will, in its most outrageous abuse of suspension of disbelief, expect us to believe fathered Megan Fox.
As noted, I’m personally kind of meh about the whole thing. While the live-action movie holds up, and the original comics are entertainingly bizarre, most of the Turtles media is fairly disposable, and arguably their origin matters a lot less than actually having turtles doing martial arts moves. And, hey, they have to try and inject narrative drama in there somehow.
Really, if they wanted to troll us all, they would have cut a deal with Sony and made Richard Parker the actual creator of the Ninja Turtles. Close the movie with Spider-Man webbing a Turtle into his shell, and watch the Internet melt with the sheer heat of outrage.
