At first, this was going to be a pure anti-Michael Bay-Ninja Turtles movie article. I had prepared arguments on how we'll probably see Shia Lebeouf as Casey Jones, an underwear model as April O'Neil, and Tracy Morgan as the voice of a jive-talkin' Michaelangelo, but instead I'll wait.
Instead, I'm going to focus on how perfect a TMNT movie would be in this day and age and how we won't get it.
Like most children born in the late 80s/early 90s, I grew up with the Ninja Turtles. When I got older, I started going back and revisiting the old cartoon, and though this is probably blasphemy, I realized it was pretty terrible (The newer cartoon started in the early 2000's is a much better adaptation of the comics) but I ended up reading the original comics they were based on and fell in love. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that the original black and white TMNT comics were in fact meant to be tongue-in-cheek parodies of the popular comics of the day. The voiceover narrations, the toxic ooze, the Foot Clan, all spoofs of the work of Frank Miller, who's dark and brooding comics had risen to popularity in the 1980's. The turtles themselves were meant to be parodies of the X-Men, which alongside Daredevil, was Marvel's most popular comic back then. As goofy as they were, the Turtles comics took themselves extremely seriously, and that was the point of it all. They were meant to be parodies of how serious comics were at the time.
And look at where we are now. With the success of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, dark and brooding serious comic book movies are all the rage. This summer, we're not only getting the third entry in Nolan's Bat-series, but The Amazing Spider-Man a darker reboot of the popular Spider-Man movies. Word has it that WB was developing The Flash as a dark and serious movie. Zack Snyder's Superman: The Man of Steel is supposed to be darker, and we just had Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance a darker sequel to a campy original movie. Last year, even before it came out, people were hating on Green Lantern because they said it looked too comedic. A lot of people disliked Captain America because they said it was too cheesy.
Now, I'll admit, some comic character need to be serious. Guys like Batman and Daredevil work in dark and gritty worlds, but as for other characters... well do you really expect a character named Captain America to be brooding? The point of the original Ninja Turtles comics is that comics were taking themselves too serious to the point where it was becoming comedic. Comic books themselves are pretty over the top and many characters and situations are pretty ludicrous. Sometimes you just have to stop and embrace the cheesiness of it all.
And a new Ninja Turtles movie, if done right, could do that. Get a good filmmaker who understands the source material, and we could have a movie that gives us an excellent commentary on the love of overly serious comic book movies. Give us a TMNT movie that takes itself seriously to the point of absurdity and you can have a Scream like parody of the comic book movies of today. Work in all the cliches, the violence, even the Sin City like VO's, and we could have an excellent and faithful TMNT movie.
Sadly, we'll never get it. Michael Bay's movies are the fast food of the movie industry (and this is coming from someone who enjoyed the Transformers movies) and he won't look into the Turtles any deeper than he has to. And as for the director, Jonathan Liebsman, he is nothing more than a clock-punching filmmaker who will come in and give the studio safe, shallow movie that will get them a good opening weekend. Instead of a TMNT that parodies dark comic book movies, we'll get one that is an overly serious, edgy comic movie. Instead of pointing out the absurdity of the CBM cliches, we'll get a movie that utilizes all the cliches. It sad, because if we had a filmmaking team that cared, we could have TMNT movie that would live up the legendary comics that started a phenomenon.
Until then, I'm sure people will love the jive-talking, alien turtles that come to Earth and fall in love with Pizza.
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