- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Bowl, Image: Nicole Wakelin
I am a big fan of the heroes in a half-shell and have happy memories of watching the first run of cartoons years ago. I know the theme song by heart and there is still a much-loved plastic cereal bowl in my kitchen cabinet that came attached to a box of cereal. I was in college and I bought it just so I could get that silly bowl and give it to my then-boyfriend who was a huge fan of the Ninja Turtles. It is one of the few objects that survived from college into our married life. Sadly, with Michael Bay’s recent statements about the remake, it seems that may be all that survives of the original franchise.
The Ninja Turtles are supposed to be mutants trained in the ways of crime-fighting by a wise mutant rat. They live in a sewer, eat pizza, know martial arts and talk like teenagers. As I type that I realize just how utterly goofy a premise that is, but they were still fun to watch. They’re kind of like all those cat videos. Sure, a cat playing piano is silly, but how can you not like a cat playing piano or a turtle wielding nunchucks? But the turtles have more of a story than Internet cats and you can only mess with an origin story so much before you break it into unrecognizable pieces.
Their origin story is simple. They became the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after taking a swim in the sewers of New York City and coming in contact with glowing radioactive goo. Until then, they were happy little turtles, munching lettuce and minding their own turtle business. But Michael Bay has announced that the coming live-action movie will feature the turtles as aliens.
They are not the Teenage Alien Ninja Turtles so how does that even work? I mean, what if you did the reverse and suddenly decided Superman wasn’t an alien but a guy who fell into a sewer and gained supernatural powers? Yeah, that would mess things up real good, just like it’s going to do with the turtles. You might as well make them zombies or cyborgs or some weird combination of it all if you’re going to mess with their origin story to such a degree.
All franchises goes through changes, but turning the turtles into aliens is just too much. Maybe change their love of pizza into a love of tacos or update their teenage lingo so they don’t sound like they’re twenty years out of date. But that’s it. I want my Ninja Turtles to be cute little turtles from Earth that have mutated due to toxic sewer goo. I do not want them to come from The Planet of the Turtles.
If Michael Bay is so eager to introduce aliens into the turtle’s origin story, he could simply make the ooze come from aliens. Perhaps an alien spaceship crashed and a canister of “alien ooze” found its way into a sewer where it turned the turtles into TMNT.
He could even make the aliens central to the plot by having the turtles track down where the stuff came from, revealing their shocking alien-related origins.
But to turn the turtles themselves into aliens is just ridiculous. They wouldn’t even be turtles then. Just Teenage Alien Ninja Turtle-Like-Creatures.
There already are aliens in the Ninja Turtles. Isn’t that evil brain guy an alien? Crang, was that his name?
We had that bowl! It was my dad’s favorite and he may still have it!