The recently-debuted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trailer is aligned closely with what has become the standard for action movies based on retro properties (see: Transformers, G.I. Joe). But what stood out to me (besides the 30 seconds max of Turtles in a 90 second spot) was the amount of guns in use in the trailer’s scenes.
Before you wail on Michael Bay’s embattled balls for forsaking the source material, in the original TMNT comic book there are quite a few firearms in use. I guess it stood out in this trailer because most of the Ninja Turtle properties we’ve gotten used to have skewed child-friendly, replacing rifles with laser blasters and human enemies with robots (it’s OK to kill robots, kids). General rule of thumb: if it bears a Nickelodeon logo, it won’t feature terrorists with guns.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, here is the first official trailer for Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
At this point the Turtles are a multi-generational pop culture institution and have been constantly rebooted. I see no problem with seeing how this goes over, but as you are aware there has been much “wailing on Michael Bay’s balls” with the release of this trailer. Things change and the complaints of the large, hulking Turtles are reminiscent of the “ZOMG OPTIMUS HAS FLAMES” from the first time Optimus Prime rolled out in the 2007 Transformers film. I’m enough of a fan to ride this out and see what happens.
Very well said. I think TMNT as a franchise is strong enough that one tanker of a movie is not going to hurt the overall property. I look at it this way- if it was announced that they were rebooting Thundercats or Silverhawks and making a movie and Bay was directing, I’d be confident that the entire reboot would fail and the property would go back in the vault forever, because not enough of the current generation have a love for it to survive a horrific feature film. The Ninja Turtles will be fine either way, whether this film blows or not.
And I’m glad someone caught the ‘wailing on Michael Bay’s balls’ bit.