Teenage Mutant Bastard Franchise Alien Turtle Whores

With people dying all over the world and evil running amok, pop culture seems like the least worthy thing to be railing against right now, but let's face it, there's a million things a day that make me hilariously and unhealthily furious. The following article is simply the straw that broke the camel's back (the camel here being a metaphor for my apathy while sitting on the couch and not writing this blog).

http://www.g4tv.com/attackoftheshow/blog/post/721877/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-arealiens/?cmpid=sn-120221-twitter-na-twitterfantrack

So if you haven't heard already, Michael Bay and some other crap-ass director of bad movies are working together to bastardize all of our fond childhood memories of the Ninja Turtles into some sure-to-be-unwatchable new film that will inexplicably gross $300,000,000 in 2013. From the soulless voids of flashing lights and loud noises that make up what should be the creative centers of their brains, they've made the decision to make the Turtles actually aliens.

That's right. Aliens.

I'm going to try to touch only briefly on why this is stupid from a creative perspective before I move onto my main point, as I'm sure the internets at large will be abuzz with the collective outrage of a generation, but lets see how it goes.

First of all, the turtles are four things: Teenage, Mutants, Ninjas, and Turtles. Everything they are is already in their name. If they were actually aliens, or had ever been meant to be aliens, I feel like that would be a pretty fuckin important thing to leave out of a title that's already absurdly long and descriptive. Secondly, turtles are pretty Earth-specific. If they were from another planet, they wouldn't really be turtles, would they? They'd be turtle-like aliens, and the likelihood of all four of them also being genetic mutations of their proper, extraterrestrial turtlesque species seems infantesmal at best. At that point, you'd have to call them something like "Teenage Alien Turtle-Like Ninjas". I mean, that is if you were in any way trying to actually give a proper title to an idea and not just using name recognition to guarantee your profitability while eye-fucking the audience with hours of predictable fight scenes, explosions, and one-liners.

But fanboy bitching aside, seriously, you had us already. Its the Ninja Turtles. They had to do absolutely nothing except to tell the same story over again twenty years later and everyone would have been happy. Let's face it, by the time I was watching the Turtles, they had already long since been wholly corporatized by the franchise goons. The pizza-loving dudebros of the cartoon show who went around chopping up a somehow affordable army of human-shaped robots were a far cry from the comparatively brutal crimefighters of the comic books who drank beer and killed gangbangers. I'm not even asking for some kind of artistic purity here, I'm just asking why you would mess with a guaranteed formlua. In the years between when the cartoon show aired and when everyone decided to save $7 by not seeing the third movie, the Turtles sold us comics, action figures, movie tickets, video tapes, school supplies, halloween costumes, video games, t-shirts, pajamas, novels, backpacks, shoes, party supplies, sleeping bags, and Vanilla Ice and KRS-1 singles. They made us want to eat pizza, join Karate, and skateboard. Every stick that fell on the ground was a bo staff until you broke it into a sword, and then finally, a sai. Then, if you had a rubber band, it became nunchucks. The mere fact that I feel a palpable sense of betrayal at the idea of someone turning the Turtles into aliens speaks to the incredible success with which they have ingrained me with brand loyalty.

All of which begs the question, why fuck with it? The groundwork is already laid. There's a legion of fans out here with a near-genetic loyalty to the Ninja Turtles franchise, just waiting to take themselves and now probably their kids to the movies, just to catch a familliar whiff of what was once so awesome. They could just do the same exact thing: Splinter, Shredder, April, ooze, and bam, it all pays off. Sure, Raphael can make a wisecrack about Jersey Shore or something, and Donatello can have a 4G Ipad instead of a collection of radio transistors, but just once, give the fans what they want. After all, its not like Michael Bay and his million dollar cronies have any artistic stake in the story. But of course, that's not what we'll get. Instead, prepare for a 3D, computer generated "action-packed thrill ride" that takes all of our childhood memories and bends them over a table in a metaphorical hillbilly rape-shack, just like GI Joe and the Transformers. I still haven't seen any of those movies, by the way. I can't bear the thought that I might get hit by a car and die knowing that the last movie I watched was Revenge of the Fallen.

There is hope, however. I recently heard that George Lucas was going to quit making movies because he was tired of all the "fanboy bitching". I'm assuming that term is washed-up, out-of-touch, lucky to have gotten unspeakably rich in the first place director-speak for "public opinion". But the point is, it seems to have worked. It may be too late to stop Michael Bay and his apprentice from turning the Ninja Turtles into some kind of nonsensical explosion aliens. In fact, they might not even know what the fuck a Ninja Turtle is in the first place. I assume that the first thing they do when the studio acquires new production rights is rev up the pyro trucks long before any scripts are written. However, it might be possible, with enough fanboy bitching, to make them quit making movies before they seek and destroy every fond memory we have, even though I think the only 80's cartoons that have managed to stay under the radar are the gay ones like the Snorks, David The Gnome, and Carebears.

To that end, sign this petiton that Jimmy Viola made: Turtles! It may be a small start, but lets get the ball rolling to send those assholes back to their mansions to sleep on piles of money with many beautiful women as the jokes of the movie industry!