Aliens?!?! The Ninja Turtles are NOT aliens, Mr. Bay.
Fresh off of milking the Transformers series for as much money as humanly possible, mindless action-flick guru Michael
Bay has his sights set on another iconic 1980s kids’ toy-and-TV franchise – the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. However, if this quick clip of Bay discussing plans for the new flick is any indication, it looks as though he’ll be stuffing the film with as many historical inaccuracies as there were in Pearl Harbor. Namely, that he thinks Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael are aliens. Aliens. Anyone who’s read the comic books, watched the TV series, watched the progressively worse ’90s films, and battled through the NES and arcade-game iterations of the series knows that they were four regular turtles who happened upon some transformative ooze that turned them into the “teenage mutants” we all know and love. We mean, come on, Mike, this is a very fundamental aspect of the TMNT universe that gets a full movie’s worth of an explanation. Their Earthliness is part of what makes the series so great, as The Guardian‘s Stuart Heritage aptly points out:
Making the turtles aliens would ruin everything – their desire to be accepted, their bizarre late-1980s street lingo, their fondness for pizza. Everything. Are we really meant to believe that there’s an alien race of giant turtles who just happen to all be named after renowned Renaissance artists from this planet, and speak English, and who came to Earth with a giant elderly rat who’s presumably from the same race, just to live in sewers and loudly eschew anchovies at every opportunity? Hardly, Michael Bay. Hardly.
Now, the film’s slated for release around Christmas, 2013, so hopefully that gives Bay enough time to correct the record and make sure there’s no mention of the Ninja Turtles being extraterrestrials. If he doesn’t, though, how long will it be until he Bay-ifies Inspector Gadget into a competent policeman with a nifty utility belt?
