With just over a week left until the official release of the first trailer for Jonathan Liebesman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (to be played before the new Captain America film), the teaser was unveiled by Paramount at CinemaCon 2014. There are no hints of the actual trailer on the net just yet, but the reaction from those who saw the trailer is fairly unnerving. Although most reports seem to be pretty positive, there are some saying that the trailer reveals a significant alteration to the origin of the TMNT. Could it be that after all we’ve been through, there may still have been significant changes made to the story of the Ninja Turtles and how they came to be? Well, if the responses we’ve seen over the past 24 hours are any indication, it would appear that they have indeed played around with the timeline.
Viewers of the trailer report that there is a voice over from Shredder, who is apparently speaking to April O’Neil. In this voice over, Fichtner’s character tells April that “heroes are not born, they are created; that’s what your father and I were trying to do – create heroes.” The implication given in the trailer is apparently that April’s father worked with Eric Sachs in order to create the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Needless to say, this is shocking and somewhat confusing information. This isn’t the story that TMNT fans are familiar with. To be fair, this line is apparently followed up by a shot of a clear cannister with the letters “TCRI” on the side and ooze flowing within. That’s right, they definitely have the ooze origin in this film, but have they added more to it and complicated matters by implicating both The Shredder and April’s father in their creation? Possibly.
Honestly, this sounds like a case of the viewers misinterpreting what a (possibly) poorly crafted trailer is telling them. Having not seen the trailer myself, I cannot confirm that this is the case, but it would seem that there just isn’t enough information to work with. For all we know, the trailer begins with The Shredder talking to April and his next line is pulled from an entirely different conversation. In addition to this, it is entirely possible that they didn’t necessarily set out to create Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – it could be that their aim was to create super soldiers and the ooze was still accidentally spilled on the turtles instead.
If you ask me, even if this is the case, it still comes dangerously close to rewriting the history of the TMNT and completely erasing one of the cultural backbones of the Ninja Turtles that made them a phenomenon in the 80’s. Back then, it wasn’t too uncommon for popular culture to reference the destructive and mutative powers of toxic/nuclear waste, as that was a hot button issue during the cold war era. Nowadays, people aren’t necessarily as concerned with these issues as they once were, but that doesn’t mean they are no longer culturally relevant or important to touch on. In other words, I understand the desire to alter this part of the story, but the motivation for it is pretty vapid.
Even when I’m being as fair as I can with this concept, I honestly don’t see how this alteration to the origin story could be deemed necessary or important from a cultural standpoint. Why even feature mutant characters if you think the whole concept of mutation via strange unknown chemicals is too outdated? At this point, I feel that I’m getting a bit too far ahead of myself. I haven’t seen the trailer yet, nor have I seen the movie, so I cannot confirm that such an origin change even exists. That being said, I can see why some fans were upset by the very idea that they had altered the story after all, especially when we were told that the story remains faithful to the origin of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
What do you think? Check out some of the descriptions of the trailer online and let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Alternatively, you can sound off in our forums!
13 comments
Do you even know what you’re talking about?! It sounds like the origins are completely in tact to me. Little alterations have been made all the time and Splinter is a prime example of that. Some origin stories he’s Yoshi’s pet, others he’s actually Yoshi! It’s still the ooze, and they’re still mutants. In the current TV series, April’s father has to do with the ooze. Don’t blow smoke just to make a story. I don’t see how any of this could possibly point to the “backbone” of their story actually changing.
Yeah i agree. As long as there is ooze and the turtles i think the core of it is pretty on point. I llike the idea of aprils dad having to do with it. He does in the idw world as well. The shreddder being behind it ostensibly kinda weird but it could work out with this new shredder. Honestly it seems like the story would make more sense if Baxter was the main villain. But yeah this article is weird. The ooze And the turtles are there…its not too different on that foundation.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. To go off your Stockman point though… Shredder isn’t human. At least he’s not always human. He’s actually an Utrom (Kraang). So this shredder really isn’t all that new… The actual origin of the Ooze has never really been specified in detail or at least set in stone. It’s always been assumed someone (or something) created it in TCRI (Techno COSMIC Research Institute). Stockman may be a mad scientist, but he’s no alien from the cosmos. In fact to cut ties with the aliens idea in the live action movie they renamed it to TGRI (Techno Global Research Industries). In the modern Nickelodeon iteration, the Kraang are directly responsible for the creation and manipulation of the ooze. I think having this movie be more blunt about Shredder’s close ties with the ooze could give people a better perspective of the original turtles and hopefully rid of the naivety this writer has about the “backbone” of their origins.
Well u do know that the Krang involvement with the ooze is from the original comic books. And shredder was in the first series Saki. That didn’t change in comic or original cartoon form.
I’m not sure that what you’re saying is different from my point. Shredder was originally human but Laird was later involved in the creation of Ch’rell (Utrom Shredder). The point being, the creators have toyed with many different iterations of this universe and having Shredder directly involved with the ooze and the turtles origins is nothing new or worth criticizing. Especially not in the manner this article tries to point at.
Actually, the original comic and original cartoon are quite a bit different. The original comic was an accident as the Utroms (not Krang) were transporting ooze and some fell out due to the blind man (a tribute to Daredevil). The canister fell out and shattered a glass bowl with turtles and fell to the sewer. Yoshi’s pet rat (living in the streets after the death of his master) saw this and followed.
The old cartoon, Shredder got the ooze from Krang (inspired by the Utroms but not actually an Utrom) to destroy Yoshi, but it gave him powers of the rats that he was around in the sewers.
So yeah, quite the different origins if you ask me. Now this new movie, maybe Shredder was involved with the creation of the ooze, but it still could have been an accident that caused the turtles to mutate. Or maybe he was truly trying to create mutant turtles (let’s hope not). We won’t know til it comes out.
Writer of the article here,
I just wanted to point out that I wrote this in response to the reactions I had seen online. I typically like to write articles from a non-biased viewpoint, touching on as many different aspects as I can without stepping on too many toes. I’m sorry if this offended you in any way, shape or form.
I am aware that Shredder has had ties to the creation of the turtles in certain iterations of the origin story, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he intentionally set out to mutate the four turtles. I was merely attempting to express some of the concerns that others may have had about an alteration of the origin story, as this has been a hot button issue with the film since Michael Bay infamously uttered the word “alien.” At this point in time, even the very idea that there may possibly have been an alteration to the origin story could upset the fans, and they have a right to know about what may be going on.
All that being said, I would hope that my several attempts to point out that I have not yet seen the trailer myself would be enough to express the concept that this is hearsay at best and only a response to the initial reaction from some of the fans who had an opportunity to see the trailer. I simply stated that if they had changed the origin story, I might have been upset about it. By the end of the article, I admitted that I was getting ahead of myself as I had not yet confirmed that a change to the origin had taken place. Please understand that nothing I wrote here was intended to be taken as naïve or as a misrepresentation of facts. I was merely speaking about an issue that fans were concerned about at the moment.
Maybe you shouldn’t write a review based on reactions you heard about on the internet, that is some journalist integrity right there. I am sure you wrote this as click bait so that you would get hits but at the cost of your credibility?
It’s a little more complicated than that. Telling a journalist not to write about a very popular subject is kind of like telling them to go out to pasture. Maybe I shouldn’t write about the subject that everyone else is writing about right now? Let’s be realistic here.
Pray tell, how exactly does this affect my journalistic integrity? I chose to write about the fan response to a trailer on a fan site. In the post, I link to a CNN article in which they are doing much the same thing — writing about negative fan reaction to an event. If the fan reaction is important, a journalist is going to write about it one way or another.
This has nothing to do with “click bait” and everything to do with reporting the most up-to-date and important information in the world of TMNT. At the time that I wrote this, the fan reaction was the most important and recent information among the fan community.
I don’t see how any of this affects my credibility. I think you might do well to take a step back and appreciate the situation for what it is. Don’t shoot the messenger. I apologize if anything I have written has offended you at all, but there’s no need to call my credibility or journalistic integrity into question simply because I did my job.
Agreed with JohnnyC. This is one little line in a trailer and wouldn’t this be consistent withy the origin in the new IDW comics?
Yeah, I think a lot of those sites that been reporting it has been taking what was said out of context, So if they used a bit of the origin from the IDW series, I’m fine with it.
Why should it be be deemed “necessary or important from a cultural stand point.”?
Every time the reintroduce the turtles for something, comics, cartoons whatever, they tweak it a bit. People worry to much. The new comics version if the story is pretty good. So I’m not worried about this in the least.
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