Paramount has just released their latest trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, and it features some pretty familiar plot concepts. If you’ve spent any time at all watching the original animated series or the new series from Nickelodeon, chances are that you’ll be familiar with retromutagen. Imagine our surprise when this trailer revealed not only the existence of something like retromutagen in the film, but also a potential conflict over whether or not the turtles should use the substance on themselves.
This is straight out of TMNT lore, so I can’t imagine that there will be too many fans crying foul. That being said, it would appear that their motivation in relation to the retromutagen may be different in the new movie. When the mysterious goo made its first appearance in the original animated series, the Ninja Turtles were more concerned with returning their master to his former self than they were with becoming humans. In this Out of the Shadows trailer, it would appear that the turtles are thinking more about themselves than they are about their master.
When we fast forward to the Nickelodeon series, the turtles are still more focused on using retromutagen for all the right reasons rather than trying to use it on themselves. Heck, if they did use it on themselves, they would probably just turn back into normal turtles. In this Out of the Shadows trailer, we see Donnie using the substance on his hand, which causes his hand to become more human. However, the first film indicated that the Ninja Turtles were once normal turtles, so this would imply a potential deviation from the original concept for retromutagen.
It would seem that although we’re going to see some references to classic moments in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, this sequel has taken a lot of liberties with the source material. Personally, I don’t have a problem with this, because we’ve seen a lot of changes to the TMNT formula over the past three decades and a lot of them have been pretty darn awesome. In this case, I’m very curious to see what they do with the concept of retromutagen, and I’m glad to see it making an appearance in the latest Out of the Shadows trailer.