Rant: Please Don’t Let This Be From The New Ninja Turtles Movie

You know what’s awesome? Memories. You know what’s less awesome? Hollywood taking a shit on your memories. I can stomach some studio big shot calling on some film school hack to remake some schlocky 80s horror movie, when the artsy asshole really just wants to make artsy films about albino abortionists living with nose cancer in Missouri. Personally, I don’t care. Horror movies, schlocky or otherwise, were never my thing. But you know what my thing was? Fucking Ninja Turtles.

And, no. I never had sex with a Ninja Turtle. I meant that “Fucking” as “You’re Goddamn right Ninja Turtles was the shit!” I, as most kids my age, had more Ninja Turtle toys than I knew what to do with. I don’t know how, because I was poor. Shit, every kid that played with Ninja Turtles was poor. I think every child of the late 80s, early 90s was given a crate of various Ninja Turtle toys as a form of hush money.  Like we had all tuned in to an episode one afternoon only to witness some TV executive smothering a hooker.

The point is, I love me some Ninja Turtles. When it comes to the movies, part one is awesome. Part two is equally awesome, if not more so, because it featured Vanilla Ice singing a song about mutated freaks of nature that have a weird pizza and violence fetish. Part three was very meh, but the song “Tarzan Boy” was featured prominently, and that song sucks so bad it made the loop around Sucks and spun itself right back in to Amazing. TMNT, the recent CG entry in to the series, gets the Luis Prada Certified Award For Participation. It’s a kind of pat on the back, a nod, and a “You’ll get’em next year, kid.”

But this…this bit of news that took me three goddamn paragraphs to get to…this is a fucking atrocity. The picture you see above may or may not be a mask for the next live action Ninja Turtles movie. I say “may or may not” because it’s unconfirmed. In fact, I’m willing to bet that it has nothing to do with the movie. Just something some guy made But the possibility of this…thing…getting used in the movie still exists. The story behind it is one of the guys over at Latino Review received the picture via E-mail.

Now, before you jump to conclusions, this may not be Raphael because the story for the new flick is supposed to be more like the original comics, and in the original comics all the turtles had red masks at first. Now, allow me to jump to conclusions: this may be pretty far from whatever the masks end up looking like in the movie, so when I say “Fuck you, new Ninja Turtles mask” I am only talking about the one above. Fuck this thing. It’s horrifying. The reason the turtles looked cartoony in the cartoons, movies and comics is because it’s endearing. It enables everyone – adults and children – to connect emotionally to the character. When I first saw this picture I thought it was an elderly head of lettuce pretending to be Rambo. That shit doesn’t even make sense, so how the hell am I supposed to connect to it emotionally? (although, the argument could be made that this FX job was inspired by a short run of the comics series by writer and artist Michael Zulli, who drew the turtles in a manner such as this).

Still Creepy

As a long time Ninja Turtles fan, I hope this isn’t from the movie. I really do hope it’s some FX student’s project.  It’s depressing. If this truly is the version of the mask that we’ll see in the movie, or at least one that’s up for consideration among many, many others that are also up for consideration, burn this motherfucker to the ground, collect the insurance on it, and move on to mask no. 11478255 (aka, the one that doesn’t look like baby poop in a red Zorro mask).