Ooh, and Boris the Bear!

“One Kansas girl in an oddly tight gingham dress…

[caption: Kate Upton]

One scarecrow who’s smoked his brains out…

[caption: Doug Benson]

One tin ass-kicking machine…

[caption: Channing Tatum]

And one mentally challenged stuntman who thinks he’s a flatulent jaguar…

[caption: Steve-O]
[smaller caption:  Nobody wanted to give Michael Bay a lion]

From the director who rebuilt ‘Transformers’ with parts left out…who Pearl Harbored ‘Pearl Harbor’…who made us root for the rock…in ‘Armageddon’…

This summer…see Adam Sandler in…

TAKING A WIZ!”

[Nobody has yet had the courage to rate this film.]

By the same token, the silliness of the original TMNT was part of what made the comic worth reading.  Michael Bay’s decision-making will result in a lower-quality product.  But I guess it will be good enough for who it’s for.

Which doesn’t mean it’ll be good.  It just means Bay’s not directing.

Apologies for not commenting a few minutes ago, but I just took a big fat Michael Bay, and just returned from the bathroom.

Seriously, there are tons of action film directors at least as profitable as Bay right now, and any of them could sneeze a better Turtles flick than Bay apparently wants to make.

She’s got nostalgia for the cartoon.  The comic doesn’t seem to enter into it.

Anyhow.  I like the original comic.  And yeah, I’m well aware of the Miller references; they’re not exactly subtle.  They also lasted as a springboard for all of one issue before the series turned into its own distinct thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwkL53bH0PI

The same thing happened when M. Night Faylaman screwed the pooch with the Airbender movie; he changed a lot of crap that didn’t need to be changed (a minimal example: changing the pronunciation of “Aang” to “Ahng” — it’s not like he was interpreting it differently from a comic book…he was basing it off of a cartoon…done in English…), and I have a very deep love for the ATLA franchise; I felt betrayed, and my expectations weren’t even that high.

If Bay wants to make a movie about alien turtles with martial arts skills coming to earth, by all means; I won’t stand in his way. But attaching it to a previously successful franchise solely for instant fanboy ticket sales is a real dickish thing to do; it’s just plain cheating. If I make a candy bar with the Snickers name, but I replace the chocolate with kale, the caramel with tofu, and the nougat with General Tso’s sauce, why am I still calling it a Snickers bar? Great, now I’m hungry.

I liked TMNT in the 80s; my friends and I all watched the cartoons, collected the action figures, and played the arcade games. I never got into the comics, though I knew they existed. The movies were so-so, but they were acceptable; the first one was pretty entertaining, actually, and mostly faithful to the cartoon. But while the movies may have taken some artistic license (they made Splinter a rat that became anthropomorphic, rather than a human that became a rat; this actually made the Mutagen ooze a little more consistent, really), the movie was fundamentally the same.  Bay is disrespecting the audience and movie patrons by trying to tap into our love for Snickers, but serving us some possibly-delicious-but-clearly-different veggie bar.