I also don’t see TMNT as a “one-note gag franchise”; while the title’s a joke and the first issue made a bunch of Frank Miller refs, I think they got that stuff out of their system pretty fast and played the premise mostly straight.

And for my money there have been good adaptations of it and bad ones.  Like with anything.

Is it possible that the rewritten origin could be an attempt at an end run around reversion?

Like, am I correct in assuming that Eastman and Laird (or their heirs) are entitled to regain the TMNT copyrights 56 years after original publication (ie in 2040), but that Paramount will retain all the trademarks?

So this could hypothetically mean that, come 2040, the creators/heirs reclaim the rights to the ORIGINAL version of the Turtles…but that Paramount still owns these alien Turtles, as distinct characters.

(Doesn’t seem inconceivable to me that they’d be considered distinct characters; the original Superboy is legally distinct from Superman even though he’s just Superman as a boy, and Wolfman’s case for the Blade rights ended in a judgement that the character was so substantially changed between his original pitch and the published version as to be an entirely different character.)

Course, it could be I’m overthinking this and Bay just wants to do another movie based on an alien invasion by a popular 1980′s toy/cartoon property.

But more likely it’s just to make it more like the Transformers movies.

1) They’re going with “our enemy is pure evil and so we must protect this innocent world!” story, which has been done to death and sounds a lot like Transformers but with turtles. 

2) Krang destroys the Alien Turtle planet and the baby turtles are sent to Earth to protect them, totally not stealing Superman’s origin story in the process, honest (or the Thundercats one either for that matter).

If they absolutely had to get some sort of space origin going I’d much prefer green ooze from the sky mutating native wildlife, it’s close to the original but leaves it open for any number of alien magic-tech civilisations to appear at any time, which seems to be the only reason to make the turtles from space.

Edit: Eh. I watched the video from further down the comments and it turns out the ooze was from space after all, so shows what I know really. :-/

I think he could live comfortably without working another day in his life; he’s had a few failed ventures over the years but I don’t think he’s hurting.

Like I say down below — I think he’s being completely sincere when he says he thinks the script is great.  I just don’t think he has very good taste.  (Ever see Heavy Metal 2000?)

Which isn’t to say Eastman DOESN’T love chesty women.  He made Heavy Metal 2000, after all.  An entire direct-to-video movie about his former Penthouse Pet of the Year wife.

Really, dude?  You wanna be THAT guy?  The guy who pulls a “Well the premise is fiction, therefore you can NEVER CRITICIZE ANYTHING ABOUT IT” response?

Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra must have been one hell of a TV show.

O wait, he created TMNT?  Yes, that is exactly what it is.