This just landed in my feed reader:
Kevin Eastman On The New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles And Our First Impressions Of Some Footage
I’m not down at the MCM Expo today but that Shaw Williams character is and she called me up to fill me in on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles presentation and following Q&A with Kevin Eastman.
She’s rushed off her feet down there, but she’s passed me her notes to misinterpret wildly.
Let’s start with the footage, which comes from Nickelodeon’s upcoming carton reboot. Proof that it’s a reboot, if proof be need be? Hannah believes episode one to be an origin story, showing the turtles “coming up to the surface of the world for the first time.”
It wasn’t clear if the footage screened was from this episode, or if it was clear, Hannah is an idiot and didn’t pick up on it. She said that the animation was good, but some of the writing was a bit off. This she blamed on the use of Michaelangelo as a forced comic relief.
Having seen The Krang in action, Hannah tried to describe their squishy brain in a cyber body look by saying that they were cyber bodies with just a squishy brain thing inside. She did confirm, however, that we’re looking at The Krang, emphasis on the The. This is a whole race, not a one-off Krang character.
The series’ main villain, she confirmed, was Shredder.
One of the points of reinvention was the new April O’Neill who is, now, a young girl. The reason for this, according to Eastman, was that they thought about it for a bit and decided, actually, having a thirty-something lady hanging around with these teenage boys was actually kind of creepy. Less creepy is a human teenage girl hanging out with a bunch of mutated turtles, of course. I suppose that’s the conceit of the piece; that they’re just boys, really, at a subtext level.
The music in the show is going to be hip hop, drum and bass and dubstep. Will the beloved theme tune be coming back? Eastman refused to answer, saying that he liked the original tune, and… Yeah, who are we kidding. He’d have just said “No,” if it wasn’t. I expect there’s a new hip-hop theme coming.
Maybe, just maybe, that’s got something to do with Kid Cudi? Would make a kind of sense.
NEWSFLASH: The cartoon series is going to be supported by a new toy line. Hannah tells me:
The party van is coming back and a motorbike which converts into stealth mode, which basically means it gets a tortoiseshell on top.
Where the heck is that a stealth mode? A beach in Malaysia?
Eastman was also asked about the in-development Ninja Turtle movie. He said that he likes what he has seen – though what this is was not clear. It may have been concept art, test footage, script pages, pre-viz or anything. He didn’t clarify what involvement he has with the film, so it could be as simple as him being on the payroll as chief Man Who Says He’s Seen Some Stuff And We Don’t Need To Worry.
Specifically in respect of the new, alien-world origin calculated for the Turtles, Eastman said that “it won’t get in the way.”
So there we go. “The animation looked quite good” was the bit I wanted to hear, and I did. Look forward to checking it out myself. [
source]