Timeline between the original film and SOTO

[sgtfbomb]

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

The only person that even knew about that was Casey, and that'd be confessing to a murder.

Casey wasn't the only one. There were people watching from the streets who would've seen Saki fall from the rooftop and land in the compactor.

[Leo656]

Furthermore, why the hell was a garbage truck just sitting around in the middle of the street in the middle of the evening unattended, anyway?

I don't know how it works up there, but around here garbage pickup is between 5 and 6 in the morning. If they didn't require it for the ending scene, then logically there would be no garbage truck there to begin with.

Hmm.

[sgtfbomb]

Originally Posted by Leo656

Furthermore, why the hell was a garbage truck just sitting around in the middle of the street in the middle of the evening unattended, anyway?.

There was a deleted bit where the garbagemen (played by Eastman & Laird in cameos) pull up on the street and run away. The Turtle Power doc has b-roll of it being shot.

The street fight could take place at any hour, but I've always assumed it was after sometime after 2am. It's already night when they return to NYC and we don't really know the time, but it seems late. Assuming it's likely an hour or two before everyone falls asleep in the lair and Danny leaves, if you figure in his walk to the warehouse (maybe a half hour to an hour), the time spent there before Shredder orders the assault, the time it takes for the Foot to travel to the sewer lair, and even the duration of the sewer fight, it could be possibly be 5 in the morning, especially if they didn't make it to NYC until well after midnight.

[Leo656]

Fair points. But the movie as-is doesn't give us the necessary information to connect those dots.

[ABrown]

Trying to make sense of it is a huge nightmare. It's almost as though they did a soft reboot with the SOTO film.

[pferreira]

Originally Posted by Leo656

However, other things imply that at least a couple weeks had passed. It would have taken a while for April to find such a fancy apartment, for starters, and she seems to know her "new" neighbors sort of well, at least passingly. Meanwhile Keno implies that he's been delivering pizza to April's apartment for many days, sometimes multiple times per day.

I was thinking about this and isn't it possible April already had that apartment? Think about how successful she was already in the first movie. Isn't it possible she already had the apartment from the second movie?

Originally Posted by ABrown

Trying to make sense of it is a huge nightmare. It's almost as though they did a soft reboot with the SOTO film.

Well they essentially rebooted April with a new actress.

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

Not necessarily, since Casey hit the compactor button and mashed him up in there. And for all we know it was done picking up trash and its next stop was the dump.

That's one way of taking out the trash.

[Leo656]

Well, for one thing her apartment in Part II was a lot nicer-looking than her cramped, sorta-dirty ("Unsightly bathtub ring" ) apartment in Part I, so aside from the fact that it was upstairs from her Dad's junk shop, it's a little baffling why she would willingly choose the "crummy" apartment as her primary living space and keep the nice one as a "spare".

Also, knowing what I do of what apartments - especially big ones like hers in either film - cost in NYC... then no, she couldn't have afforded it. The place they showed in Part I would have cost a fortune by itself since it was almost a whole entire building when the junk store was factored in. She also mentioned that she ran the junk shop at a loss, which doesn't help matters. Also, the first film presents her as being only a moderately-successful reporter, at best, not a celebrity. Sure, she got a raise and a new position at the very end of the film, but... the second film doesn't exactly reinforce that, either, as she's still not treated as a reporter with any significant "clout". And didn't she have an entirely new boss? Perhaps Charles got fired by the station for caving in to April's excessive demands for a raise and a corner office?

So... I don't know, I highly doubt she was able to maintain two semi-luxurious apartments AND a giant junk shop on a reporter's salary. I think the first place she had was tough enough to believe, frankly.

I mean, at the end of the day, it's all fake, so maybe? Kinda like the house in "Full House"; apparently Danny Tanner would have had to be a multi-millionaire to actually afford that place if it were real life, and he probably wasn't, at least when the show started. So in the entirely fictional movie world, perhaps April had both properties simultaneously at one point. But if we're using any kind of logic at all, then no. She was probably paying about three to five grand a month, minimum, in 1989 money, just for the original apartment building. The second place obviously would have cost less, since it was "just" an apartment, but it was also far nicer, so it also definitely wasn't cheap. NYC is a ridiculously expensive place to live; most people can't afford ONE apartment there, let alone two.

Ultimately, the people who made the second film simply weren't at all concerned about continuity, because they knew most people watching it were 7.

[pferreira]

Originally Posted by Leo656

Ultimately, the people who made the second film simply weren't at all concerned about continuity, because they knew most people watching it were 7.

I don't know. When I first watched the sequel at 8 I was really fussy about making sure there was continuity with the first. Anyway it's not like they didn't bother to make any attempts at continuity with the first movie at all.

[sgtfbomb]

I don't think it is that they weren't concerned about continuity as much as they were trying to distance themselves from the darker first film while aligning closer to the more cheerful animated series.

Therefore, April's unkept (and burned-down) apartment in a rundown neighborhood became a posh suite in a high-rise residential complex. The dark alleyways and messy sewer lair were traded in for colorful shopping centers and an extravagant and theatrical subway station. Saki, who was probably meant to stay dead (a blood spurt was even deleted), was brought back to be killed again, but this time going out as the more "toyetic" Super Shredder. The score was lightened up and the humor became even more pronounced and cartoon-y. No more foot soldiers frying to death from electrocution, no more misguided teens being harshly beaten by their surrogate father figures. But personally, I think the most unfortunate thing lost in this transition was the sincerity and how the Turtles were treated as flesh and blood people capable of thoughts and feelings, not just caricatures with trademark personality traits and catchphrases.

I see SOTO as being somewhat akin to Batman Forever, another sequel that brought drastic tonal and conceptual changes to a series that started off darker, but still retained some of the cast and a vague level of consistency.

[d_osborn]

Originally Posted by sgtfbomb

I see SOTO as being somewhat akin to Batman Forever, another sequel that brought drastic tonal and conceptual changes to a series that started off darker, but still retained some of the cast and a vague level of consistency.

Exactly this. Similar outcomes, as well.

[Leo656]

Originally Posted by sgtfbomb

I don't think it is that they weren't concerned about continuity as much as they were trying to distance themselves from the darker first film while aligning closer to the more cheerful animated series.

Therefore, April's unkept (and burned-down) apartment in a rundown neighborhood became a posh suite in a high-rise residential complex. The dark alleyways and messy sewer lair were traded in for colorful shopping centers and an extravagant and theatrical subway station. Saki, who was probably meant to stay dead (a blood spurt was even deleted), was brought back to be killed again, but this time going out as the more "toyetic" Super Shredder. The score was lightened up and the humor became even more pronounced and cartoon-y. No more foot soldiers frying to death from electrocution, no more misguided teens being harshly beaten by their surrogate father figures. But personally, I think the most unfortunate thing lost in this transition was the sincerity and how the Turtles were treated as flesh and blood people capable of thoughts and feelings, not just caricatures with trademark personality traits and catchphrases.

I see SOTO as being somewhat akin to Batman Forever, another sequel that brought drastic tonal and conceptual changes to a series that started off darker, but still retained some of the cast and a vague level of consistency.

Boy, great job listing just about everything I hate about the sequel over the original in one tidy paragraph. Thanks brother!

[pferreira]

Originally Posted by sgtfbomb

I think the most unfortunate thing lost in this transition was the sincerity and how the Turtles were treated as flesh and blood people capable of thoughts and feelings, not just caricatures with trademark personality traits and catchphrases.

I see SOTO as being somewhat akin to Batman Forever, another sequel that brought drastic tonal and conceptual changes to a series that started off darker, but still retained some of the cast and a vague level of consistency.

I love Batman Forever, great film. I never noticed the change in score. The score for the sequel was less electric guitar to make it gritty but the music could still be dark.