Bebop & Rocksteady pre-mutation - First Look

[Galactus]

Originally Posted by Yabuturtle

It's a guy with a purple Mohawk. He looked silly back then and he looks silly now. Even if it was in the 80s it would still look silly. Because it's a guy with a purple Mohawk.

As I said, there's no pleasing people. You try to stick with the original look and people will say it's cheesy and outdated. You change it, and people whine that he doesn't look like the original.

No one is complaining that Bebop and Rocksteady's pre-mutation costume doesn't look like the original but that it's badly executed.

I'm something of a traditionalist when it comes to adapting my favorite franchises. More often than not I think the whole idea that a certain things don't translate well to live action is used as an excuse not to even try.

However I know the certain things from comic books don't always translate to live action but that means a film maker has to work at it. This execution looks lazy and poor and not accurate to the animates series at all - I mean in the series Bebops's mohawk was supposed to be real, he and Rocksteady were supposed to be real punkers but these look like two guys in a bad cosplay outfits and sadly I think there's more than an outside chance that's exactly what they are in the story.

Regardless of that one of the (admittedly many) problems with the last movie was the sense of cognitive dissonance

I didn't think Heath Ledger's Joker was going to be good. I didn't think it was a good choice to have Heath play Joker, I didn't care for the design ect. but it actually turned out to be good. In some ways it was better than Jack's version of the Joker, despite being nothing like the comic book version.

A lot of people throw out examples of casting choices that fans thought were bad but turned out well like Heath Ledger as the Joker or Michael Keaton as Batman but these are generally exceptions to the rule.

Bare in mind that once people saw a little of Heath Ledger in his outfit and heard more about his take on the character it eased a lot of fans tensions and Tim Burton put out an early teaser that not only allayed fan concerns about Keaton's casting but also about whether the movie was going to be a complete camp-fest.

Platinum Dunes TMNT series has never done this. Their strategy has been to hide as much as possible, deflection and outright lying and a bizarre mixture of imploring us to trust them with no reason to and at times attempting to shame us for not taking them at their word.

Being different doesn't mean it's going to suck. Speculation is the only thing we can do until it comes out.

Actually I'm coming around to the idea that in this context being different means it's going to suck.

Comic book movies are experiencing a renaissance at the moment and the most well received ones like the original Iron Man, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Batman Begins are very faithful to the comics. Even the ones that don't adapt specific stories draw a lot from the comics to generally good affect.

But why?

It's that the comics and animated series and so forth these characters have been featured in have done the legwork for them.

Change is vital for a property to sustain itself for decades whether it's through taking characters in a new direction or through a process of retconning or rebooting aspects. Sometimes these changes are popular and are added to the canon or largely discarded. It's through that process of trial and error we get a continually evolving picture of what works and what doesn't for these characters. The movies already have their blueprint all they have to do is follow it.

You may ask why doesn't this process extend to the movies themselves? In principal there's no reason why it shouldn't...but more people watch movies of a franchise than will ever watch an episode of an animated series or read a comic on which it's based on which is why fans place such an importance on them.

From a commercial standpoint why would a studio risk so much on some freaky alternate version when they know what works well? It's only the aforementioned excuse that "it doesn't translate well to a movie" that holds this back and the current comic movie landscape continues to devalue that idea. That's not to say that a director can't come along with a unique vision for the characters or an objectively good idea never found in the various material but no one making TMNT had a unique vision and things like Splinter learning ninjutsu from a book is hardly a good idea.