Ninjas from Space?

COWABUNGA!  Its Wednesday, March 21, 2012, I'm shocked spell-check doesn't recognize 'cowabunga', and this is The Side.  Yes, I know I'm on the record as not thinking much of the ninja fad.  I bought into it when I was 11.  I grew up.  I have a much better pool of knowledge as to martial arts and what ninja actually were.


That said, I still have a couple of soft spots on ninja-fanboyism: Sho Kosugi flicks, the whole Storm Shadow/Snake-Eyes thing from the Larry Hama comics, and the TMNT.

BATTLEGROUND: MY CHILDHOOD!!

Well, it seem something else from my childhood is getting the big screen treatment.





That's right, Michael Bay is going to make a movie about aliens coming to earth and call it "Ninja Turtles" in hopes that all the people who actually know about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will just not notice and go shill out a bunch of money.  This brings us back to the fun topic of adaptations.  I'm OK with changes being made to certain parts of stories for the sake f updating things or making a smoother transition from one medium to another.  When the TMNT made the transition to a cartoon there were a lot of changes from the original comic.  It was made much more kid friendly, and the kids loved it.  Then there was the live action movie and that was a bit of a middle ground between the kid friendly cartoon and the grittier comic.  I'm a big fan of the first movie myself.  Both the cartoon and the movie kept essential parts of the original story.

The thing with TMNT is it was a parody of a lot of Frank Miller's stuff from the 80s.  The origin of the turtles getting mutated spoofed marvel's Daredevil's origin.  From there it took its own path with some fun sci-fi and gritty street level stories.  There's lots of room to play with story elements.  However, with all the many different adaptations the origin has always been four turtles get mutated into a humanoid form and are mentored by a mutated rat in the ways of ninjitsu in order to get revenge against The Shedder.  This concept that Bay is proposing is completely off the reservation.  This is along the lines of that THE KARATE KID movie that came out last year that had absolutely no karate in it.


People are ticked.  Fans are already speaking out.  I even came across one guy who put forth this little gem:

 The real problems come with corp greed. They take 1 story line and keep it going, and going, and going.. They also DONT finish most of these comics. Even TMNT, Fantastic4 and hulk, and all the rest, are only designed for kids and short lived.

They also instill the idea/thought that the GOOD always wins. and that ISNT the reality. from the bible stories to comic books, its programmed into us, to be NICE/FAIR...but the corps are anything but..nice or fair.

Nice to see some goof has taken a break from occupying something to let us all know that all them there comic books are just for kids and greedy corporations are out to make a profit.  Dick.


There's plenty of room for many different adaptations of intellectual properties.  Take this lunacy for example:





Looks like Joel Schumacher's wet dream.  However, that's still Batman.  That's a perfectly fine adaptation of the property.  This isn't a case of someone trying to pass something off as a thing that's very familiar to us and saying, "Don't worry, I'm changing almost everything entirely, but you'll still love it because its still what you loved as a kid."


So, I'm completely out on this one, and its for the same reason I refuse to watch that THE KARATE KID movie.  This is insulting to my pop culture intelligence.  These aren't the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and should be trying to pretend to be the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles just to try to get Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fans to support it.  I don't care how good this ends up being.  I feel like someone is trying to pull a fast one, and they won't be doing it to me.  There's plenty of other movies for me to be excited about.

MUSIC!!!

Yeah, we're sticking with the theme.



That's it for me today.  I'll see y'all Friday.