Fanfic: Ninja Turtles...IN SPAAAAAACCEEEEEE

         

          The 'Net's been abuzz lately about how Michael Bay's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot will have the Turtles as aliens instead of mutants, and to reflect this change the working title has dropped "Teenage Mutant" from the title to make it just "Ninja Turtles". People have been arguing about this viciously for the past week now, and I thought I'd share my two cents. I never really liked the Ninja Turtles to begin with, but I respect their contributions to '80s and '90s pop culture and how they were a huge part of many people's childhoods. While I never watched the Turtles, I learned about their mythology through friends who were fans, and I have to say that personally, the Turtles as aliens could work depending on the context it's presented in. Bay said they come from "an alien race", but did he mean there was an entire planet of turtles, or that the means by which the turtles were mutated was alien? Looking past that, how good will the film be given Bay's behind it? In all probability, it won't be. But if it revives the Turtles's film franchise the same way the Transformers films renewed that series, we could be looking at anything from a horrible pile of shit to an entertaining guilty pleasure. Or it could defy all expectations and actually be, well, good.

           Regardless of the quality of the film, here's how I think a Ninja Turtles film could be presented in a modern context incorporating Bay's "alien" idea. The film would begin in Dimension X, and have Krang, the leader of a race of brain-like aliens, attempting to create a portal to our world. He has invented a mutagenic substance called Ooze which mutates anything it touches into a humanoid creature. Krang hopes to use the Ooze to mutate Earth creatures into an army powerful enough to take over our world, then repeat the process with other planets. He manages to successfully create a stable portal to Earth, and tests the Ooze out on a rat who was once a pet of a skilled martial arts trainer. The rat is mutated into Splinter, who has the martial arts training of his former owner. Splinter sabotages the portal and takes the only sample of Ooze back to Earth with him, where he uses it to mutate four baby turtles he finds in the sewers.

         Cut to about twenty years later. Splinter has trained the Turtles, Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo, in martial arts, so now they act as vigilantes protecting the city from a gang called the Foot Clan. The Foot Clan is led by the Shredder, who is revealed to be the former protege of Splinter's former owner, and he desperately wants a way to increase the Foot Clan's efficiency when he learns the vigilantes who are besting him are mutated turtles. Krang, after all these years, creates another portal to Earth and more Ooze, and teams up with Shredder to defeat Splinter and the Turtles. Beebop and Rocksteady become the first test subjects of the new Ooze, and in the end the Turtles face off against Krang, Shredder, and a mutated army of Foot Clan soldiers. April O'Niel and Casey Jones will be the human POV characters, with April an aspiring news reporter following the street war between the Turtles and the Foot Clan and Casey her boyfriend who is inspired to become a vigilante by the Turtles' example. The "alien" aspect comes from the Ooze being alien in nature, but the turtles themselves are still mutants.

            That would be how I would handle a modern Turtles film, but in actuality I'm sure Bay will come up with something completely idiotic. Still, it's fun to speculate.