I was going to save this for Friday or possibly next week, but I’m having trouble focusing today. Either I didn’t get enough sleep last night, the weather is messing with me. or something. Maybe both. So let’s drop this so I can make deadline.
At San Diego Comic Con, Nickelodeon dropped the new intro for Tales Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, because apparently Nickelodeon can’t stop rebooting itself. No, I don’t think it’s a sequel to Rise, but I could be wrong. Instead it’s a spinoff to the recent Mutant Mayhem movie, including girl-voiced Donatello and overweight black April O’Neil, only now black man Bishop who was basically Amanda Waller lite is now an obnoxious white woman Amanda Waller. So…white Amanda Waller on the New 52 diet. And yes, that title has been used before. Apparently Nick is taking cues from Hasbro’s Transformers and reusing names for series. (Robots In Disguise comes to mind as that had two TV shows and a comic that are completely unrelated to each other.)
Enough about the show and why I probably won’t watch it when I had no interest in the movie. The new series, according to a Nickelodeon fanwiki though it will be a Paramount+ exclusive, actually has an interesting idea, with the brothers separated by each other and having to fight on their own while making their way back home across the city. If that is the premise, how does the new intro demonstrate it?
Not too badly. It does show the Turtles being separated and fighting solo, though you could be accidentally fooled by them coming together for the logo. That’s the end goal of the series, or miniseries, or whatever its going to be. The music is showing a frantic nature, while the early part of the intro features teenage stuff. This would be in keeping with the style of Mutant Mayhem specifically and Nick Turtles in general, where the focus is more on the “Teenage” than the “Ninja”, which I’m on record as not being a fan of. I’ve seen clips where the “Mutant” comes into play as the instigator of this plot is zealously hunting mutants and even considers the Turtles evil just for existing, though her assistant seems totally cool about it.
I do like the premise, but the 2003 series already gave the Turtles solo adventures, as did the various comics over the decades, so we have seen it. I admit, my bias against the movie is killing any interest in the show, but as an intro it isn’t that bad. It does what it set out to do, short as it is, and using the same animation team that did Rise but in the Mayhem universe and designs was a good move. The problem of course is that Nickelodeon and IDW both are oversaturating the Turtle multiverse, not giving the last continuity time to breathe before shoving in the next one and drawing away any memory of the previous one. Like someone said about Star Wars in a recent stream I watched, you need to give a property time to be missed and assessed/re-assessed before we can get interested in the new stories, and Star Wars doesn’t technically have a multiverse, just some stories that were questionably canon before being officially decanonized in favor of a lesser take.
The show could end up being good, but I’m not convinced. I’m also not convinced it’s for me at all. The intro might have worked for you and that’s fine. For me, it’s another pass, but points for actually having an intro in 2024. Now if they reair the 2003 series or the other three theatrical movies (not including the third movie in favor of TMNT) I am so in!
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