This 'TMNT' Isn't Like the Original

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles goes down with High School Musical as a title that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the plot. It also goes down with High School Musical as being able to stretch a plot that seemed so simplistic across many adaptations and media. There was a comic book that became a series of action figures that came with a tie-in cartoon series, followed by more comics, more cartoons, several video games, and a couple of live-action adaptations. The most recent incarnation comes in the form of a live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Michael Bay movie, which stars Megan Fox as April O'Neil, and, according to the teaser trailer that Paramount widely released, will revise the canon.

Wait, what?

"People want heroes, Miss O'Neil. But heroes are not born. They're created. That's what your father and I were trying to do: create heroes," says William Fichtner as Shedder, the arch-nemesis of the turtles and their main threat during the movie. As dramatic and intriguing as it was in both content and delivery, that single line was enough to make every TMNT fan take a pause. Because what?

First of all, April O'Neil is entrenched in Turtles canon as a close friend of the brothers and, even more importantly, there's no real need to further tie her into the plot of the movie. In her most famous incarnation, she is the Lois Lane of TMNT canon and there are a bunch of giant CGI infantile turtle mutants in masks wandering the streets. Does she need more of a reason to get involved? Second of all, Turtles fans have already had to swallow the information that Shredder will be Caucasian instead of Japanese for the first time, but getting used to the idea that the Turtles may have been created by the bad guy and the father of their closest friend? That's just... sort of interesting, actually.

When Hollywood decides to make a movie out of a beloved franchise, it's a given that producers are not going to please the entire fanbase. Sometimes, Hollywood will pull a Divergent and bring the author on as a producer to keep an adaptation as close to the source material as possible. Sometimes, Hollywood will pull a The Giver and change so much of what was good about the story that it becomes almost unrecognizable. And sometimes, Hollywood will hit a middle ground where some changes are made, but they're small enough to make the film worthy of giving it a chance. Watch the trailer for Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles below, and see which category it fits into.

Image: Paramount