Speaking to
Toon Zone, the creative team of the next
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV series - writers/executive producers J.R. Ventimilia & Joshua Sternin, and show character desginer/art director/episode director Ciro Nieli - talk in detail about the show, confirming that there will be 26 episodes in the first season and the first episode will be two parts. They also address the roles of certain characters in the series (such as Casey Jones and April O' Neil), as well as the roles of the Turtles themselves.
Since this is a reboot, did you want to do anything to put your own personal spin on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that maybe hadn’t been done with the property before?
J.R. VENTIMILIA: Well I definitely felt it was important to differentiate the characters a little physically; push the way they look so that we can really make them look more fleshed out, fully realized characters. That was one thing I wanted strongly, and the idea of starting as a year one thing. We all felt it was very important we start over from the beginning because it got a little – they are coming out from underground for the first time.
Where are the Turtles and Splinter at the start of this show?
J.R. VENTIMILIA: At the very start of the show, they’ve been living underground for their entire lives. They’ve finally come to an age where they feel it’s time to come out and explore the world. Splinter reluctantly agrees that they can’t be kept down in the sewers forever, so he lets them go up for the first time freely. So it’s really a story about exploration and discovery.
JOSHUA STERNIN: Right. Everything is new to them. We start day 1. They go up top side for the first time and they’ve never seen any of this. They’ve been living underground on algae and worms for fifteen years.
Regarding the character dynamics, Joshua, you mentioned not reinventing the wheel. Does that mean you will have Leonardo the leader, Raphael as the hotshot rebel, Michelangelo is a party dude, and Donatello does machines?
Yeah, in a general sense, yes. Those are the archetypes. We feel like we can go deeper, we can find different dimensions to them. But that is the show and we are not going to mess with the core of the show.
While working on this show were there any previous adaptations of the comic you all thought were particularly well done?
J.R. VENTIMILIA: Josh and I have known each other for very many years. We actually were roommates when the original series came out. So we were fans of the show. We actually thought it was funny. We were just out of college and drinking heavily, but we had a good time with it. Josh and I were the only two adults at the showing of the movie where there were no kids. We both like those incarnations and that’s where we came from.
JOSHUA STERNIN: Yeah, we came through it at the same time. We really just thought it was fun with the brotherhood theme; it was just a really entertaining dynamic. And I know Ciro comes at it from a much earlier place in its run.
CIRO NIELI: That’s kind of our balance. I think I was from the camp that tuned out when the cartoons started because I was primarily a huge fan of like issues one through ten, and then maybe even later like where it picked up with Kevin [Eastman] and Peter [Laird] again doing like 1920-21, "The Return of the Orc" series, kind of a big fan of that original arc/storyline.
Besides the Turtles, Splinter, and Shredder, can we expect to see other classic characters in the show from Turtles lore?
JOSHUA STERNIN: Absolutely. Baxter Stockman makes an appearance. Mousers will be back.
J.R. VENTIMILIA: We just wrote the first story for Leatherhead so yeah.
CIRO NIELI: Metalhead too.
What about Casey Jones? Can we expect to see him as well?
JOSHUA STERNIN: Casey we all love and want to put him in there, maybe not in the first season or at least not early on.
What is the vision for April O’Neil in the series? Previously she was a reporter and later a scientist and also an archaeologist and martial artist.
JOSHUA STERNIN: Right now, April starts out as a younger version than we’ve seen her in the past. She’s sixteen years old. She’s more worldly. She’s been in the real world so she is kind of their conduit towards that. In an early episode, her father is kidnapped and she is spared, but now she has a whole mission to find him. The Turtles are going to help. And eventually we will find out that there are special things about April.
Will there be any multi-part episodes or miniseries?
J.R. VENTIMILIA: The first episode will be a two-parter.
CIRO NIELI: Possibly the fronts and the tails of seasons, I’m thinking two-parters, nothing too crazy. I’ve never really been a big fan of stories that go beyond three.
J.R. VENTIMILIA: It really is just a matter of, "Does the story demand it?" If it doesn’t, then we won’t do it.
How many episodes will you be starting with for the first season?
JOSHUA STERNIN: Twenty six.
To read the rest of the interview, click the link below.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hits Nickelodeon later in 2012!