Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is now playing in theaters, and the response from fans and critics alike has been overwhelmingly positive.
Following the news we're getting a sequel and two-season TV series bridging the gap between both movies, there's a great deal of excitement to see where this animated franchise ultimately takes the four Heroes in a Half-Shell. However, for purists, the reboot does feature a few "controversial" creative decisions.
Without getting into spoilers, Mutant Mayhem takes some noteworthy liberties with the Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird-created characters, while the status quo for Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michelangelo moving forward is bound to raise some eyebrows.
During an interview with Uproxx (via Toonado.com), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem director Jeff Rowe revealed when exactly it made sense to break away from the source material.
"Backstory stuff," he begins. "Sometimes a lot of our early conversations were like, 'How do we make this world make sense?' Because there was a logic in the comic and then it shifted a little bit in the TV series and then it was completely different in the live-action movie."
"And what’s explained in the first episode of the animated TV series, which I watched religiously as a child, is if you touch ooze, you mutate into whatever the last animal was that you touched. The logic is so twisted and weird."
"There were things like that we’re like, 'Okay, we have to just make this make sense and make it feel like these characters exist in the real world that has something believable within physics that we know or movie logic that we’re familiar with."
"Hopefully to create a foundation," Rowe concluded, "that would let audiences relate to the characters and connect with them."
The changes are unlikely to be too upsetting for longtime fans and, if anything, they give the awesome foursome a fresh lick of paint that should lead to a lot of very exciting new stories moving forward.
In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, after years of being sheltered from the human world, the Turtle brothers set out to win the hearts of New Yorkers and be accepted as normal teenagers through heroic acts.
Their new friend April O’Neil helps them take on a mysterious crime syndicate, but they soon get in over their heads when an army of mutants is unleashed upon them.
Directed by Jeff Rowe (The Mitchells vs. the Machines), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is now playing in theaters.