Turtle Power!

It’s those heroes in a half-shell again, coming to save the day and eat your pizza. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is one of the coolest franchises to arise from the 1980s, and though recent years haven’t been great to them, there is a new movie and video game in the works featuring the sewer-dwelling ninjas that look to be a breath of fresh air for the franchise.

The new film, which hits theaters Friday, March 23, is told through computer-generated imagery, and will be the American debut for Imagi Animation, an award-winning studio out of Hong Kong. It’s been 14 years since the Turtles have graced the silver screen, and the forthcoming film marks a rebirth for the Turtles in their long and often-illustrious history.

It isn’t widely known that the origin of the Ninja Turtles was a late ’80s comic book parody of Daredevil–a comic that was subject to even more ridicule two decades later, when Ben Affleck showed up in red tights. The Turtles comic got popular enough to lead to a video game and kiddie cartoon, and by the ’90s, the Turtles were starring in live-action blockbusters. The boom of Turtle Power was so popular that every little boy just had to have his Ninja Turtle action figures. Oh, the countless hours of making your left hand, holding a Ninja Turtle, battle your right hand, holding supervillain The Shredder…good times.

The Turtles kept up a fairly successful run through the first half of the ’90s, spawning half a dozen video games and two more feature films. The cartoon kept going strong, though much like many other great franchises, it started to go stale when money meant more than good ideas to the developers.

The late ’90s brought about a live-action show featuring the Turtles that was loosely based on the cartoon, though it was mercifully short-lived. I remember running around my bedroom, excited as a tweaker who had found a stray crack rock under his bed, when news of the show was reported. When it aired, however, you could almost hear the collective sigh of disappointment from Ninja Turtle fans the nation over.

There was another cartoon series that began airing in 2003, and the aim of the show, according to the new production team, was to spin a darker tale of the Turtles’ secret war against enemies bigger and badder than The Shredder and his Foot Clan. The show tried to mature the Turtles a bit, and while it did just that, it came at the cost of Mikey saying “cowabunga” at every jump, dive and special attack. Similarly, the phrase “Turtle Power” is rarely used in the cartoon, and the Turtle character animations have creepy little slits for eyes, all the headbands are green and the show starts with a God-awful new theme song. The show still airs on 4Kids TV (formerly the FoxBox), a block of children’s shows on Saturday mornings, and the only reason it hasn’t been canceled is because youth today don’t know any better.

That’s about to change, however. The new movie and game are going to re-introduce the elements that old fans loved about the series and blend them with the new, edgy feel of the recent stuff. The plot of the film begins by catching up the audience with each of the Ninja Turtles, who have drifted apart since their final defeat of The Shredder. Leo’s been out training and traveling, Raph is still working as a vigilante crime-stopper and Mikey and Donny have started a kid’s party entertainment business–what parent wouldn’t want well-trained, human-sized warrior reptiles from the sewers at their child’s party?

Master Splinter is still doing his thing as the wizened sensei, and he becomes aware that Karai, one of The Shredder’s minions, is scheming to unleash an army of ancient monsters onto the planet with the help of a power-hungry industrial executive. The story will bring the Turtles back together to fight off this catastrophic wave of monsters, and old faces like news reporter April O’Neil and fellow vigilante Casey Jones will make a return to help stop The Shredder’s legacy from coming back into power.

Noted voice actors James Arnold Taylor (Tidus in Final Fantasy X, Wooldor Sockbat in Drawn Together) and Nolan North (Vossler in Final Fantasy XII, Sgt. Randall in Call of Duty 2) are voicing Leonardo and Raphael, respectively. Patrick Stewart, as in Captain Picard and X-Men leader Xavier, lends his voice to the character of Max Williams, the power-hungry executive with a hard-on for world domination. Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy, a whole bunch of really shitty teen films) is the voice of reporter April O’Neil.

The soundtrack will feature Portland-based Ever We Fall’s track “Youth Like Tigers” alongside songs from Jet, P.O.D and Billy Talent. Ever We Fall frontman Adam Brazie said that the members of the band are all huge fans of the Ninja Turtles. He said that he isn’t sure how they made it onto the soundtrack, though he isn’t too concerned, so long as their music is in the film.

“I was a total Ninja Turtle fan growing up,” Brazie said. “I mean, I had the bed sheets, the pajamas, all the toys, I’ve played all the games and I still watch the old VHS videos from the cartoon sometimes. The Ninja Turtles kick ass!”

Brazie said that he has been told that the song will be featured in the film and will not be just a soundtrack supplement. He said he hasn’t heard if EWF will be on the soundtrack to the video game or not.

The new game is set to drop on March 13, and details of the game thus far are sparse, though you can expect to see the return of many themes from the earlier saga. The game will be a free-sprawling, mission-based adventure where gamers select a Ninja Turtle to control at the start and then work with the other three to complete stages. No word has yet been released about multiplayer modes, though given the online support included, it’s safe to bet that you can team up with other Ninja Turtle fans the world over to explore New York City for apocalypse-intent monsters to open up a can of turtle-flavored whoopass on.

This is all very exciting for a generation of filmgoers and video gamers that grew up loving the Ninja Turtles and dressed up like their favorite on every Halloween. It’ll be great to see what else comes with this reunion tour and whether the old popularity can be restored. Let’s hope this isn’t going to be some contrived attempt to capture old glory, because that will mean riots in the streets of wannabe ninjas, using papier-m퀌�ch퀌� weapons to punish anyone responsible for getting our hopes up.