TMNT-Gate continues! Well, not exactly, but this is an interesting look at what might have been had things moved forward unabated with Michael Bay's controversial take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which as you'll recall got fans all riled up a few months ago. People didn't react too kindly to the plan of having the Ninja Turtles(the movie's official title) be a bunch of kung-fu extraterrestrials, and the outcry seemed to work. Paramount bumped the production from 2013 down to May 16th 2014, with the primary reason being that the Josh Applebaum and Andre Nemec's script was subpar.
Well the gang at the fan blog TMNT NOT TANT have gotten their mitts on that thrown out script, and I think we have a pretty good idea why Tom Stoppard was brought in to start over from scratch. Basically, it does include the idea that the Turtles weren't created in a mutagen bath as they originally were, but are aliens sent from another planet. That much we knew, and to be honest I could learn to deal with, but it's the rest that gets my goat. The Turtles would have essentially been secondary characters in the story, with the focus mostly on the teenaged love affair between Casey Jones and April O'Neill. The Turtles chief nemesis, Shredder, is re-envisioned as Colonel Schrader, who gathers together The Foot as his army to take over the world. Basically, it sounds like Casey Jones is taking on the Shia LaBeouf role in Bay's Transformers flicks. He and April haggle over her decision to move to New York to be an intern at CBS, while he wants to stay in their small town as a security guard. Ugh.
TMNT co-creator, Peter Laird, has confirmed the leaked script is real and accurate, also stating that fans should be happy the studio cared enough to delay production rather than putting out something nobody will like. He's right about that, but it's still disturbing this was the direction they were going, in what appears like a terrible combination of Transformers and Gossip Girls. No thank you. I like Jonathan Liebesman(Battle: Los Angeles) as a director, but I'm not sure he could've made this work. Hopefully the script Stoppard is cooking up goes in a totally different direction.
