5 Essential Qualities from the Original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie That Can't be Recreated
This morning we relayed that Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol scribes Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec would head up a reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which is probably good news. Problem is, the best parts of hard-bitten 1990 original should be preserved in turtle wax for eternity. You simply can't recreate the essence of a film where the chief voice talent is Corey Feldman, and why on Earth would you try? Here are five elements from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that can't be topped or (probably) even retooled.
1. The New Jack swing of that gorgeous 1990 soundtrack. I don't want the CGI-afflicted humanoids of a 2011 version to sway with the sounds of Hi Tek 3's "Spin That Wheel" or Partners in Kryme's "Turtle Power." Abuse the Vanilla Ice "Go Ninja Go!" rap from Secret of the Ooze all you want; I just can't handle a revamp of the slack-swag cookout jams from the original.
2. The dour NYC denizens! April's boss Charles can't figure out where Danny picked up a boss pair of headphones. (He stole them.) A police chief snorts at a too-inquisitive April, "Just what is it you hope to accomplish out there, besides busting my chops?" We're even treated to the Dragnet-style deadpan, "This block's got a crack the size of the San Andreas" at one point. Grittier than old pebbles in a turtle aquarium, this movie.
3. Judith Hoag's downtrodden hots as April O'Neil. Where have all the despairing, trench-coated TV reporters gone? Now that's something Geraldo could investigate.
4. Mean Turtle name-calling: "Elf lips" and "Gak-face" are my favorites. Man, I miss stupid word wars in kid movies. As far as I know, no one in, say, Super 8 or the Transformers franchise has insult-comic brass. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley would crack in half if you called her "hose brain."
5. And most of all: righteous '90s slang. "Tubular," "radical," "bodacious," and even Casey Jones's insistent use of the word "punker" are quintessential tenets in the TMNT saga, and Appelbaum and Nemec will need a full-body, definitively 2011 makeover to keep the new version from sounding like a sad throwback. I'll allow more "Chevy Nova" puns, though.
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Comments
Don't forget the awesome shot of that rat/Kung Fu master practing his skills in a tiny cage. Puppets are funny.
You also can't recreate anyone as cool as Elias Koteas playing Casey Jones.
Aside from being the oldest person in the cinema when I saw this movie my only other strong memory of it was how cool Koteas was, especially in his introductory scene.
His delivery of "hose brain" makes me cheer more than the entirety of, like, Billy Elliot.
The TMNT soundtrack was and is my favorite album on cassette. Nevermind that my entire cassette collection was that and the "Gangsta Lean" single. I didn't have a lot of buying power before CDs took over.
Also, keep Sam Rockwell as the recruiter for the foot clan.
I freaking LOVED the first TMNT film. The shot of Raph recovering in a bathtub, the freeze-frame first appearance of the Turtles, the "we-have-a-message-for-you"-opens-fist-confused-look-slap scene, all the fight scenes but the last one... The first film was the bomb!