The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles look stupid. We’ve already gotten glimpses of the remade turtles in Michael Bay’s TMNT reboot — in Australian cinemas on September 11 — but today’s new trailer takes “dumb-looking turtles” to the next level.
I mean, come on.
Come on.
Come on.
COME ON.
This whole gritty, doofy, straight-out-of-Avatar look is not working for the iconic cartoon turtles. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has never exactly been cool — Leonardo and crew were always dorky and cheesy in a loveable sort of way — but they have never had ridiculous zombie nostrils and gaping mouths like this before. It sure looks dumb. They’re meant to be goofy cartoon characters, not outtakes from Predator. No wonder even TMNT’s creator doesn’t like them.
You can watch the new trailer here:
That Megan Fox acting. Yeesh.
Comments
86 responses to “I Can’t Get Over How Dumb The New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Look”
You’re completely uniformed. The turtles started out as a dark gritty comic. Not dopey cartoon characters. The hatred people are feeling for this has nothing to do with that aspect.
Give me Jim hensen creature shop over these weird nosed Michael bay CGI any day.
Same thing I thought, and the best animated show was the 2003 series and it was dark and far from goofy.
Been a fan of TMNT for a long, long time and I got to say that I actually love the new look. Pumped for the film too.
I think it has grown on me. Sure they look goofy but then again they are giant humanoid turtles.
I agree, I actually like the new designs.
Me too I’m pretty sure that Michael Bay can somehow make those snow scenes catch fire and explode as well!
Have a look at this, it shows how ridiculous the new designs are and how good they could have been http://imgur.com/a/0lwLZ
I don’t think it’s possible to really do it any other way in this context, so just don’t get the hate. I think there is just NO pleasing some of these man-child fan boys.
People say they didn’t like the previous turtle movies, but in my mind TMNT2 was the closest you’re gonna get to a live action adaptation of the cartoon. Which clearly is NOT what they are going for here.
Sure they look a little different, but why is that a bad thing? Bring on the creative interpretations i say, the more different spins on something the better it can only get.
You are a great example of the type of person that should never, ever work in a creative field. If you cannot comprehend why the turtles are considered to be so idiotic looking, you’re not a very sharp individual. Stick to reality tv.
No. Just no. First Bay does his thing to the Transformers and now this. All he has to do next is Voltron and he will have officially raped my entire childhood.
Also just once can we get a Bay trailer without a slow mo helicopter whirl.
Your entire childhood consisted of 3 things?
Yeah I don’t get the people complaining, if anything he improved Transformers… can’t argue with the success he generates… btw I hate people that say “your childhood” it wasn’t exclusively yours mate we all watched that stuff too growing up you ewok
I know mine did. TMNT, Transformers and Nintendo.
and no more Dubstep drone on the slow mo shit for everything.
How does Michael Bay’s movies change your nostalgia for something? the shows and movies you watched as a kid still exist, he isn’t destroying all copies of them and replacing them with his version.
I always equate it with a significant person in your life. Your gonna take offense if someone takes a picture of them and draws a cock on their forehead. The person is still the same before the cock was drawn but the idea that their image was ever so slightly sullied just doesnt sit right.
No love for he-man?
Sage advice – http://media.heavy.com/media/2013/07/icestorm.gif
NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
what the fark have you done to my childhood heroes, i’ll have your head m.Bay.
They don’t really look that goofy at all, and I bet if the original creators said that they liked the new look, Schreier would have been writing how awesome this looks.
I actually don’t mind the new look. I think it makes them look a little more ‘realistic’.
There is no emoticon for the face I’m making right now.
Assuming this: http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/syglzmcthgxraabtoepz.gif
How else would you Re-Imagine the ninja turtles in an over the top movie? If they were any more cartoonish I wouldn’t be able to take them seriously. I agree with @tofuzombie, this will be a great film and I am sure Michael Bay is doing his best to bring the TMNT to a whole new audience.
If his best is like his best was with the Transformers… then nothankyousir.jpg
Shredder is now Col. Schraeder. Not Oruku Saki. William Fichtner plays him. Col. Schraeder. See what they did there? *nudge nudge wink wink*.
The ‘Foot Clan’ are now a PMC company.
Aprils Dad and Schraeder created the Turtles on purpose. They are no longer a freak accident. This takes a *lot* away from the stories purpose.
Splinter is allegedly Aprils mutated father. (Yet to be confirmed but when they were pushed about it, they gave a look of ‘Oh shit they found out’)
There’s too much Deus Ex Machina going on in this movie, too many links. The turtles design, I’m loving the bodies, but the faces are just wrong. The noses are what kills it. The mouths I’m fine with but the noses ugh… they ruin it.
I’ll just leave this here.
Thank you and thank Stone and Parker.
Splinter is allegedly Aprils mutated father. (Yet to be confirmed but when they were pushed about it, they gave a look of ‘Oh shit they found out’)
Wow, really? They really thought their cliche and totally predictable plot twist was unique and original? Is Hollywood so out of touch that they’re not even aware of what they’ve done in the past?
If the turtles are now ‘made in a lab’… ummm maybe this is a dumb question, but why the hell would you pick a turtle, known for nothing more than their superior lack of speed, as the ‘base animal’ design for a group of supposed ninja’s?
That, to me, makes not the slightest sense at all.
… then again it is MB
“Oh look! Big explosion! Forget the plot holes!”
I myself asked that same question. Why would you not choose some sort of lizard, a reptile that can regenerate lost limbs, has sharp teeth, is agile etc…
But yes… Michael Bay.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Velociraptors?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Chameleons? (now that would be good, built in auto-camo as well!)
I would watch either of those, I have to be honest.
From IMDB “The Shredder’s alias in this film is Eric Sachs. This is an Anglicized alias derived from the Shredder’s original name of Oroku Saki. “
soz, duplicated
Then it’s been changed, originally Shredders name was, in an earlier draft Col. Schraeder. Good to know that’s been changed at least. Doesn’t change the fact though that it’s still not Oruku Saki and he’s now a white guy…
also this “The Shredder in this film is based on his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) incarnation, where he is an alien being inside a human android suit. His spiked armour and his helmet (with a alien face painted on it) point to his alien heritage.” so it’s not that far from the cartoon.
Damn, that’s even worse. Still, originally the turtles were going to be aliens too lol.
I thought that was Krang xD
I like the new look, but am pessimistic that, like the transformers movies, the focus will be the human characters, with the title heroes as supporting and lacking in depth…
I wanna see a Power Rangers reboot. Keep the explosions. Leave it real-time. So every 2 minuts and when someone jumps the screen will be littered with flames and particle effects.
PEW PEW.
(⌐■_■)
Good to see Russell Westbrook making his feature film début!
Nice – now that’s what I see too….
At least he shares Michael Bay’s poor shot selection
Ha ha that’s gold !!!!!
OH SNAP
They look like a pretty logical translation from their cartoon and comic incarnations to me. Not to say that the rest of the film won’t be utterly abominable, but the character design is fine, particularly after the objectively terrible Transformers designs.
If you like the designs that’s fine, but I’d say they’re making exactly the same mistakes they did with the Transformer designs. Gritty designs that stray pretty far from the most iconic incarnations of the characters in order to be more ‘realistic’, with a handful of completely arbitrary changes. Ie, Optimus Prime was the wrong sort of truck, Donatello wears ridiculous glasses.
I don’t object to you liking the designs but I think if you’re going to say Transformers were objectively bad designs you have to extend that to these Turtles. They’re hulking beasts. They’re hideous monsters just like his Transformer designs. As fan art I’d find them interesting but this is the official movie.
The problem I found with Transformer designs is that they all looked the same. You can’t tell which Decepticon is which without exposition (even then they get jumbled up in the background). So I really had no problem with Prime changing truck designs (they’ve done worse).
That was my major problem with them. They were just a jumbled assortment of metal-ish polygons. They’d smash a building and you could barely tell where the debris ended and the robot started.
Turning them into monsters was my second biggest problem. Optimus Prime was traditionally a heroic build. The movie manages to make him feel like a good guy, but it’s all in the voice and the way they shoot him. His core design could was more appropriate for a Decepticon. Swap the yellow for grey and Bumble Bee could have been Megatron. Not just in a ‘they all look the same way’, that’s fine for the turtles, but in a ‘these are all bad guys, the little personality there is to each design feels like they were going for evil’ way.
It’s the problem with gritty redesigns of non-human heroes, you have to be really good at designing heroes or else they come out looking like something Oscorp would cook up to fight Spider-man.
That is also made worse by the fact there is literally not a single shot that lasts more than 5 seconds throughout the entire movies. Editing Transformers would have been hell tying together so many second long snippets of indiscernible footage, into even the incomprehensible story that it ended up being.
The fact that the camera switches angle every 4 seconds means that it is impossible, even ignoring the horrible designs, to keep track of anything.
Michael Bay is just an incompetent film maker.
Another glaring issue with the Transformer movies was a complete lack of continuity from one movie to the next. First, Megatron was on earth to get hold of the AllSpark. Then, Transformers have been visiting earth for thousands of years and had built a ‘Sun Harvester’ to destroy the sun, because, you know, harvesting. Megatron and his ‘master’ just decide randomly that they just want to turn it on. THEN, we’re told, that Sentinel Prime and Megatron had formed a secret pact to meet on earth and what the Decepticons really wanted all along was to enslave the human race to rebuild Cybertron. Pretty hard to do that without a sun, isn’t it? You literally have to watch each movie as a reboot of the franchise, rather than a continuation of a particular story, because otherwise, they make no sense at all. There are other random plot conveniences as well. A piece of the AllSpark is fine for resurrecting Megatron, but Optimus can’t use that, he needs the matrix of leadership. The same matrix of leadership that is the only key to the big Sun Harvester thing, for some reason.
I can imagine the discussion at Decepticon HQ:
“What’s the plan?”
“Well, we want to turn on the Sun Harvester.”
“Sweet. Where is it?”
“We don’t know. But we’re going to get it.”
“…How?”
“Shia will know.”
“How will Shia know?”
“When he killed me the first time, a little piece of the AllSpark was left on his jacket. He’ll touch it and all of our knowledge will be his.”
“And then what?”
“We’ll kill Optimus Prime, okay?”
“Great idea! Let’s do it.”
“Wait, there’s more. We’ll torture the location of the Sun Harvester out of Shia. Then, we will make sure that he knows that Optimus can only be resurrected by the Matrix of Leadership”
“Uh…”
“Stick with me, because we need the Matrix of Leadership to turn on the Sun Harvester”
“How will we make sure he knows that?”
“We’ll make sure one of our little decepticons gets captured by his girlfriend. He can betray us and tell them about the Seekers, who will tell them about the tomb of the primes, which is conveniently located here on Earth and they can retrieve the Matrix for us.”
“This plan…”
“Is AWESOME. So once we know the location and Optimus has been resurrected, we can steal the key and activate the Sun Harvester. Once we turn it on, nothing will stop us.”
“Except, possibly, Optimus Prime, who you just guaranteed a new lease at life.”
“Don’t you worry your head about the finer details, just look at the pretty explosions.”
“Ooh, burble. Michael Bay”
*masturbation sounds*
“How does this tie in to our ultimate goal of enslaving all of humanity to rebuild Cybertron and why don’t we just call down the hundreds of Decepticons on the surface of the moon to eradicate all of the Autobots right now?”
“All I know is, there’s another film and we need SOMEONE to kill in that so we make millions for Michael Bay. Okay? Stop asking awkward questions.”
Yeah, the lack of readability is what I’m talking about in terms of objectively bad design. There’s opinion either way – personally I thought the Transformers movies were awful to the point of unwatchability, but there are evidently plenty who don’t agree there and that’s ok.
From a design standpoint though that abstract mess of unreadable shiny metal is breaking an awful lot of rules. Sometimes you can get away with that with some careful consideration, but that’s clearly not the case there though.
Now the Turtles here – they honestly don’t look like that much of a departure from the originals to me. Opinions evidently vary, which is fine. They’re still got clean, readable silhouettes which it looks like they’ve tried to vary up some more with different armour and accessories which alongside some physical variation makes each turtle more recognisable beyond the colour of his headband. That’s good character design. Whether you like it or not is entirely up to you.
Whatever the case, let’s face it, this movie is almost certainly going to be dreadful, no matter what the characters look like.
they just look Mong. i think they look way better in the live action TMNT movie from the 90’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMJPwRWaZBI
My God, has it really been that long?
I’ve been looking in the local shops for a while for the original movie on DVD to watch with my son, with no success. Looks like I’ll just have to order it from JB.
i tried ordering it from jb… apparently theres no PAL release.. had to “sail the seven seas of 1’s and 0’s” and grab a 1080p version which is great quality.
Cheers for the tip, just found this though. the packaging is actually a pizza box. I reckon I’ll just order that, and get a Blu-Ray drive for my PC and change the region on it.
that is so many levels of awesome…. !
Who’s dumb idea was it to give the Turtles human faces? My guess is Bay.
Oh, and all you manga fans might want to hold onto your hats, rumour has it that one of his future projects is a film version of the manga series Pluto.
They look down syndrome.
And you speak it.
Hmmmm how is Bay going to handle his love of over-the-top explosions? I do not think nunchucks, sai, bo staves, nor katana produce them. Will the turtles be whipping out RPG’s and flamethrowers? 😉
Give them their turtle faces back!
This:
http://cdn.screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/Michelango-Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles-2014-Traditional-Design-1024×856.jpg
and this:
http://cdn.screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/Leonardo-Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles-2014-Traditional-Design.jpg
Otherwise we’re thinking this:
http://schmoesknow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Untitled42.png
mind… BLOWN
well, most turtles have noses and faces similar to this…
http://s10.photobucket.com/user/Expansa1/media/Worrelli600.jpg.html
I hate to break it to you, but real turtles don’t look anything like that. They have elongated faces with pronounced nostrils and beak like mouths, not bulbous mushroom noses.
Those look so much better!
Good to see Shrek is still getting some work.
Edit: how is this still awaiting moderation after 3 hours??
Should have gone this route: http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2013/213/6/e/tmnt_by_allengeneta-d6g5vkn.jpg
Not bad, though I think I prefer Dave Rapoza’s designs just a little more: http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/11/if-you-like-he-man-tmnt-or-dark-souls-you-need-to-see-these-amazing-paintings/
They are way too big and heavy footed to be “ninjas”.
They land with a very loud THUD!!
Not very ninja silent are they?
More like hulking masses and brawlers.
As long as Donny doesn’t have that goofy looking helmet thing and they don’t remove the eye masks they look alright to me. Although trying to remember if i ever saw Don wear glasses previously?
That would be a negative. I think Don looks stupid (he was always my favourite). Why they got to geek him up with geek glasses?
Because he’s a geek, and geek wear glasses.
I’m a geek and I do not wear glasses
No, geeks wear glasses because they are geeks. They’re also socially awkward. My idea of geeks and intelligence hasn’t changed from the stereotype that existed back in the 50s when it was outdated even then.
We need to find out what Michael Bay held dear as a child… and rape it.
I believe he held raping other people’s childhood’s dearly as a child.
This move looks bad for so many reasons. The humanoid nose on the turtles is almost the least of it’s problems.
They’ve completely gutted the story, characters and relationship links. The whole thing is a mess.
I mean, April’s dad (who might be Splinter?!) and Shredder (no longer named Shredder) intentionally made the Turtles as some kind of Vigilante neighbourhood watch group? I mean christ almighty. Spare me.
I think it looks fine, and that the team went with the design that they thought was best. To me, they look more like actual turtles than the previous live-action films. Because they are CG characters in a real live-action environment, they had to make them fit into that world, that style, otherwise it would be like that 3d simpsons episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=limDIYytL38
Also, turtles do actually have nostrils.
I was actually expecting Robotech to be next
The designs aren’t too bad. It could definitely be worse. Metallic turtle skeleton’s with a shell come to mind.
I do think Donatello looks like Simon from The Chipmunks with those glasses. The lips are giving me a Jar Jar vibe though.
Aside from the designs, Mikey’s voice is nothing like I’d expected… So used to his surfer style voice (duuuuudddeee)…
This looks crap.
That whole time I was watching that trailer, it felt like I was watching Transformers, with turtles instead of Robots.
The turtles look crap to the max.
I loved TMNT growing up. Me and my bro would watch every episode they played in the week. But this isnt a good direction.
Even one of the turtles is covered in all this metal and tech crap.
I understand its a reinvention of the story, but when you change it up this much to the extent that it feels like a Spin off to the Transformers films, your gonna get a very unpopular reaction. Even the creator of TMNT detest the new look and feel of the movie.
I like Michael Bays movies. I know he has this annoying habbit with the camera, by letting it move so much that you would think a Parkinson sufferer is behind the camera, his later movies have had shallow characters and he lacks the balance where its needed, but his movies have been pretty darn good.
But after he announced another Transformers movie with different actors, I was bummed. The series should have ended where it did.
Now he is just milking Transformers.
Then i heard he was now involved in the TMNT remake, so I get scepticle, then I see this trailer. He has become a 1 trick pony.
this Bay hate is ridiculous, it’s not even his movie. Yes, he is a dingus but Jonathan Liebsman is directing the film, Bay is just producing.
I think the problem here is that he’s a rapist. Everything he is associated with is a poor rape victim. Rape rape rape!!!
And where the fuck is vanilla ice in this shit??!
Do they actually or are you just looking to spew some hyperbole?
please inform me on how human turtles are supposed to look like….they look pretty damn close in my opinion. I cant wait to see this movie
I don’t like their faces at all! I don’t care if they’re supposed to be dark, funny, goofy, or any thing else, their nostrils kill the look! I was so excited to take my son to see this, but they look ridiculous! No matter how many times I see the trailer I cannot get used to them!!
Actually, the original creators did not like the look. http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2014/04/08/tmnt-creator-peter-laird-doesnt-like-the-new-designs-either