FROM THE EDITOR TURTLE POWER

There’s a saying, often attributed to Brian Eno, but that may have been the legendary musician quoting the equally legendary Lou Reed, about how the first Velvet Underground album didn’t sell very many copies, but “everyone who bought one started a band.” You might be able to say something similar about 1984’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird—a self-published independent comic that the pair only printed 3,000 copies of. But for a time, it felt like anyone who read one of those early copies, especially as the legend grew about how such humble beginnings spawned one of the most enduring pop-culture franchises of a generation, started making comics of their own.

That was certainly true in my case. I was way too young to have gotten in on the ground floor of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics. Early printings of that legendary first issue were already fetching absurdly high price tags by the time I became aware of them. No, like most Gen X-ers, my first exposure to TMNT came via the animated series and the first wave of toys, which sparked an immediate, profound obsession in my preadolescent brain. When my best buddy and I realized that the cartoon and action figures sprang from a little black-and-white comic that was self-published by a pair of friends, we spent the rest of the school year (much to the annoyance of our teachers) and the entire summer writing and drawing our own comics. And no, we didn’t think fame, fortune, or TV and merchandise deals would come our way. We did it because the sheer joy of creation and a sense of wild, unfiltered imagination was so clearly baked into the TMNT concept that it was infectious.

The Turtles were, for lack of a better word, my friends As an awkward kid who didn’t always do well socially, I envied their brotherly camaraderie, and I’ve tried to bring the way they always have each other’s backs (or um… shells) to the good friendships I’ve been fortunate enough to forge. I studied their effortless wiseassery as surely as

I wished for their martial arts prowess. It seems that at various points in my life, I find new reasons to rediscover and love some fresh iteration of their adventures, whether through new comics, video games, TV shows, and, of course, movies.

TMNT is a pop culture institution now. And like other prominent franchises, every generation deserves their own interpretation of the myth. Fortunately, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is imbued with that same imagination, humor, and sense that anything can happen that hooked me and generations of fans in the first place. It’s the perfect entry point for new fans, just as it is welcoming for those who have been prowling the sewers with the Turtle boys for years. It’s a group high-five from your four best friends. It’s a welcoming hug to anyone who has ever felt a little different. It’s an exciting martial arts action romp through (and below) the streets of NYC. In other words, it’s a great Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story. The kind that never goes out of style.

Mike Cecchini, Editor-in-Chief

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ACTUAL TEENAGERS AND A FRESH, WILD ART STYLE MARK A NEW ERA FOR THE CLASSIC FRANCHISE IN TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM.

Almost everyone has a memory of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Their cultural ubiquity has been maintained for almost 40 years on toy shelves, game consoles, and Saturday morning cartoons, but there’s something about reptilian ninjutsu masters who binge

BY ERIC FRANCISCO

on pizza slices in the New York City sewers that conjures deeply personal recollections of halcyon youth.

No matter when you met Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello, you were a fan for life. This is true for the filmmakers of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. In interviews with Den of

Geek, director and co-writer Jeff Rowe, co-writer and producer Seth Rogen, and producer James Weaver all regale us with tales of growing up with TMNT fever, even dragging their parents on wild toy store hunts to complete their collections.

“It was the first thing that I ever loved in life,” Rowe tells us about his fandom.

The animation director, whose work includes Gravity Falls and the Netflix movie The Mitchells vs. the Machines, remembers one Saturday during the release of the 1991 film

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze when he embarked on an epic quest for villain toys Tokka and Rahzar with his dad. “We just could not find them,” Rowe recalls. Finally, at a store, his father peeked inside a box that wasn’t yet stocked, and it was like unearthing the Holy Grail. “We’re holding them up and cheering, ‘We found them!’ That’s just like, one of the best days of my life.”

Seth Rogen, an Emmy-nominated comedy writer and star of R-rated juggernauts like Pineapple Express and Superbad, also grew up on the cartoon series like anyone born in the ’80s, and had his mind blown by the live-action movies. He studied kyokushin karate for 10 years because of the Turtles’ influence. “My dad bought me a pair of nunchucks,” Rogen remembers, laughing about it in his signature way. “I could not have been more their target audience.”

Like Rowe, Rogen obsessed over Ninja Turtles toys. “They opened up my imagination in a lot of ways,” he says. “The toys, honestly, are something we referenced a lot in the design of this movie—how detailed and fun and weird they were.”

However much the TMNT occupy childhoods, the new movie exists to encapsulate all the awkwardness and messiness of the next stage in everyone’s lives: being a teenager.

Rowe and Rogen, along with screenwriters Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, and some 120 artists from studios Mikros Animation and Cinesite, synthesize past and present to chart a new future for the franchise. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem reimagines the iconic heroes, who originate from creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. The movie explores the origin of the team and even pinpoints the source of the ooze that gave them feet and fingers to spin sai blades. The Turtles also venture outside and meet people for the first time, like aspiring journalist April O’Neil.

The film brings to the table new and radical ideas for the franchise. In addition to a jagged, street-inspired art style that bursts over lines with restless energy, the Turtles themselves are—get this—actually teenagers, with a cast of real teenage voice actors.

“When we looked at the opportunity to work on Turtles, [we found] that’s the aspect that has been underplayed the most, being a teenager,” says James Weaver. “That freshness about what it is to be a teenager is something that made us excited.”

Rogen adds,“We wanted to make a coming-of-age Ninja Turtles movie that focused on the teenage elements. That, to me, was always kind of the last word in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When you’re young, you don’t get that they don’t act like teenagers. To make a movie that served that purpose was really appealing.”