Friday, November 23, 2012

Still Love Them After All These Years...



Anyone else watching Nickelodeon's new version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? I was really prepared to hate it but ended up adoring it instead.

The humor is really spot on (one of the producers is from Animaniacs, if that tells you anything), the characters are super-well-defined- probably the best they have ever been defined, and the animation is actually pretty impressive. I was terrified about it being CGI, as I find the current CGI Green Lantern cartoon painful to watch. But the shading is excellent and the use of 2-D effects in the 3-D environment is pretty impressive.

Also, it seems to grasp a lot more from the title of the show than most of the previous incarnations did. They really at like disobedient goofy teenagers, they're super aware that they're mutants (mutants play a big part in the over-arcing plot of the show), they do a lot of ninja training, and they're very turtle-y. The emphasis is really on them being teenagers, though. As this might be the most true to life portrayal of teenagers currently on any Nickelodeon show. Seriously.

The one issue I have with it so far is April. While the boys have all been very defined and get a lot to do, April still doesn't seem like a whole character. Or, at least, not a whole interesting character. I know that my childhood memory of the classic April is really distorted- but I wanted to be her so much as a small child. This April just isn't interesting yet. Which is a shame because with Mae Whitman voicing her, all they have to do is give her some good lines and plots and Mae will carry it home.

But there's still time to flesh her out beyond "lost her father" and "Donatello has a crush on her"- so I'm not disparing yet. The first six episodes are all on Hulu currently. The latest one is linked above. Check it out.

In the mean time, I've just realized that the movies (all three live action movies, Turtles Forever, and TMNT) are all on Amazon Prime Instant. So, I'm going to be passing some serious time this winter re-watching turtle movies.

Well, and this so-bad-its-good-but-its-so-bad related item:

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