Fellow TMNT fans, I come before you today to report a crime of the WORST possible kind.

You might recall my post from a few days ago in which I was expressing my deepest excitement at the film reboot of TMNT finally coming to fruition. You might also recall that while I was a little unsure as to having Michael Bay involved with the project, I was nevertheless viewing his involvement with an open mind and was taking it in stride. I even came to his defense a bit when my husband vowed that he would never see the rebooted film so long as Bay was involved. I again came to the man’s defense when a friend of mine predicted that Bay would irreversibly frak up the franchise the same way in which he frakked up Transformers. I went to bat for Bay, saying that he was neither writing nor directing the film, but simply producing it…meaning that he and his would mostly be in charge of financing the project.

However, today I’ve learned that Bay is becoming more involved with the project than he should be, and is interfering with things that he has NO business interfering with.

According to a recent article on Boomstick Comics, Michael Bay has come out and said that he is completely changing the origin story. Now, that’s not what’s got me in my present state of rage. If you recall from my earlier retrospective of IDW’s reboot of the comic book series, you will remember that I was praising IDW’s new take on the origin story of Splinter and the turtles. Don’t get me wrong, I love the original origin story as much as the next TMNT fan, but I am still able to appreciate the changes because IDW still showed the franchise’s original story the proper respect that it deserved. Yes, Splinter and the turtles were reincarnated into their animal forms after their deaths in Feudal Japan, but they were still mutated because of the ooze. Despite the change made by IDW, the ooze was still an integral part of the story and thereby paid homage to the original story.

This however is not the case with  the film reboot that is currently in the works.

In his infinite wisdom (I do hope you picked up on the sarcasm there) Michael Bay has decided to make the turtles aliens from another planet.

That’s right, you heard me…or more to the point, read me.

Michael Bay is making the turtles ALIENS FROM ANOTHER PLANET!

Describing the characters, Bay says, “These turtles are from an alien race, and they’re going to be tough, edgy, funny, and completely lovable.”  He also went on to say ”Kids will believe one day that these turtles do exist when we’re done with this movie”

I’m sorry, but when I was a kid, I certainly believed that the turtles were real after having seen the original film. If Bay wants to make the turtles believable, all he has to do is use the same formula as others have done before him. After all, mutations are real; we see them every day not only in people, but in plants and animals as well. Besides, the last time I checked, there was already an alien answer to TMNT, and it was called Biker Mice from Mars. But that’s not the driving issue here. The driving issue is that Michael Bay is not only COMPLETELY ignoring the origin story of the franchise, but he’s also COMPLETELY ignoring one of the key words used to describe the turtles in the first place, and that is the word “MUTANT”.

They are teenage MUTANT ninja turtles….not teenage ALIEN ninja turtles! You can’t make a change as drastic as that and then hope to pass it off as the same frakking thing!

Seriously…WHAT is Michael Bay thinking?!

Is he in fact thinking?!

It doesn’t seem like that to me! Rather, it seems to me that he’s just issuing a giant middle finger to the fans.

If Bay wants to use aliens in the film to change things up from the normal formula of having the Shredder as the main villain, then fine. He should use Krang, .and he should feel free to make him as much of a diabolical bad-ass as possible. My point is that he should stick to core and crucial points of the lore instead of throwing everything out of the window and starting from scratch as though the work of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird never happened in the first place!

If this disaster of an idea comes to fruition, it will be the WORST thing to happen to the franchise since the live-action television series in which the female turtle character of Venus was introduced. I’m sorry, but turtles are REPTILES, and therefore do NOT have boobs.

And don’t even get me started on the massacre that was the live-action TMNT cross-over with the Power Rangers.

Just don’t!

I can only hope that this horrible atrocity is either a joke, a first and very rough draft of the script, or a simple case of smoke and mirrors employed to keep actual facts of the film from leaking out.  Either way, Bay is taking a great risk because I am NOT the only fan who’s completely enraged by this. If Michael Bay goes through with this horrendous idea, then he will be alienating (and no, I was not intending to make a pun) the fans who have loved and followed the franchise since the beginning.

It will be almost as bad as when George Lucas recently came out and said that Han never shot first.

Just as Joel Schumacher killed the Batman movie franchise before it was rebooted, so too will Michael Bay effectively kill the TMNT movie franchise if he goes through with his plan.

After all this, I have only this left to say…

TMNT fans, ASSEMBLE!!!

Nerd up!