Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It started as a joke. Way back in the ’80s, the phenomenon we now call “superhero fatigue” was already a thing, at least among comics afficionados.
Frustrated with pulp creators recycling the same old ideas, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird hatched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The idea was to poke fun at how lame mainstream heroes had gotten, but the parody got so popular, it spawned a mini-empire of its own: movies, games, TV series and a whole lotta merch.
At a certain point (around the time Michael Bay got involved), the brand got out of hand. Time for a reset. With “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” Nickelodeon Movies takes the fertile turtle property back to its roots: Tapping “permanent teenager” (as the trailer cleverly dubs the former “Freaks and Geeks” star) Seth Rogen to produce, the toon studio commissioned an animated reboot that focuses on the ooze-boosted vigilantes’ awkward adolescent identities, while giving the franchise a fresh comic-book look.
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