On this past weekend’s Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, Seth Rogen introduced the cast of his upcoming CGI-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot.
The film, titled “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” is being produced by Nickelodeon owner Paramount Pictures (PARA), as well Rogen and his partner Point Grey Productions and will be in theaters on August 4, 2023.
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There’s really only three ways for a reasonable person to react to this news.
Option one goes roughly: “Aww! The Ninja Turtles were a big part of my childhood, and this trailer looks fun. I can’t wait to watch this with my kids and/or nephews and nieces.” (It’s also entirely possible that a person who was a fan of the 1984 comic that introduces the four green crime fighters, the 1987 cartoon or the 1990 film might be watching the new cartoon with their grandchild, just in case you need a reminder of time’s relentless passage and inevitably of mortality.)
Anyway, option two goes like this: “Ugh, more IP mining. This property has spawned five films, and no one really liked the ones from 2014 or 2016. There’s also been a thousand cartoons with these guys. There’s nothing new to do with these characters! Can’t we just give it a rest, get over our collective nostalgia and have new things?”
And option three is something like: “this cast is great, and getting Giancarlo Esposito to voice Baxter Stockman is a stroke of genius. Rogen has a solid track record, so this will probably be pretty good.”
But, unfortunately, some people have chosen a fourth option, one that is not on the menu and much dumber and more distressing than those listed above.
Wait, Why Are People Mad At Seth Rogen?
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” will be directed by Jeff Rowe, known for the Netflix animated film “The Mitchells vs. the Machines,” and the computer animation has already earned favorable comparisons to the award-winning “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”
But some fans have spent all day complaining on social media that April O’Neil will be voiced by the comedian and actress Ayo Edebiri, who is best known for “The Bear,” and who is, in case you were unaware, a black woman.
In the cartoon and film that first made the Ninja Turtles a global merchandising bonanza, O’Neil, a reporter who helps the Turtles fight the Shredder and other bad guys, has been depicted as white woman with reddish brown hair.
While the majority of the responses to the casting news seem to be positive, there have been people complaining that social justice warriors ruined their childhood or whatever, as always happens when this type of casting happens.
So Here’s The Thing
Racebending is the term for when a character is depicted as one ethnicity in what could be termed “the source material,” usually a novel or a comic book, or a TV show or film that is being rebooted.
Usually, this practice is done when a character is Caucasian, and a person of color is cast in the role. The most well-known example of this is Samuel L. Jackson being cast as Nick Fury in the Marvel movies, as well as Laurence Fishburne cast as Jack Crawford in the “Hannibal” TV series and Will Smith playing the DC character Deadshot in “Suicide Squad.”
This is done for a variety of reasons, mostly to modernize the character, increase representation on screen and attract high-profile talent. Only one thing about the character changes, and if that’s the thing you value most, that says more about you than the character.
But the thing is, this is arguably not even really racebending, but taking the character back to their roots. In O’Neil’s first appearance, in the black-and-white independent comics created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, she is as many Twitter users and Turtles historians have pointed out, depicted as a black woman.
(It’s also worth pointing out that the Turtles villain Baxter Stockman, a mad scientist, was black in the original comics, and was later depicted as white in the ‘80s cartoon, but was changed back to his original color in later depictions.)
Anyway, Twitter has been spotty all day, and if people are going to continue to be racist babies about cartoons they loved when they were children, maybe we’d be better off if the site never got fixed.
