Saturday 27 February 2010

Watching:

One of those ideas so simple it's genius, Turtles Forever is the movie-length epilogue to the most recent Ninja Turtles tv show, a series that was actually pretty good, but typically hard to follow on terrestrial television.
The 'movie' sees the stars of the original 1980s Fred Wolf-produced cartoon series thrown across time and space to team up with the current versions to fight the original Shredder, who has revived the current Shredder from his intergalactic tomb so he can seek out and destroy the original Ninja Turtles from the 1980s comic book before they can become popular enough to spawn the Turtles franchise that will in turn spread out across a multiverse of infinite possibilities to create realities where the Turtles are real and thwart the Shredder at every turn. We see glimpses of these realities, and pretty much every version is in there, from the videogames, the CGI movie, the UK comic strip based on the cartoon show, the live-action movies, the live-action tv show - it's a nice little metatextual nod, but not unprecedented given that the show this movie bookends had an episode where one of the Turtles teamed up with Jack Kirby.

It's good fun, with the initial impression that the 80s cartoon Turtles are jobbing to their 2000s counterparts defused with the scene where the comic book versions refer to them as sell-outs (and the 1980s versions as "the fat ones"), and plenty of humour that suggest the makers know exactly what level they're pitching at, but still manage to put in humour you don't see coming, like the appearance of the 1980s Splinter, which made me laugh even though I'm well aware this is a show about jellyfish in robot suits fighting ninja turtles across time - he just looks fucking ridiculous even in that context - and I somehow didn't see "but first we have to save April!" coming, either.

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