Let's say all TMNT projects have been cancelled permanently and enough time has passed that there'd be no overlap or problems from making a new series. You've been given the opportunity to pitch a new TMNT project, but you have the following stipulations:
>It cannot be a continuation/revival/reboot of a previous TMNT series. No bringing back something for more seasons or issues.
>It cannot be a direct adaptation of something that wasn't previous animated or made as a comic. So no turning old comics into cartoons or vice versa.
What's your pitch?
Completely set the whole story in feudal Japan, (with no time travel) and base all it all around what beliefs and myths that actually existed at the time
So would all the "mutants" be yokai and oni? Or would there still be some magical/alchemical ooze-type substance involved?
I want to focus more on the ninja part with mystical ninja skills more than just karate guys with weapons bouncing around.
Don't go full Naruto with it, but I would love to see a Shredder who can smoke port, make shadow copies of himself, stun lock an enemy with a stare, and be a genuine physical threat to guys that routinely fight aliens, robots, and monsters too. A guy who is really really good at ninja jutsu and weapons can still frick them up more.
Maybe Splinter can summon a giant frog when things get real.
Splinter is a Rat Hanyo but a member of the Foot from a small village in Japan that trains ninjas for corporate killings, assasination, political things etc. They sometimes summon and breed various yokai to make more powerful warriors. He screwed up and was targeted to be killed himself, which is why he ran away to New York. He is not a good person himself, he is a ninja with a bodycount in his history.
The turtles are a botched summon, Splinter was summoning a yokai to take revenge on his old village but 4 baby turtles are all he managed to conjure. He instead raises them and trains them to eventually go kill the Foot.
Shredder runs the New York branch of the foot, he is ordered to kill Splinter if he finds him.
Bebop and Rocksteady are also hanyo, yokai rape children from ghettos, but born in New York, living on streets as freaks they were muscle for various street gangs before Shredder found them. They cannot take a true human form like their fathers.
>Bebop and Rocksteady are also hanyo, yokai rape children from ghettos, but born in New York, living on streets as freaks they were muscle for various street gangs before Shredder found them. They cannot take a true human form like their fathers.
This is actually a really cool take on Bebop and Rocksteady both being violent as hell and dumb as frick.
I'd want something that starts in 80's/90's action movie era New York with lots of crime and gangs, but then moves forward to a warped presented day where the crime problem was never solved because The Foot Clan cemented themselves as the ruling criminal force in the city, while allowing numerous smaller gangs to continue operating. Make the Foot more like a Yakuza gang that trains and employs ninja tactics. Have it be heightened anime logic where intense training and borderline mystical practices make their elite ninjas an actual threat, instead of just being guys in weird pajamas.
The Yakuza angle also solves the whole honor and duty thing. Yakuza families have a certain code of honor (at least in the movies and games lol) but it's not as rigid unless it comes down to a subordinate betraying a superior. Shredder is now Patriarch of the Oroku Family, subsidiary of the Foot Clan (Futo Clan?) which is the biggest Yakuza family in Japan. It also means Shredder has a variety of lieutenants who can server as lesser antagonists, each operating in different parts of New York with their own specific kinds of crime and money generation to oversee.
For the Turtles and Splinter, I think you need that connection between Hamato Yoshi and Shredder. Have Yoshi be another officer in the Foot Clan who was trying to bring Saki down for overstepping his rank in the organization, but Saki found out and staged an "accident" where he left Yoshi to die and then turned the rest of the job over to Baxter Stockman, who worked as one of his cleaners and a back alley doctor for Foot Clan. Maybe he's an intern working for TCRI with delusions of grandeur, and thinks Yoshi would be a good lab rat for his experiments with the mutagenic compounds he's been smuggling for Shredder to sell on the black market. Yoshi gets mutated, but goes into a temporary berserk state and destroys the lab, etc etc... Yoshi and 4 baby turtles end up washed away in the sewer.
Other ideas
>Casey Jones is like an urban legend because he's actually fricking terrifying. Like a horror movie slasher who comes out of nowhere and hospitalizes a dozen guys by himself. He's the character that gets the turtles to understand that street fights aren't about fighting fair or following the rules; they're about winning no matter what.
>April is not directly tied to or involved in the origin of the turtles.
>Splinter isn't so ancient that he can't fight regularly, but he's been trying to fight the Foot Clan alone for so long that he's getting too injured and battered to keep up the fight.
>Baxter Stockman is more morally ambiguous instead of being a mad scientist villain. He wants to take down Shredder too, but he's too much of a coward to risk his own life.
>After the incident with Splinter and the Turtles being mutated, Shredder put Stockman to work weaponizing the mutagen. As the series is starting, there is a sort of mutant arms race taking shape in dystopian present-day New York.
>No plots about how the turtles want to be real boys or just be accepted and considered normal. They've never known normal in their entire lives.
>Likewise, no plots about the turtles wanting to split up and go their separate ways. Every single series has done this and it's rarely good. I'd rather have them working together as a running theme, with their fighting styles evolving to compliment and rely on each other more and more as the story goes.
shredder get ipad
>April is fake paranormal investigator who hosts a ghost hunters style show but dreams of breaking into real journalism.
>Gets her chance when during the filming of an episode in an abandoned water treatment plant, she comes across real paranormal phenomena.
>The TMNT are experiments on the run from a deranged cult that believe mutants are the next step in evolution.
>They learned their ninja skills from the overseas help the cult hired to guard them, the kindly Hamato Yoshi.
>Members of this "Cult of Ooze" have already infiltrated many government institutions around the world and plan on using ooze in many different plans to create mutants around the world.
>In the meantime, the cult has also sent out additional mutants to find the turtles. Out of all of them, the most deadly is a murderous rat creature that has incredible strength and agility.
>It's up to April and the turtles to stop the cult, reveal their existence and rescue the now missing Hamato. Their escapades lead them to new adventures all around the world.
>Ooze might be the physical essence of God on Earth.
I don't know how to fit Shredder into this naturally.
Rival Cult Leader with an opposing vision of the future? Close ally of the cult founder who has his own interpretation that the future can be changed instead of the future being total mutation.
Im gonna start off with episode one being set in NYC with hamato yoshi and tang shen getting abducted by the foot clan, and how during the struggle his pet rat escaped during the struggle.
Episode 2 would be about how the rat survives in the sewers while the b plot would be about a kid buying 4 baby turtles, the episode ends with the kid pushing a blind man out of the way of a speeding Pharmaceuticals truck, resulting in the pet turtles getting dropped in the sewer and the rat finding them alongside a broken canister.
Episode 3 would be about the rat and turtles mutating in their sleep and the morning after the creatures explore their new situation, with the rat being more careful about it and keeping the turtles out of danger.
The rest of the 10 episode season would be about how the rat and turtles adapt and survive in the sewers together in a weird endearing family situation.
>The rest of the 10 episode season would be about how the rat and turtles adapt and survive in the sewers together in a weird endearing family situation.
What sort of stories would you do with 10 episodes of the Turtles' childhood? I don't think it's a bad idea, I'm just struggling to think of anything good that isn't like Rugrats, but with turtles.
More like time skips from them being 1 to 5 to 10 to 15
Episode 4 would be their mischievous years at age 5 getting into trouble and the rat struggling to keep up with them, finally accumulating to one of the turtles getting injured by a sanitation worker which then the rat resolves to train the turtles in the ways of matial arts to help defend themselves
This is sounding like the flashback from Mutant Mayhem now
Yeah but more contained in the sewers
Do Usagi Yojimbo instead and ignore rule 2
I'm sorry, but you're being escorted out of the building.