Michael Bay will explain why it's just called Ninja Turtles now, if you'll just give him a chance

By Sean O'Neal | March 27, 2012 | 4:47pm

Aux Features Film

After suffering the slings and arrows of outraged fanboys over the inclusion of racist robots and morons who don’t appreciate the beauty of 3-D, Michael Bay has once again been forced to take arms against a sea of troubled Internet people—this time defending the purity of logic dictating that human-sized turtles skilled in the art of ninjutsu must naturally be aliens, otherwise no one would believe them. But no sooner had Bay and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman entered respective pleas to “chill” then a new controversy erupted over the decision to name the film Ninja Turtles, indicating that both the “mutant” and “teenage” aspects of the characters had been removed.

And while this demonstrably makes the entire notion of ninja turtles 50 percent more reasonable, not everyone sees it that way, forcing Bay to stand up once more for rationality with a another terse, straining-for-diplomacy statement on his website. “Paramount marketing changed the name. They made the title simple,” Bay said of the decision to boil down its capitalization on a recognizable franchise name to its most salient storytelling core, much like the recent proven formula of John Carter. But please, Bay asks, stop worrying and also shut up:

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“The characters you all remember are exactly the same, and yes they still act like teenagers. Everything you remember, why you liked the characters, is in the movie. This script is being developed by two very smart writers, with one of the original creators of Ninja Turtles. They care VERY MUCH about making this film for the fans. Everyone on this team cares about the fans. Just give them a chance. Jonathan [Liebesman] the director, is a major fan of the whole franchise. HE’S NOT GOING TO LET YOU DOWN.”

Let this matter now be resolved, lest Michael Bay be forced to deploy even more capitalized letters, or put Krang in tiny denim shorts just to spite you.