The cast of Seth Rogen’s new Ninja Turtles movie is totally radical
Never before have you seen a more famous person play a character named Mondo Gecko
Aux News Seth Rogen
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been pop culture icons for decades, with Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s original comic already getting adapted into a bunch of cartoons, a few movies with live-action people in turtle costumes, and a few movies with live-action people next to CG turtles, so you may be wondering what else can be done to keep the turtles feeling new and fresh. Well, how about… a ridiculous collection of celebrities playing a ridiculous array of fan-service characters! Spoiler: If you don’t need to Google the name “Mondo Gecko,” you may be very excited.
But first, the turtles. No offense to these actors, but they’re being played by actual teenagers, which means you may not be as familiar with their work as you are with, say, Mondo Gecko. Micah Abbey is playing Donatello (he does machines), Shamon Brown Jr. is playing Michelangelo (he’s a party dude), Nicolas Cantu is playing Leonardo (he leads), and Brady Noon is playing Raphael (cool but rude). Now, are you ready for famous people? Sing this to the tune of the old theme song: Grown-up people who are famous, grown-up people who are famous!
Jackie Chan is playing Master Splinter. Seth Rogen (who is producing this movie) is playing Bebop. John Cena is playing Rocksteady. Hannibal Buress is playing Genghis Frog. Rose Byrne is playing Leatherhead. Ice Cube is Superfly. Natasia Demetriou is Wingnut. Ayo Edebiri is April O’Neil. Giancarlo Esposito is Baxter Stockman. Post Malone is Ray Fillet. Paul Rudd is Mondo Gecko (yessss the crowd cheers). And, finally, Maya Rudolph is Cynthia Utrom. We’re not sure if that last one is an established character, but the Mondo Gecko fans will tell you that “Utrom” is the race of alien that Krang is. You love Krang!
The film is called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (the word “mutant” is in it two times!), and The Hollywood Reporter says it’s about the teenage turtles trying to “win the hearts of New Yorker by performing heroic acts” until they mistakenly get wrapped up in a “mysterious crime syndicate” and a “mutant army.” It’s coming out on August 4, and The Mitchells Vs. The Machines director Jeff Rowe is directing.
51 Comments
Good to see the turtles are being played by actors that weren’t hired just because they were famous.
Seth Rogen (who is producing this movie) is playing BebopJohn Cena is playing Rocksteady
Post Malone is Ray FilletJFC they always find a way to ruin it
I am more optimistic than cautious about this development.
Seth Rogan’s ability to put together a great cast has never been the problem. It’s who he gets to write it. Preacher had a great cast, but wasn’t as good as it should have been. The Boys, however, also a great cast and eventually got to be pretty awesome.
Rogen does a great job with casting and actually getting shows made.
I don’t want to hear his fucking voice in this.
HeHeHeHeHeHeHe
*coughs for ten minutes*
That’s fair, but if he’s going to play any character, Bebop or Rocksteady is kind of perfect.
He already had a chance at being a warthog.
Lol, I’ve never heard anyone actually say that. He sounds maybe like a duck crossed with Grouco Marx?
(pumbaa)
Only thing is that if there’s a wrestler going to play Rocksteady I’d rather it was Sheamus , as I thought he was pretty good in the last live action movie.
The Boys just needs to stop trying to appeal to actual boys, and start appealing to men. Every time there’s something clever, the show forgets about it and instead has someone’s head blow up.
Gimme a break, Raphael is cool but *c*rude…
L-O-L at the continued red head erasure
Ayo can dye her hair red but Jackie can’t dye himself Japanese…seriously unless half the movie is explaining how Ninjas can be Chinese
This…is animated…
Only one Punk Frog?
Rose Byrne seems to perpetually have a “i need to get fucked” look on her face.
C’mon, Sam. You were quoting the lyrics to the ‘80s cartoon theme song in the article. You know you’re excited for this.
Ok you’ve got my attention. But… Jackie Chan? How long will it take before Hollywood finally realizes there are plenty of Japanese actors to choose from when Ken Watanabe isn’t available?
There’s this thing called “fan base.” Look it up, it will help you.
Wait so this is… animated? It was unclear from the article
CGI. Not hand-drawn, alas, but also not another *&$(# animation-live action hybrid, at least.
They got 4 of the 7 Mighty Mutanimals, not bad. Maybe 5 (Screwloose) and he just doesn’t speak…? Can’t have Wingnut without Screwloose. Poor Jagwar and Dreadmon will never be animated, will they… Aw…They should have swapped Post and Rudd with Mondo and Man Ray (I mean.. ugh… “Ray Fillet”). Just seems more fitting Post being a teenage skater dude, and Rudd being… a manta man. Yeah, that’s more fitting.Not sure why they gender-swapped Leatherhead and Wingnut, but sure ok, the source material was light on cool female mutants (except Ninjara, but that’s never gonna happen either) I guess. I love Rose Byrne, one of my favorite actresses (Damages!) but I wouldn’t have guessed her in a bajillion years to voice a Cajun mutant alligator. And I always imagined a very deep, Brad Garrett kinda voice for Wingnut, but they clearly went in a very different direction.Whatever, it’s for kids, not for old dudes who read Archie Comics in the 90’s, I’m sure it’ll be anywhere on the spectrum from “fine” to “not bad.”
They’re gonna go with an Australian accent for Leatherhead, I guarantee. He will probably be a crocodile.
You’re probably right, she’ll finally get to use her natural accent for a role. And Wingnut, I guess will be a mutant bat from… Romania..? London…? Is it b/c she plays a vampire ( bat!) in a WWDITS? Ohh clever!
I’m feeling oddly stoked about this.
I know this is unlikely, but seeing this cast and this lineup of characters makes me hopeful that we’ll one day see a Mighty Mutanimals movie. I loved that comic when I was I kid and part of me would still like to see it brought to life on the big screen.
I only got comics as gifts from my aunts and uncles every now and then so I have an incredibly odd childhood collection with one or two issues from many different titles and nothing else. My only exposure to the Mutanimals is from an issue of TMNT I have where they all get brutally murdered by some space villain and his cyborg henchmen. Was kind of crazy to read that as a ten year old.
I have all 72 issues of the Archie series (and all the important mini-series and some specials), and all 12 Mutanimals comics, and the one you speak of, to me, was the pinnacle of the Archie TMNT universe. Everything led to that story, and like you said, as a 10 year old, it was quite shocking. I was like, the turtles have time-traveling capabilities, they’ll bring them back… Oh they all stay dead, no revival, no alt-universe, just meaningless brutal finality, and also Slash dies avenging their deaths, but that is a meaningless death too. Ok! I know the Archie version of TMNT, and stories like that, will NEVER be adapted in animation, but fuck it would be cool to see stuff like that play out. But I’m expecting “cowabunga”s and pizza and light kiddie stuff, and none of the darker stuff that, I guess, only a small amount of us TMNT fans wanted. For me, if it wasn’t for Archie TMNT Adventures, I’d probably have no real affection for the turtles or any of these characters anymore. I never read the Mirage ones, and even as a kid I pretty quickly realized the cartoon was corny crap, and by the 3rd movie I was already checked out.
The 2003 animated series was a bit darker in tone – probably darkest we’d get considering primary target of the show is kids.
Did that show kill all 7 Mutanimals in an unheroic way and leave them dead permanently? If not… NOT DARK ENOUGH BABY!
Give me Cudley the Cowlick in a movie!
Seriously, how cool would that be? Give me Stump Asteroid and all of its weird characters, give me the space and time travel, give me the wrestling, just give me every Archie issue adapted into animated form!!! Not asking too much.
I don’t remember all of that. I’m not sure I read all of the Archie TMNT run. I probably only remember Cudley because he was just SO WEIRD. Stump Asteroid? Space and time travel? Wrestling? Heck yeah, I’d be down for all of that!
Cudley was the inter-dimensional Cowlick that scooped them up and took them TO Stump Asteroid in his first appearance (end of issue 6 I think? then 7 was the wresting issue) and he did it AGAIN 30-something issues later (and why not?). And in between he took them some other random places around the globe, and once mistakenly about 100 years into the post-global warming dystopian future, that Mikey didn’t like too much. It’d be so fun to watch that all in animated form, but it just wasn’t meant to be.
I can’t believe how close we were to getting a Mighty Mutanimals animated show in the 90s and the morons in charge passed on it. But shit like Street Sharks gets made…? Just ain’t right. I just wanted to see an animated Jagwar, Dreadmon, Ninjara, and the rest of the Mutanimals re-done right, b/c their TMNT animated series counterparts were clown shit. Even as a kid I knew that. Every Archie Comics version of the character was so much more appealing. And we’d also get to see animated Maligna, Scul, Bean, etc. (Null??) But it wasn’t meant to be. I’ll always wonder what kind of voices they’d have had, but I’ll just have to stick with the ones I imagined in my head. And no, I did not imagine a dude like…sigh… Post Malone when I was reading Man Ray dialogue, but what can ya do
So there has been a lot of talk about voice acting black and yellow face being an issue but are we not getting outraged when a Chinese man is playing a Japanese man or rat(depending on which origin they do for splinter).
Check out who’s voiced Splinter in past iterations. I think this will be the third time an Asian has performed the role, and only once has it been by someone with Japanese ancestry, so by that metric, Rogen’s doing better than average!(Although the one time was freakin’ Mako, so it’s going to be really hard to match that.)
Why would anyone ask Hannibal Burgess to do voiceover work? As funny as he is (which is extremely), his overtly monotonal and expressionless voice, which his stand-up uses to great advantage in front of a live audience, is massively ill-suited to animation.
I need some Don Turtelli up in this bitch. My man kidnapped and tied April to a chair so he could tickle her feet with a feather. So fucking weird.
1)Author tells fans of TNMT to be excited!2)Commenters explain how they’d be excited if only “insert important change that shows their vast level of Hollywood/animation/producing/writing AND depth of TNMT fandom”3)Repeat.4)I write this stupid comment
profit?
Rose Byrne is playing Leatherhead. The fuck?
so it sounds like the turtles get wrapped up in some Q-Anon January 6 Mutant Hijinx? Rad!Why does Krang have so many Timothy Olyphantasies?
Is this an animated film, or live-action? None of the press releases or articles I’ve seen have been clear about that.
It’s theater of the mind
Cool another animated movie for kids filled with big name celebs taking easy paychecks! Kids don’t give two shits who is voicing Bebop or Splinter and parents will probably take their kids because of their own childhood nostalgia.Want to feel old? Those parents are probably nostalgic for either the 2003 or 2o12 TMNT series.
Is Vanilla Ice on board?
Sorry, was that ROSE O’BYRNE as… LEATHERHEAD?
“Raphael (cool but rude)“Crude. Raphael is cool but crude.