This week are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem marks the seventh big-screen outing for Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo, who never go on hiatus — the half-shell heroes have almost always had a TV show or comic to keep their tortoiseshell power going between movies.
And despite the quantity, TMNT has a property with a decent hit rate for quality: 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles goes much harder than anyone would expect, the sequel Secret of the Ooze is more cartoony fun, 2007 is fully animated TMNT revived the suspense on a budget, and the Michael Bay produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at least the casting nailed behind a polarizing motion-capture-spirited CGI. With high marks thanks to a star-studded but still passionate creative team, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem should the franchise continue to move in the right direction.
Here’s the thing: no feature film or episodic TMNT saga will ever overshadow The Onion’s 2014 take on Ninja Turtles. Whenever pop culture reminds me of the Turtles, this video comes to mind. It’s a joy and a curse. Once you see the footage in the video below – no, movie – there is no spare. There will be then and now. Michael Bay gives fans a taste of Ninja Turtles’ hyper-realistic CGI genitals is a work of a true comic genius.
Released in July 2014, around San Diego Comic-Con, The Onion’s Michael Bay gives fans a taste of Ninja Turtles’ hyper-realistic CGI genitals was a spot-on parody of Entertainment tonight or Additional segments filled with gushing praise and jargon from the press kit. It was also an excuse for The Onion artists to add flaccid penises to the Ninja Turtles.
“All we did was a headline pitched and selected,” says director JJ Shebesta, who was kind enough to respond with genuine enthusiasm to my email subject line “Question about Michael Bay’s Turtle Genitals.” “Then the whole group of writers, producers and directors shaped the script and the final product. (…) We were on the fence that it would be too silly or too small a target to begin with. But I know I was excited about it because I always loved anything that lent itself to being a world-building spectacle and super playful.
Success. The end product is bathroom humor taken to the extreme and executed with seamless moving graphics. Added the green CG phalluses to Bay’s footage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles look very real. Each line’s delivery is articulated with a specific kind of everyday hype that’s instantly recognizable to anyone who’s watched studio-produced featurettes from the past 20 years.
“Michael Bay was very hands-on for a producer,” a fake VFX artist says in the video. “From day one, he said these turtles should be gritty with realistic-looking facial expressions and veined, textured genitalia.”
Shebesta says the team’s ear for making-of promo jargon grew out of a devout love of making-of promos — while it may exploit Michael Bay’s sophisticated TMNT movie for laughs, it’s also a love letter. And everyone accepted the mission to push it as far as possible. Shebesta recalls that the actor who played the entertainment journalist refused to use foul language in scripts because it would have poked holes in the actual spoof. “I think the fact that I wasn’t punched in the dialogue softened something that was already pretty gross,” he notes.
As mountains of content pour onto the internet, it becomes increasingly difficult to find gold produced entirely for the internet. The video era of The Onion always struggled to break through to the same extent as Funny or Die or creator-driven YouTube channels, stuck on the hunt for bigger fish – did you know there were two different Onion TV shows on IFC and Comedy Central ? — or just being too niche, weird, and sophisticated for the viral crowd. Even the videos that exploded (and Michael Bay gives fans a taste of Ninja Turtles’ hyper-realistic CGI genitals was one of them) have no place in any comedy canon these days, aside from vague memories of those who think “Twitter used to be good”.
But they should. The videos are fantastic. (Also see: True Detective: Yellow King Theory.) We should look again Michael Bay gives fans a taste of Ninja Turtles’ hyper-realistic CGI genitals whenever a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles thing happens. The team at The Onion should have Oscars for Best Short Film. Shredder’s spiky metal sword schlong probably shouldn’t be in it Mutant chaos 2 for the good of children, but still, it’s an achievement.
While The Onion’s video team may be the unsung heroes of a bygone era of internet crazies, Shebesta says the daily practice was a mind-boggling marvel where anything could and did happen.
“I remember we had a talented intern doing monster dongs making and he couldn’t believe this was a job people do,” he says. ‘We couldn’t either. That was a common experience on that job.”