Michael Bay accused of "sodomizing" the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, encourages everyone to just relax
A groundswell of Internet outrage continues to rise against Michael Bay’s plot to turn the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles into aliens, because the Internet abhors logic, but these days, such outrage can never truly effect change until someone has the temerity to compare it to rape. Fortunately that someone has arrived in the form of actor Robbie Rist, who experienced firsthand the dire consequences of tampering with mythology when he played “Cousin Oliver” on The Brady Bunch, and whose role as Michelangelo in the first live-action TMNT adaptation makes him uniquely qualified—like Kim Novak and Courtney Love before him—to report the violation of a body of work that isn’t technically his.
“The rape of our childhood memories continues,” Rist writes in an open letter to Bay posted on his Facebook page, angrily decrying Bay’s “sodomizing” of the franchise by forcibly inserting his own interpretation and brusquely penetrating it with his “alien” angle while ripping out the "ooze" that once protected our collective virginal innocence. And of course, Rist’s cry of "rape" is but one voice in a growing chorus of victims, meaning it was only a matter of time before Bay himself was forced to step forward and address them with the rationale and sensitivity that has long made him Hollywood’s Great Communicator.
“Fans need to take a breath and chill,” Bay writes in a statement on his website. “They have not read the script. Our team is working closely with one of the original creators of Ninja Turtles to help expand and give a more complex back story.” (After all, if there were ever a shortcoming to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it was their simplistic, drably quotidian origin story.) Having thus calmed the masses by assuring them of the complexity that has long been the hallmark of a Michael Bay production, Bay concludes, “Relax, we are including everything that made you become fans in the first place. We are just building a richer world.” Indeed, everyone should just lie back and try to enjoy it. [via EW]