BLUE BEETLE
• D C’S LEGAC Y HERO •
EXCLUSIVE: ANTHONY MACKIE HITS THE ROAD IN THE PEACOCK ADAPTATION OF THE CHAOTIC VIDEO GAME FRANCHISE.
Got a telly? There are some tasty treats coming your way! We’ve chatted to the talent behind some of the hottest new shows around, as well as rounding up the very best returning this year.
This summer DC brings us a new kind of superhero movie. Director Angel Manuel and star Soto Xolo Maridueña tells us about bringing Blue Beetle to life. PG. 52
Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema is a regular collaborator with Christopher Nolan. He talks us through their latest project which is full of firsts. PG. 58
Creepy Easter eggs, trick moves, hidden symbols and more are hiding in classic NES games. We’ve dug deep to reveal all our favorite nuggets. PG. 62
IT’S BEEN 10 YEARS since I attended my first San Diego Comic-Con. By 2013, there were already grumblings from a certain segment of fans that the show was losing its way, that it wasn’t about comics anymore, that movie studios and TV networks were taking up all the oxygen, that they were (gasp!) appealing to too many casual fans. I didn’t care (still don’t!) because not only were they wrong, but I was finally at SDCC and lucky enough to be there in a professional capacity.
At this point, I had only been on the job at Den of Geek for just over a month. The profile, reach, and audience of the site in the U.S. was far lower than what it eventually became. It wasn’t even certain that I’d be able to go until just a couple of weeks before the show, long after the press registration period had closed. Fortunately, I found a sympathetic ear in the press registrar’s office, who got me a pass. Of course, by then, the press lists had long gone out, and as I said, Den of Geek didn’t have a lot of pull yet in terms of interview invites—and forget about things like parties. My mission was to pound the southern California pavement, hand out business cards, do some panel coverage, and generally make enough of a nuisance of myself that folks might
remember the DoG name. I even managed to sneak into a party or two. But even then, as a website that, at the time, barely had any full-time staff, I didn’t get there alone. The opportunity to attend SDCC as a kind of “advance scout” only happened because folks were putting in the work in other areas of the company. Over this decade, Den of Geek has grown in ways I could never have imagined in terms of scale, ambition, quality, and more. While it’s a bigger staff now than the one in 2013, it’s still not exactly a big one, so it requires a staggering amount of effort, year-round, to get us to the point where we can bring a crew across the country to cover the most important event on the pop-culture calendar. See those names on our masthead on the other page? The DoG team is the best in the business, and they’ve allowed me to have (literally, in the case of San Diego) my “moment in the sun.” I’ll never be able to thank them, or you readers, enough.
Mike Cecchini, Editor-in-ChiefThe summer is upon is us so what better way to celebrate than with a bright, beautiful cover celebrating crime in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The show is Twisted Metal, based on the hit video game series. We caught up with star and producer Anthony Mackie, as well as his costars Stephanie Beatriz, who plays Quiet, and Will Arnett who voices the maniacal clown, Sweet Tooth. Inside these pages you will find all manner of great TV content including features on Ahsoka, John Wick spinoff The Continental and Ted spinoff... Ted. Plus, see that cute little Blue Beetle flash? That’s to remind you to read all about DC’s new movie which could be the start of a reboot of the DC universe. Enjoy the issue!
ISSUE 11 | SUMMER 2023
MAGAZINE
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The magazine you’re holding in your hands right now is available at these fine comic book stores nationwide.
ALASKA (1) The Comics Shop
CALIFORNIA (2) House of Cards and Comics, (3) Isotope Comics, (4)
Crush Comics, (5) Fantasy Books and Games, (6) Comics Conspiracy, (7) Illusive Comics and Games, (8)
SpaceCat, (9) Atlantis Fantasyworld, (10) Comicopolis, (11) House of Secrets, (12) Hi De Ho Comics & Books, (13)
Galaxy of Comics, (14) Golden Apple Comics, (15) Mega City One, (16)
Secret Headquarters, (17) The Comic Bug, (18) Now or Never Comics
COLORADO (19) Time Warp Comics and Games, (20) Mile High Comics, (21) Vision Comics & Oddities
HAWAII (22) Westside Comics and Games
IDAHO (23) EntertainMART, (24)
Captain Comics, (25) The Collector’s Outpost
MONTANA (26) Muse Comics & Games
NEVADA (27) Frank-N-Freds Comics & Cards, (28) Celestial Comics
OREGON (29) Cosmic Monkey, (30)
Excalibur Comics
UTAH (31) Black Cat Comics, (32) The Nerd Store
WASHINGTON (33) Arcane Comics & More, (34) Phoenix Comics & Games
WYOMING (35) Olympus Games and Comics
ARIZONA (36) Cab Comics, (37) Drawn to Comics, (38) Samurai Comics, (39) Ash Avenue Comics & Books
NEW MEXICO (40) Astro-Zombies
OKLAHOMA (41) Bibliotech Books & Comics, (42) New World Comics
TEXAS (43) Titan Comics, (44) Austin Books & Comics, (45) Tribe Comics and Games, (46) King’s Cache,
(47) Dragon’s Lair Comics and Fantasy, (48) Juniors Comic & Cards, (49) Rogues Gallery Comics & Games, (50) Bedrock City Comic Company (Houston, Westheimer Rd), (51) Bedrock City Comic Company (Houston, FM 1960), (52) Bedrock City Comic Company (Houston, Washington Ave), (53) Bedrock City Comic Company (Missouri City), (54) Bedrock City Comic Company (Katy), (55) Bedrock City Comic Company (Webster)
ILLINOIS (56) Perkolator, (57)
Maximum Distractions, (58) Challengers Comics + Conversation, (59) Graham Crackers Comics Loop
INDIANA (60) Heroes and Havens
Comics and Games, (61) Downtown Comics, (62) Comic Carnival, (63) Comic Book University
IOWA (64) Alter Ego Comics, (65) Mayhem Collectibles Inc AMES
KANSAS (66) Elite Comics
MICHIGAN (67) Summit Comics & Games, (68) Green Brain Comics
MINNESOTA (69) Rogue Robot
Games & Comics, (70) Hot Comics and Collectibles
MISSOURI (71) The Wizard’s Wagon
NEBRASKA (72) Dragon’s Lair Comics & Games (N 90th St), (73) Dragon’s Lair Comics & Games (S 153rd St)
NORTH DAKOTA (74) Grand Cities
Games
OHIO (75) Carol & John’s Comic Shop, (76) Superscript Comics and Games, (77) Rockin’ Rooster Comics & Games, (78) The Laughing Ogre
SOUTH DAKOTA (79) Rainbow
Comics, Cards & Collectibles
WISCONSIN (80) Capital City Comics, (81) Lost World of Wonders
ALABAMA (82) Bob’s Comics, (83) Deep Comics & Games
ARKANSAS (84) Collector’s Paradise
FLORIDA (85) Yancy Street Comics, (86) Descent Into Gaming, (87) Dark Side, (88) Korka Comics
GEORGIA (89) Level Up Games, (90) Oxford Comics, (91) Titan Games
KENTUCKY (92) Comic Book
World, (93) Heroes Realm
LOUISIANA (94) Excalibur Comics, (95) More Fun Comics
MISSISSIPPI (96) Jak’s
NORTH CAROLINA (97) Capitol
Comics II, (98) Fanboy Comics
SOUTH CAROLINA (99) Heroes & Dragons
TENNESSEE (100) Rick’s Comic City
VIRGINIA (101) Victory Comics
WEST VIRGINIA (102) Comic
Paradise Plus
NORTHEAST
CONNECTICUT (103) Alternate Universe (New Haven), (104)
Alternate Universe (Milford), (105)
DJ’s Cards and Comics,
(106) Matt’s Sportscards & Comics, (107) Sarge’s Comics
DELAWARE (108) Bethany Beach
Comics and Gaming
MAINE (109) Eagle Hill Stamps & Coins, (110) Newbury Comics
MARYLAND (111) Cards Comics & Collectibles, (112) Alliance
MASSACHUSETTS (113) That’s
Entertainment, (114) Comicazi, (115) New England Comics
NEW HAMPSHIRE (116) Jetpack
Comics & Games
NEW JERSEY (117) Dewey’s, (118) Zapp
Comics (Wayne)
NEW YORK (119) Collector’s Inn, (120)
Fordham Road Comics, (121) Midtown
Comics Downtown, (122) Midtown
Comics Times Square, (123) Midtown
Comics Astoria (Queens), (124) Midtown
Comics Grand Central, (125) Forbidden
Planet, (126) JHU Comics and Books
(Staten Island), (127) JHU Comics and Books (3rd Ave), (128) Silver Age Comics
PENNSYLVANIA (129) Phantom of the Attic Comics, (130) Comix ConnectionYork, (131) Ontario Street Comics, (132) Wade’s Comic Madness
RHODE ISLAND (133) The Time
Capsule
VERMONT (134) Champion Comics and Coffee
WASHINGTON DC (135) Fantom
Comics
NOT MAPPED
CANADA (132) Golden Age
Collectables (Vancouver), (133) Silver Snail (Toronto), (134) Capitaine Québec les Livres Comiques (Montreal)
WHEN YOU THINK of San Diego Comic-Con, you think of Hall H, huge announcements, a beautiful city locked in permanent summer and filled for a week with cosplayers and industry folks. You don’t think of a small shop at the end of the Ditmars Boulevard N/W subway station in Astoria, Queens, walls lined with books surrounding an island of longboxes. And yet… “In 1991, I went as an attendee,” says Gus Poulakas, owner of Silver Age Comics and a San Diego Comic-Con exhibitor. “San Diego is such a great city [and SDCC], it’s the show of shows, so in 1999, I just decided to, you know, do San Diego.”
Silver Age’s modest retail space belies one of the key facets of their business: Poulakas is one of the biggest vintage comics dealers in New York and maybe on the entire East Coast. To SDCC attendees, that’s what helps him stand out. “There’s a more diverse pool of buyers [at San Diego],” Poulakas says. “I’ll sell lots of oddball things besides the mainstream—some Harveys, some Archies, Charlton, Gold Keys, Classics Illustrated. That stuff does better at that show.”
You would think that trekking across the country with enough comics to set up one of the biggest booths on the convention floor would
be a bit of a production, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but when the shop owner has been doing it for 25 years, he develops a rhythm and relationships that make it simpler. “Nowadays, I just truck pool with other East Coast dealers, and we truck it cross country,” he tells us. “It takes a while for the stuff to get back, so I don’t need to rush home. [The books get there] a little early, I stay a little later… It’s kind of like a working vacation. It’s just a beautiful city.”
Doing this for 25 years means that Poulakas has built up a local network on the other coast, too. “I used to fly a guy out there,” he says, “but at some
point, I started hiring my friends who were local to San Diego. [Now] I get to see some of my dealer friends and, you know, we eat and drink, and it’s a good time.”
Being primarily a vintage dealer (at least at shows) means Silver Age is less prone to the wild swings of the pop culture marketplace. You won’t find anything Spider-Verse or Flashpointey in the Silver Age booth. “I just picked up a large Big Five war collection [the five major war comics put out by DC—G.I. Combat, Our Fighting Forces, Star Spangled War Stories, Our Army at War, and AllAmerican Men of War],” Poulakas says.
When he brings books like this, he tends to draw hunters rather than browsers. “It’s nice to see people with their want list and they’re not just necessarily looking at your wall and seeing what big book you have or what key you have… to try to fill in their runs.”
It sounds complicated, but ultimately what keeps Poulakas going across the country is that it’s less stressful than his hometown show. “When you get to San Diego, it goes really smoothly because the stuff gets there before you, you get to chill out, and you get there, and then stuff leaves, and you hang out while your stuff gets shipped across country,” he says. Hopefully, he sticks around for another 25 shows full of good vibes.
Silver Age Comics is located in booth #1106 on the show floor or at 22-55 31st Street #208, Astoria, NY, 11105. If your shop does something fun and unexpected tweet us @denofgeekus.
”THERE’S A MORE DIVERSE POOL OF BUYERS AT SAN DIEGO. I’LL SELL LOTS OF ODDBALL THINGS BESIDES THE MAINSTREAM.
HOW DO YOU ADAPT a racing simulator to film? When Neill Blomkamp was approached by Sony to direct Gran Turismo, he was skeptical about the project, to say the least. “My initial response was, you can’t make a movie out of that,” he tells Den of Geek
But when Blomkamp read the script, he quickly realized that the film would be unlike any video game adaptation he’d ever seen—and
BY BERNARD BOOunlike any movie he’d ever made.
“I never imagined myself directing a car movie or a sports movie. It’s continually surprising to me that I made this,” he says with sincerity.
The peculiar thing that inspired Blomkamp to take on the project is that the film isn’t actually based on the game at all. It’s inspired by the extraordinary real-life story of Jann Mardenborough, an avid Gran Turismo player who, at age 19, out-raced 90,000
entrants in a competition called “GT Academy,” which earned him the right to hop into the cockpit for real, racing for Nissan at the Dubai 24 Hour race in 2011. Remarkably, he placed third and continues to lead a successful pro racing career to this day.
Blomkamp knew that Mardenborough’s story was the key to bringing the story-less game to the big screen. While the PlayStation classic is integral to the film, its involvement is exclusively in a real-world context, which gave Blomkamp the freedom to tell a story that is intrinsically human.
Blomkamp developed a deep respect for Mardenborough and his accomplishments, and involved him in the filmmaking process as a stunt driver and as the ultimate reference for the film’s narrative.
“As a professional race car driver, he could tell us what we were doing right and wrong and tell us how real the racing scenes felt,” Blomkamp
explains. “And on the personal side of things, I could ask him about his family and what his aspirations and fears were at the time.”
In 2015, Mardenborough endured a horrific crash that sent his car airborne, tumbling violently off-track at The Nürburgring in Germany. While he sustained no serious injuries, one spectator was killed. The tragedy is covered in the film, and it was of utmost importance to Blomkamp that the incident and its fallout be represented with nothing but stark honesty.
“There was no need for embellishment,” says Blomkamp of the way the dark chapter in Mardenborough’s life is portrayed in the film. “The assumption by some was that we would Hollywood-ize the tragedy, but we don’t Hollywood-ize it at all. It’s one hundred percent truthful to what Jann went through.”
Blomkamp’s commitment to
authenticity can be felt in the movie’s blistering race scenes as well. Unlike much of his prior work, Gran Turismo has a heavy focus on practical effects and capturing all of the high-speed action in-camera. “Every single shot in the movie, of any of the actors inside cars at high speed, is real. There is not a single VFX, fake shot of high-speed driving,” Blomkamp explains, adding that from day one, he insisted on shooting the movie with IMAX screens in mind.
View) drones fitted with highresolution, IMAX-approved sensors that could follow the cars in close proximity at speeds of 150–180 kph.
“Cinematic drones have been used for about a decade, where we’ve been mounting cameras on drones and getting dramatic shots that you may have used helicopters to get before,” Blomkamp explains. “But FPV drones are relatively new. They’ve been used in sports more than cinema, and I wanted to capitalize on that and bring some of the photography angles I had seen in rally and motocross into the way that our cars were filmed. I’m pretty sure there are no race films that have used drones in the way we’ve used them.”
Another thing that makes Gran Turismo unique is that the cars are depicted not just as beautiful racing machines, but as monstrously powerful metallic beasts that require an intense level of physicality to control.
This posed a staggering logistical challenge for the production, as bulky IMAX cameras and ultra high-speed chases don’t typically mix well. To capture the races the way Blomkamp envisioned, he and his crew came up with creative solutions, like a pursuit vehicle with front and rear-mounted cameras on remote arms that could lead or tail the cars and track their movement, and FPV (First Person
For Blomkamp, capturing the intensity of the sport was crucial. “Race cars are really gnarly metals and gears and burning petroleum and exhaust heat,” he says. “We filmed clutch plates, brake pads, transmission systems, and the inside of engines so that we could cross-cut those shots with the on-track shots to create a visceral feeling for the audience.”
The film’s attention to detail largely stems from Blomkamp already being
I NEVER IMAGINED MYSELF DIRECTING A CAR MOVIE OR A SPORTS MOVIE. IT’S CONTINUALLY SURPRISING TO ME THAT I MADE THIS”Left: Archie Madekwe stars as real life gamer-turnedracing driver, Jann Mardenborough who out-drove 90,000 others in a competition when he was still a teenager. Orlando Bloom plays marketing executive Danny Moore.
an avid car enthusiast prior to signing up to direct. The movie features a fleet of stunning sports cars including the Chevrolet Camaro GT3, Lamborghini Huracán GT3, and Nissan GT-R, all of which were hand-selected by Blomkamp, who tried to fit as many insanely tricked-out vehicles into the movie as possible. “I could not have been more explicit about the cars that I wanted in the movie,” he recalls. “But you have to match that up to what the studio is willing to spend. So, the cars in the movie are one hundred percent curated by me… but I didn’t get everything I wanted.”
“It’s the creative wishlist mixed with the thermodynamic reality of what is actually achievable,” Blomkamp continues, explaining that the way the film was made—with real cars shot on real race tracks—resulted in the production being something of a logistical nightmare. The film features over 20 race teams and pit crews, which meant that in addition to transporting a fleet of expensive race cars from track to track across the globe, dozens of extras and stunt drivers would need to be transported as well. “It was not uncommon for us to have an entire plane—pretty much
a 747—filled with extras who would move with us from track to track.”
The exorbitant travel costs, soupedup cars, and expensive drones make Gran Turismo both a feat of modern moviemaking and an homage to how films were made pre-CGI, when cinema was an event to be fully immersed in rather than a casual distraction one flicks on and glances at while doing laundry. Blomkamp conceived Gran Turismo as a theatrical experience first and foremost, and Sony Pictures Entertainment is backing him up all the way, pushing the film’s theatrical release in hopes of
capturing the same box office success as recent releases including Top Gun: Maverick and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
“Sony really doubles down on theatrical releases, which is becoming more and more rare,” Blomkamp says. “I really appreciate how Sony is approaching this film as far as making sure it’s on a lot of screens. I didn’t realize how important that was to me… but it actually is very important.”
1 Australian actress Sophie Wilde was born in 1998 and is the daughter of an Ivorian mother and Australian father. She grew up around Sydney and began attending the National Institute of Dramatic Art at age five.
2 Wilde was first introduced to acting by attending plays and operas with her grandparents, but got the bug while watching Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. “I just thought, ‘Shit. I want to do that’,” she told Marie Claire.
3 Known now for BBC’s You Don’t Know Me and PBS’ Tom Jones, her breakthrough came via chiller Talk to Me where she plays a teen who gets high through demonic possession. As soon as directors Danny and Michael Philippou met Wilde, they knew they “were pretty set.”
4 Wilde tells us she appreciates the level of authenticity the Philippous bring to the modern youth experience. “The characters talk like young Australians which in Australia I don’t think has often happened before.”
5 The Philippous planned to dub Wilde’s demonic voice but were stunned by the actor’s ability to learn French on the spot. Says Michael, “There’s a scene where she’s possessed and started singing in French so perfectly.” No dub necessary.
Other Warren investigations—such as the haunted Raggedy Ann doll named Annabelle or the Arne Cheyenne Jackson “Devil Made Me Do It” trial— were likewise adapted to films. Lorraine served as a consultant on The Conjuring in 2013, where she was played by Vera Farmiga, and died in 2019. In 2022, Netflix’s first paranormal investigative series, 28 Days Haunted (hosted by yours truly), was based on theories attributed to the Warrens.
IT WAS THE MORNING OF JULY 11, 2013, when members of the media settled in at the Warner Bros. screening room in Manhattan to watch The Conjuring eight days before its theatrical release in the United States. In just under its two-hour runtime, other journalists and I squirmed in our seats, cried out, and noted this haunted house story involving a frightened family, a cursed New England farmhouse, and husband-and-wife paranormal investigator team Ed and Lorraine Warren.
The film was different and would go on to define a decade of horror. Drawing on supernatural elements from The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, and director James Wan’s own Insidious, The Conjuring hit big with audiences. Real big. With a $20 million budget, the film ultimately grossed $319 million at the box office globally. And a decade after its release, it has a legacy that has impacted paranormal pop culture in three big ways.
Prior to The Conjuring, James Wan enjoyed success with the exceptionally profitable Saw franchise, having directed the first installment in 2004 and executive-produced eight sequels. But Wan feared being pegged as a creator of primarily gory fare and independently made 2010’s PG-13 horror Insidious, which starred The Conjuring’s Patrick Wilson. Following the massive hit of The Conjuring, Wan would go on to direct the seventh Fast & Furious film and Aquaman, while also directing another Conjuring film and producing 17 features, including last year’s M3GAN. Wan returns as director for 2023’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, for which he also receives story credit and produces.
The self-identified demonologist/ medium duo are arguably the most famous paranormal investigators of all time, but their spotlight burned brightest during the late 1970s with their involvement in the Amityville Horror haunting. Ed died in 2006, and Lorraine occasionally appeared in the paranormal reality TV series Paranormal State, which ran from 2007–2011. Although the pair remained well known in spooky circles, it was The Conjuring that brought them more into the mainstream than ever before with these loosely “based on a true story” adaptations (despite criticism of their methodology or the extent to which they were involved in some cases).
In the first film, Patrick Wilson, playing Ed Warren, takes a reporter on a tour of his collection of haunted objects, stating that every item is “either haunted, cursed, or has been used in some kind of ritualistic practice.” The scene might as well have been the paranormal equivalent of Nick Fury teasing “The Avengers Initiative” at the end of the first Iron Man movie. Indeed, following the success of the 2013 film, “The Conjuring Universe” was spawned. Wilson and Farmiga returned as the Warrens in two direct sequels—2016’s The Conjuring 2 and
2021’s The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It—with a third in development titled The Conjuring: Last Rites
Similarly, there have been five spinoff films, including three focused around the evil doll Annabelle, The Curse of La Llorona, as well as The Nun and its September 2023 sequel, The Nun 2. To date, The Conjuring Universe is the highest-grossing horror franchise of all time and has made more than $2 billion, eclipsing Wan’s own Saw franchise by more than a billion bucks. Annabelle even crossed over into the DC Extended Universe by making cameos in Aquaman and both Shazam! films.
THE CONJURING UNIVERSE IS THE HIGHEST-GROSSING HORROR FRANCHISE OF ALL TIME.
Visit our 2,500 sq.ft. Tasting Room just a short walk from the Convention Center! 131 14th Street, Downtown San Diego
We are dog friendly, family friendly, bring-your-own-food friendly and a whole lot of fun.
Time, the casually cruel thing that it is, continues to insist on only moving in one direction. Thus, we once again find ourselves smack dab in the middle of summer. Yes, school is out, and the beaches are open (much to Chief Brody’s dismay), but these long sunny days are also a bouillabaisse of heat and discomfort. So it evens out? One thing we all can take some joy in is the fact that this season is also rich with a fresh crop of exclusives—be it from retailers or much-demanded souvenirs from marquee fandom conventions. With that in mind, here’s an overview of the latest and greatest exclusive merch that will be controlling your mind and wallet from now until Labor Day.
As part of its product line released in conjunction with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Hallmark has unleashed all manner of Indy merch. Our favorite is this desk calendar, styled after the Staff of Ra from Raiders of the Lost Ark, featuring movable magnets you can use to keep track of the month and year.
Ack Ack! Available exclusively at Target stores this summer is this glow-in-the-dark Mars Attacks figure that wears its nostalgic influences on its murderous, dog-destroying sleeve. The figure is based on Topps’ trading card line (the basis for Tim Burton’s movie), but an extra level of detail is how the cardback is an homage to Remco’s old monster action figure line.
With 12 replayable combat challenges and 15 narrative encounters, Funko Games’ Avatar: the Last Airbender: Crossroads of Destiny utilizes imagery from the globally loved TV series to immerse participants in the environment of the Four Nations. One of the best licensed games ever.
Nearly 40 years since they made their indie comics debut, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are still an unstoppable franchise. So much so that even originally maligned projects featuring the characters like 1993’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III have been re-evaluated by fans and subsequently become merchandising juggernauts. All of which leads us to NECA’s San Diego Comic-Con exclusive four pack of Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo, and Raphael in their Samurai attire. These 7” figures come with a mind-blowing number of accessories and throwback VHS-inspired packaging that further illustrate that it is always turtle time – regardless of the decade.
When pop culture meets capitalism, magical things happen. Case in point: Icon Heroes’ set of hard enamel pins replicating the magical G.I. Joe episode where Zartan and the Dreadnoks posed as the heavy metal group Cold Slither (“You’ll be joining us soon!”) to use subliminal messages embedded in their music to take over the world. It is one of the most fondly remembered installments of the series, and this set includes four pins of the band members and an 8” x 8” print of the faux album cover, packaged in a deluxe collector’s box that doesn’t go to 11 but will make you the envy of your authority-shunning circle.
($34.99,
While you wait anxiously for further information about the next Tron film, consider picking up this remarkably retro collectible. Available exclusively at Disney Parks and through shopDisney, this set features a glow-in-the-dark 3¾” Tron action figure and an eyecatching lightcycle. Part of a larger line of Tron figures and vehicles from Super7 and Disney, we won’t rest until we have this in our hands.
Exclusive to AMC, this set of pins from Across the Spider-Verse showcases the characters Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2099, Spider-Punk, Spider-Gwen, SpiderWoman, and Scarlet Spider. (We don’t envy whoever had to limit the film’s endless characters down to just those six). Created by Figpin and limited to 1,000 sets, we recommend thwipping on over to AMC’s website and grabbing these before they are gone.
As the director of Rogue One, Gareth Edwards is no stranger to explosive sci-fi blockbusters, but in shooting The Creator, he took a far more grounded approach.
“WHERE DO YOU GET your ideas?” is one of those questions you are never supposed to ask, but Gareth Edwards remembers precisely where he was when the storyline of The Creator came to him.
“I got the idea on a road trip while promoting Star Wars [Rogue One],” Edwards recalls. “I had Thanksgiving off, and we were driving to Iowa, where my girlfriend’s family is from, and I was just looking out the window. We went past this farmer’s field of tall
grass with a strange building in the middle that looked like a factory, and my memory is it had a Japanese logo on the side, and I thought, ‘I wonder what they’re building in there.’ Being a sci-fi geek, my first thought was ‘robots,’ and to be honest, in Iowa, it was definitely robots, right? So I thought, imagine if you were built in a factory like that and escaped, and the first you ever saw of the outside world was this field.”
Edwards combined the idea with
the germ of a Lone Wolf & Cub concept he’d been batting around, and by the time he arrived at his girlfriend’s parents’ house, the whole movie was plotted out in his head.
It’s the sort of movie Edwards has always wanted to make.
“I felt like if I never get to make another film ever again, I’m going to go for broke on this one,” he says.
THE HOLY GRAIL
That movie would be an epic sci-fi war movie following flawed, morally complex protagonists including John David Washington’s ex-special forces agent sent to destroy an advanced AI, and the mysterious Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Perhaps not a massive departure for the man who had just
made Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. But Edwards would go about filming this story in a very different way.
Throughout his career, Edwards has directed indie shorts like Factory Farmed and blockbusters like Godzilla
“It has always been my goal to find the holy grail, the sweet spot between those two processes,” Edwards says.
With The Creator, Edwards took an almost backward approach to the production of Rogue One
“Normally, with a big blockbuster, you design the entire movie. You sit down with concept artists and figure out what the world is like, and there is nowhere in the world that comes close to it, so you build big sets and use a lot of green screen,” Edwards explains.
“Something about that process doesn’t feel as real as I would like it to, so I did it the other way round.”
Edwards and his team went on a global search for locations that were close to what was required by the screenplay. In the end, the movie was shot in eight different countries, with its crew going to 150 different hotels and traveling 10,000 miles.
“The idea was that we would shoot the movie as if it really existed, without sets, in real locations with real people,” Edwards says. “Then we digitally augmented the science fiction elements on top of that.”
Adding those science fiction elements was the job of production designer James Clyne, who had worked with Edwards before on Rogue One
“Essentially, I knew whoever was the production designer on this film would have to paint a million images at the speed of light because there were going to be so many paintovers, photoshops, and concept art put over the plates that we shot,” Edwards says.
Edwards and Clyne share a love of films including Star Wars and Blade Runner and the work of iconic designers such as Sid Mead and Ralph McQuarrie, but they also wanted to create a unique visual vocabulary.
“A simple way of saying it is if the Sony Walkman had won the future instead of the Apple Mac,” Edwards jokes, of the look of The Creator.
Their design process involved combining familiar items to create something new and alien. As Edwards points out, “It feels new, but reminiscent of something you can’t quite place.”
But despite the countless drawings and post-production CGI that went into The Creator’s world, it was all built on very real foundations.
“I would tell anyone playing AI or a robot, ‘Please do not play this as an AI. Don’t play this like science fiction. Imagine it is set in the Vietnam War or something,” Edwards says.
At the same time, while The Creator is a huge film that required a massive team to shoot, Edwards was keen to keep the set itself very small.
“We were often filming just three or four of us and the actors, and it would look like a tiny student film, at times, in terms of the number of crew,” Edwards says.
He points to a shot in the trailer of Gemma Chan running across a beach under fire, a shot that was filmed on an open tourist beach in Thailand.
“I thought we’d get so many tourists taking photos of us, but nobody came up to us because we just looked like some YouTubers or something,” Edwards says. “We totally got away with it.”
The Eisner Awards are here, celebrating the best comic books of 2022 as part of a gala at San Diego Comic-Con. And while it’s impossible for normal people to read everything nominated, we at Den of Geek are decidedly not normal, and we’re here to help you figure out what to read!
If you like Batman: The Animated Series, you should try “Finding Batman,” the short story in DC Pride by Kevin Conroy and J. Bone.
Kevin Conroy’s death is still an incalculable loss, but this nominee for Best Short Story, published a few months before his untimely passing, helps quantify what a wonderful man he was. The story is beautiful and sad, adding depth to Conroy’s performance as Batman and showing why Batman, the character, has moved so many people over the years.
If you like stunning character work, try Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely.
King, nominated again for Best Writer, dropped what turned out to be one of the most definitive character studies of Kara Zor-El in 2022 with Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. The book is, for much of its first half, just True Grit, with Kara playing the part of Rooster Cogburn. But it is full of brilliant Kara moments—quietly at first, building to a crescendo about two-thirds of the way through, and spending most of the final act on big, big-hearted Super-family heroics. Evely is one of the best artists working in comics right now. Her inventiveness and creativity make the outer space scenes sing and the planetary landscapes scenes look beautiful. This book is amazing.
If you like jump screams in your autobiographical comics, try Ducks by Kate Beaton. One of the consensus best comics of 2023, Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, is up for several Eisners, including Best Graphic Memoir and Beaton for Best Writer/Artist. It is a vivid picture of life in the Alberta oil sands for women, with all the casual and violent sexual harassment that entails, presented in Beaton’s matter-of-fact cartooning, which makes it all the more powerful. It ends with a scene structured like the final jump scare in a slasher movie. Truly brilliant work from a top class storyteller.
If you thought Disney’s Hercules wasn’t soapy enough, try Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe.
Rachel Smythe’s reigning Best Webcomic, Lore Olympus, is a modern retelling of Greek myth with a focus on Hades and Persephone, but at 200+ strips, it’s got a lot of everything for everyone. It’s stunning to look at, with vibrant colors and deep characters. This strip (collected in several print editions) is very easy to disappear into.
If you like literally anything at all, buy Parker: The Martini Edition by Darwyn Cooke.
Best Graphic Album—Reprint sounds like a cop-out category right up until you hold a copy of Richard Stark’s Parker: The Martini Edition in your hands and flip through a few pages. Darwyn Cooke was one of the most brilliant artists who ever worked in the medium. His New Frontier took six issues to completely change the trajectories of four Justice Leaguers because it was so brilliant. Parker blows everything else he ever did out of the water, and the Martini Editions—oversized, high-quality printing and binding, the kind of book you read on a lectern rather than on the can—are the best versions of them.
HAUNTED MANSION was launched as a theme park attraction at Disneyland in 1969. Riders get strapped inside “doom buggies” and whisked through a spooky old manor with chills and thrills around every corner. The ride doesn’t end at the last stop, either. A mirror along the exit captures the image of a phantom prankster attaching itself to each visitor. For Disney’s upcoming film adaptation, director Justin Simien wants to bring that feeling home.
“My number one goal as a filmmaker is to make sure you actually get haunted,” Simien tells Den of Geek “I was nine when I rode the Haunted Mansion at Disney World, and you couldn’t tell me that dude was not still over my shoulder all around the park.”
The feeling never left, so Simien brought that spirit to pitch meetings. He had to know how to project that
BY TONY SOKOLsensation. “There’s a physicality to the ghosts you can’t explain,” he says. “They may not be there, but they’re somewhere.”
Simien couldn’t find that special presence, though, from the last time
he insists about his new film, “is the mansion you see at Disneyland.”
In that mansion, audiences will meet single mother Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) as she moves into the estate with her son. The place is cheap because it’s already crowded with tenants who are ghosts of their former selves, so she hires paranormal investigator Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), psychic Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), college history professor Bruce (Danny DeVito), and Father Kent (Owen Wilson), for a bit of haunted house cleaning.
Disney attempted to make the ride into a movie via The Haunted Mansion in 2003, which starred Eddie Murphy. “When I was a kid, I was disappointed that it wasn’t the mansion at the theme parks,” Simien tells us. “This,”
The director, who acted in the Disneyland cast early in his career, had studied the attraction thoroughly long before making the movie. “I even got to walk through it before the park was open,” Simien says. “It was kind of sad because they turned the lights on, and all of the magic was
MY NUMBER ONE GOAL AS A FILMMAKER IS TO MAKE SURE YOU ACTUALLY GET HAUNTED.”IMAGE CREDIT: JALEN MARLOWE, DISNEY ENTERPRISES, COURTESY OF DISNEY
ruined. But it was amazing. I’ve ridden it so many times; there were so many little details I never knew were there.”
Still, Simien felt trepidation when he heard Disney was considering a Haunted Mansion remake. “I had had the same reaction anybody finding out a Haunted Mansion movie is coming out would have: ‘Okay, we’re doing that again.’” Yet strange twists come in the witching hours. “I read this thing expecting, frankly, to pass on it, and I stayed up all night. Katie Dippold, who wrote the script, tells the story through a journey through the mansion. I knew when I got this job, I had to do justice to this script and to that ride.”
He wasn’t alone: most of Hollywood loves the terrifying attraction. Jared Leto took that to new levels, creating new speech patterns to match his ghostly character’s eternal dilemma (his head disappears from his
shoulders and reappears in a box). This generation’s most dedicated method actor also flirted with playing the Hat-Box Ghost without effects.
“He wanted all of that going on during recordings; he was in full gear,” Simien concedes. “Luckily, he didn’t take it far enough to suggest: ‘Okay, I’m gonna go to the other side, and you’re going to channel me, and then I’ll do the scene.’ But he comes very prepared for everything.”
The director also readied the set and cast by tuning into paranormal thinking. “I’m a little woo-woo already,” Simien admits. “Ghost stories and a connection to the other side, that’s just in my DNA. When we started shooting, I went a little crazy. I bought crystals and gave them out. I got into burning different things, setting my intentions. I really wanted to mentally go there.”
Still, one cast member known for going there remains a mystery guest at the film’s mansion. When it comes to Winona Ryder, little is known about her role, and the director will only tease: “[She] was really a hoot to work with. I don’t want to say where she appears.”
This is not for shock value, though—it makes for a better story. “I definitely want people to feel like they’re not sure how the tricks were done,” Simien says. “Strip everything away—the effects, the ride, all the goodies—and this is a movie about people who wouldn’t get along under any other circumstances, finding a way to find a family with each other.”
Or at least share a ride. There are 999 ghosts in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, and room for one more. Simien would be thrilled to fill the vacancy. “Whatever happens on the other side, this is the place to be. They got music, a rotating set of guests. You can talk to people from any time period. When you see the movie, I don’t know how you wouldn’t wanna hang out in this house. Once you get past the terror, it’s a lot of fun.”
Haunted Mansion opens in theaters on July 28.
DC COMICS’ KNIGHT TERRORS is the next Dawn of DC event, which kicked off in early July with Joshua Williamson and Howard Porter’s oversized special Knight Terrors: First Blood #1. The story continues over four additional Knight Terrors issues with art by Giuseppe Camuncoli. It revolves around a new villain named Insomnia who has plunged the entire world into a realm of their own deeply personal nightmares.
Can you break down the origins of Knight Terrors? What were the inspirations behind it?
The easiest way to explain it is Freddy Krueger vs. DC Comics. It’s Nightmare on DC Street. I’ve always been really fascinated by nightmares, and I’m a big fan of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Last year, I started talking with DC about some ideas, and one
of them was saying that DC Comics is haunted.
Who is Insomnia?
He puts every single person on the planet into the Nightmare Realm, and he’s searching for something called a Nightmare Stone, which allows you to pull things from your nightmares into the real world. Doctor Destiny has
been a Justice League villain since the Silver Age, and he hid it in somebody’s nightmares. But what it does is it allows us to tell a bunch of fun, short horror stories within the DCU.
Why is Deadman the supernatural tour guide of this story?
He loved having an audience. He was this death-defying daredevil. This is a person who used to love having an audience, and now he is forever the audience. He is forever trapped. He’s a ghost. And in this situation, when it’s the DCU’s back against the wall, he ends up being its one hero, but it forces him to step out of that audience for a moment. He’s being the showman again.
We spend a lot of time with Batman as well. Is this a Batman able to navigate this realm? Or is this a Batman out of his league? When you read the Batman twoparter, you’ll see that Batman thinks he’s prepared for everything. But he didn’t prepare for everything; he prepared for everything from his point of view. Because he prepared for everything, his nightmares are also prepared for him.
What are the rules of nightmares in Knight Terrors?
They’re basically the same thing as the rules you would see in A Nightmare On Elm Street. If somebody dies in the dream world, they die in the real world. The entire story takes place in one day and one night.
You also bring Wesley Dodds —a.k.a. Sandman—back in an unexpected way.
Deadman is running around in Batman’s body to save Batman, but also to combat Insomnia. So he needs help with all of this. At one point, he has a vision. He sees a bit of what Insomnia is doing, then realizes the connections between the Nightmare Realm and Wesley Dodds. So he goes, and he resurrects him and turns him into a zombie.
“I think if it had been made four years later, it’d still be on.”
— Adrianne Palicki on NBC's 2011 Wonder Woman TV series pilot that never aired.
“We have to triple everything. If we’re gonna do it, we have to give them more.”
— Anthony DiBlasi on increasing the practical effects in his horror remake, Malum
“You’re going to need that guy to destroy Central City every four or five months. And I was more than happy to put on the suit and do that!”
— Tom Cavanagh on his years playing
“I think you create art for it to be critiqued. It doesn't really exist as a piece of art if it's not there to be looked at and discussed.”
“We were like, ‘Let’s make this movie feel like we’re gonna murder everybody, and then have them live and have a happy life.”
“Playing the first out lesbian companion is a massive thing. And that is something I really think means a lot to a lot of fans.”
“Only Ari and his therapist could tell you exactly what it’s about.”
Mackieon her proudest
Doctor Who moment.
Nathan Laneabout
the meaning of Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid
“Gen X forged our own identity, and we were considered the lost generation, t he forgotten generation. I see exactly why people would say t hat ab out Captain Shaw.”
Director Matt Bettinelli-Olpinon Scream
VI
“I ALMOST IMMEDIATELY SENT MY AGENT AN EMAIL SAYING, ‘WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?’”
— Owen Harris on receiving the pilot script for Mrs. Davis— Todd Stashwick on his breakout Picard character. — Pom Klementieff on
Guardiansof the Galaxy Vol.
3
“I asked James if I should read everything about Mantis, and he said that the character that he wrote was very different from the comic books and that she was more inspired by a bug.”
PLUS
AHSOKA, THE CONTINENTAL, TED, AND THE HOTTEST RETURNING SHOWS
FEEL LIKE WE’RE IN A TIME where all of us are trying to not forget our childhood…. Twisted Metal is one of those forgotten gems that really brings you back to your youth.”
Hood-mounted Gatling guns, blood-splattered windshields, and a psychotic clown driving a deadly ice cream truck may seem like strange memories to file under the “childhood nostalgia” column. But for ’90s kids who loved Twisted Metal, like Anthony Mackie, the vehicular mayhem of the long-running PlayStation classic conjures warm and fuzzies in the most delightfully demented way.
When Mackie signed on to produce and star in Peacock’s TV adaptation of the game, he knew it would be a chance to pay homage to an era that meant a lot to him. “I was formed and defined by the ’90s,” he tells Den of Geek. “There was freedom of expression back then. It’s when a generation really found its voice. When I saw they were making a show about Twisted Metal, I had to be as much a part of it as I possibly could.”
With a story by Cobra Kai’s Michael Jonathan Smith (who Mackie refers to exclusively as “MJ”), the action comedy series centers on John Doe (Mackie), a “milkman” who traverses treacherous wastelands in his trusty-rusty Subaru, lovingly named “Evelyn,” to deliver precious cargo between walled-off cities in a post-apocalyptic United States, fending off bazooka-toting looters and marauders on the open road. John and the rest of the wastelanders are completely cut off from the prosperous pockets of civilization scattered across the map, but when he’s offered the rare opportunity to earn citizenship in New San Francisco in exchange for retrieving a mysterious package from New Chicago over 2,000 miles away, he embarks on the most dangerous mission of his life.
The original game, created by David Jaffe, wasn’t exactly narrative-forward, telling a loose story about a tournament hosted by a mysterious man called Calypso in which the victor is granted one wish. The show alters and expands on the lore extensively, though Mackie,
Anthony Mackie stars as John Doe in Twisted MetalSmith, and the show’s writers—including Deadpool’s Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick—do preserve the irreverent humor and ultra-violence of the game while also celebrating the edgy, off-the-wall energy of the ’90s.
The story is inspired by the source material but not bound by it, and the creative process was liberating for Mackie and the team. “We had the opportunity to give the characters backstories and tie them together in a way the game didn’t,” the actor says. “The great thing about John is that we had 100 percent artistic freedom. Because we had that liberty, the writing team and I were able to develop and craft him to my sense of humor. He’s a very serious character at times, but there’s an absurdity to the world he lives in.”
Absurdity is certainly a core component of the show, with the gruesome spectacle of the car combat and the dialogue’s constant flurry of F-bombs ensuring the material is on-brand for the franchise. But there’s more humanity in John’s story than one might expect. Ostensibly, he’s a happy-go-lucky lone wolf who thoroughly enjoys his job and its spoils. And yet, there’s a family-sized hole in his soul that compels him to take on the suicide mission to New Chicago.
“I think MJ and the other writers gave John, and every character in the show, a very interesting arc,” Mackie says. “You can relate to all of the characters on the show. There’s not a good guy or a bad guy. When you’re in a situation of survival, everyone has a different vantage point they look at survival from. None of them are right or wrong. Each character has an argument that makes sense and that the audience can relate to.”
The most iconic character in the entire Twisted Metal universe is the maniacal nightmare clown Sweet Tooth, voiced by Will Arnett and played onscreen by AEW pro wrestler Joe Seanoa, a.k.a .Samoa Joe. Joe is an imposing presence, which Mackie can attest to, having shared a particularly physical casino fight scene with the hulking “Samoan Submission Machine.”
“He’s a wrestler in real life, so he doesn’t know his strength!” Mackie says with a smile. “Whenever he hit me or threw me or punched me, he literally beat the shit out of me! When he slammed my head against a damn video poker machine, the glass cracked. I was like, ‘Why?! Why would you do that that hard?!’ [Laughs] I have a newfound respect for pro wrestlers.”
In trying to flesh Sweet Tooth out for the show, Mackie and the writers designed him to embody the madness an entertainer like a clown would succumb to in this particular post-apocalypse. The show’s world “goes to shit” in the early aughts, so while the story takes place in the present day, outsiders like Sweet Tooth are still culturally stuck in a time when making mix CDs was a national pastime, and EB Games was a staple in malls across the country. “He’s this eccentric, crazy character with flaming hair and a leather chest harness, and we thought the audience would gravitate to that ridiculousness,” Mackie says with a chuckle. “He’s a 6 foot 3 clown who worships Sisqó.”
Sweet Tooth is one of the campiest characters on the show, but according to Mackie, the role required a highly sophisticated performance from Joe, who had to bring the character to life using physicality alone. “Samoa Joe is one of the most talented, amazing dudes I’ve ever met,” Mackie gushes. “What he was doing on the show was basically commedia dell’arte. He created this character with his body.”
Also featured in the cast is Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Encanto star Stephanie Beatriz, who plays Quiet, an original character who becomes a reluctant companion for John. She’s badass, hell-bent on revenge, and as her name suggests, she isn’t the talkative type, though that
doesn’t stop her from putting John in his place when she needs to. “It was easy to play off of her,” Mackie says of his chemistry with Beatriz. “We had a lot of fun, and I think that shows throughout the course of the series.”
As part of their stunt-driving training Mackie and Beatriz practiced drifting in a parking lot, leading to one of Mackie’s favorite memories from production. “We had this thing in the car called a funny stick, which you tap to make the car drift out,” he recalls. “Let’s just say Stephanie Beatriz is not the driver of drivers. [Laughs] If we had her learning to use the funny stick on film and we put it on TikTok, I think it would get 10 billion views.”
The stunt training was part of the crew’s overarching emphasis on capturing as much of the vehicular combat on camera as possible, as opposed to relying heavily on visual effects. The opening action sequence of the pilot is a blistering chase through a mall that sees John dodge
rockets in front of a Sam Goody, read the mall directory while doing donuts, and swing by a Foot Locker to pick up a pair of pristine Jordan 1s. “In the middle of the apocalypse, I wouldn’t be looking for any other shoes but Jordans,” Mackie quips.
“We had amazing stunt drivers and a really great stunt crew,” he continues. “The show hinges on the cars and their abilities, so we put a lot of time and energy into the car combat, and I think it paid off. These sequences are second to none. Doing as many practical stunts as we could was an important part of the show.”
The series was shot in Mackie’s home city of New Orleans—a point of pride for the Captain America: Brave New World star, who had the time of his life working with loved ones in the place he loves most. “Being there and having my friends and cousins pull up on set… it was exciting and comforting,” he says. “It was just fun. From running away from alligators at Blue Bayou Water Park to the police chasing us out of Armstrong Park, everything about this production was a big laugh.”
Since becoming one of the industry’s biggest stars, Mackie has used his platform to help bring business and awareness to New Orleans. Last year, in the wake of Hurricane Ida, the actor helped to repair roofs in his neighborhood, the Seventh Ward. Currently, he’s developing a film studio in New Orleans East to help weave the film industry and all of the jobs it creates into the fabric of the city.
“There was a pride that I took in that my friends were able to eat off of Twisted Metal,” Mackie beams. “I want people to learn how hard people work in New Orleans. I appreciate the crew, and I wanted to give them a good performance. It reminded me of why I act and how great my job is. It was really an enjoyable experience to have a production this big in a city so small.”
All 10 episodes of Twisted Metal premiere exclusively on Peacock on July 27.
Tell us a little bit about Quiet. As her name suggests, she doesn’t talk much at first. [Laughs] I think fans are going to be really excited to see me play this character because she’s a lot of what I do really well, which is play a fucking badass! But Quiet has a sense of humor that I haven’t been able to bring to roles I’ve played in the past. And there are secrets that she’s holding pretty close to the vest.
There seems to be a good mix of action and comedy on the show. Tell us about the level of physicality the role required, as well as the level of comedy.
By the end of filming, I was ravenous to do more and more fight scenes. It’s thrilling for me as an actress. And [as for humor,] one of my favorite things on set is when you can feel the crew laughing and trying not to ruin your take, and that happened a lot on this show.
What does it mean to you to be part of adapting such a classic franchise?
It’s an honor to step into an adaptation of a video game that is so beloved. I think fans are going to be particularly happy with the car combat. I spent a lot of time on couches in people’s basements, playing video games, eating way too many pizza rolls, and drinking way too much Mountain Dew. I think the show captures that feeling.
What was it like working with Anthony Mackie?
I love working with Anthony. He’s such a giving scene partner, and he’s one of the most professional people I’ve ever met. And he went to Julliard! So to have him express his goofy side on this show is a really unexpected turn for him.
Anthony told us about how entertaining it was to watch you learn how to drive a stunt car… Anthony Mackie is a great driver. Stephanie Beatriz is not. [Laughs] I do my best. There were multiple times when I couldn’t get the car to start or slide, and he was there to make fun of me. I drove a wee bit better when he wasn’t in the car. But the crew made me look great driving on the show!
What was it like filming in New Orleans?
I think I left part of my soul in New Orleans. My daughter was six months old when we started shooting the show, so it was pretty intense to move my family there. But that city embraced me. It’s actually the first city that my father lived in when he immigrated to the United States, so to be able to work there on such an incredible project felt full circle for me.
Sweet Tooth is one of the most iconic video game characters in history. What is it about him that makes him so beloved?
He’s got a cool name, first of all. But I find that even people who aren’t heavy-duty gamers know Sweet Tooth. He’s an insane killer clown who drives an ice cream truck, so he kind of sticks with people. He’s crazy, but at the same time, he’s kind of funny! He’s such an iconic character that it took two actors to play him. We’ve seen psychotic characters before, and even psychotic clowns. But, maybe I’ll regret saying this, he’s, like, a fun psycho.
What was it like putting a voice to another actor’s physical performance? Was it difficult? It was really weird. It was a lot more challenging than I thought it was going to be and a lot different from doing an animated film. Usually, I lay down the voice, and the animators animate to that. For Twisted Metal, I got to watch Samoa Joe every day, physically embodying Sweet Tooth, and I tried to capture what he was doing with my voice. It’s like collaborating with another actor in a way I never had before. It was a challenge—getting it right took a minute.
What’s surprising about Sweet Tooth and the show, in general, is that there is actually a layer of humanity underneath all of the ultra-violence and comedy. You think of Sweet Tooth as this killer clown, but you realize that what got him to where he is explains a lot. There are these moments when John and Quiet understand a little bit about where Sweet Tooth is coming from, and they reach an understanding with him. Like a lot of people, he just wants to be heard and appreciated.
There are a lot of shows out there that do a great job of depicting a post-apocalyptic world. Hopefully, what sets us apart is that our show is really fun. You have these moments of insane violence and even humanity, but you also have a lot of big laughs.
As an actor, you must try to find interesting angles when approaching playing a character. What angle did you find with Sweet Tooth? I always look for things about a character that make me laugh. With Sweet Tooth, it’s the fact that he has this sort of psycho ADD. He can be compassionate and gracious one moment and in the next, murdering somebody! There’s an unpredictability to him.
Rosario Dawson is having the time of her life. In fact, when we call to chat about her starring role in Star Wars: Ahsoka, she’s literally on a Ferris wheel in New York City, enjoying a little downtime with family before the rollercoaster ride that will be her latest foray into the galaxy far, far away.
Story-wise, Ahsoka is arguably the most ambitious live-action Star Wars series to date. On the surface, it follows the space adventures of one of the most popular characters in franchise history—and one of the last co-created by George Lucas before he sold his studio to Disney—but it covers a lot more ground than that. It picks up from both The Mandalorian and Rebels, an animated series about the heroes who fought the Empire years before Luke Skywalker ever hopped into an X-wing. It also takes inspiration from the classic ’90s Star Wars novel Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn, complete with the live-action debut of another fan-favorite character: Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen). And like every Star Wars project before it, Ahsoka is hiding plenty more secrets to be revealed across the eight-episode first season.
But for Star Wars fans who have only watched the movies and recent Disney+ shows, all you really need to
BY JOHN SAAVEDRAknow to get into the series is that Ahsoka is searching for Thrawn, an Imperial warlord who threatens to destroy everything the Rebellion (now the New Republic) fought so hard for in the Original Trilogy. When Ahsoka is reintroduced on The Mandalorian, she’s traveling the galaxy as a lone warrior out for justice. Dawson describes the Ahsoka of this era as a “wanderer.” Yet, to find Thrawn, Ahsoka will need some help from her old band of freedom fighters. Enter Mandalorian Rebel Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and New Republic general Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). But getting the band back together is easier said than done, according to Dawson.
“That’s going to be the interesting thing to kind of figure out what’s truly going on with all these characters. There’s real tension there,” Dawson reveals. “Yes, we can be part of the hero team that helped to get to where we are now, but it did not come without sacrifice. We’re going to be able to see that explored.”
Rebels fans know that one of those sacrifices was Ezra Bridger, the Jedi Padawan and Rebel fighter who sabotaged Thrawn’s ship in the cartoon’s series finale, sending them both hurtling into hyperspace to parts unknown in order to save his friends from the Empire. Neither hero nor villain has been seen for years,
although we know they’re both out there, evidenced by the fact that Eman Esfandi is set to play Ezra in live-action. Just how important is Ezra to the new series? At the end of Rebels, Ahsoka and Sabine made a pact to find their lost friend, and he’s “still very top of mind” on the new Disney+ show, Dawson says.
Meanwhile, Thrawn’s return to challenge a fledgling New Republic is straight out of Heir to the Empire, and the series isn’t shy about referencing that inspiration. Showrunner Dave Filoni, who co-created Ahsoka for The Clone Wars and also made Rebels, even consulted Timothy Zahn on the game-changing villain the writer first introduced in 1991. While the Thrawn we’ll meet on this show isn’t exactly like the one in Heir, which is no longer part of the official canon, he is still the terrifying mastermind who is always several steps ahead of the heroes. Thrawn can outsmart just about anyone, and unlike most Star Wars antagonists, he doesn’t even need the dark side of the Force to do it. Worst of all for Ahsoka, he’s had plenty of time to plan his comeback.
Ahsoka not only continues a story Filoni has been telling since The Clone Wars but places Thrawn back in his rightful spot as the “big bad” of this era of Star Wars. “I could see that joy in Dave’s eyes on a regular basis from seeing these characters relate to each other and where they are now,” Dawson says.
Ahsoka also introduces two new Force users: Baylan Skoll, a mercenary who works for Thrawn, played by the late Ray Stevenson, and his ruthless apprentice Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno). The duo made headlines at this year’s Star Wars Celebration due in no small part to the color of their lightsabers, a reddish-orange that suggests their allegiance is more complicated than light and dark sides. They’re billed as villains, but Baylan’s history as a survivor of Order 66—the infamous Jedi extermination event—implies he and Ahsoka might have a little more in common than we know.
“[Baylan and Shin] are very powerful Force wielders. Very curious, right? Because there aren’t very many people who can at this stage in history,” Dawson teases. “It’s very exciting, the idea of what these characters suggest. I will just say that they are quite formidable.”
All of these characters are on a collision course that will set up the next phase of Star Wars storytelling not just on Disney+ but in theaters, too. After Ahsoka, Filoni will direct a Star Wars movie that “will close out the interconnected stories” told across The Mandalorian, Boba Fett, and Ahsoka, meaning there’s a good chance we’ll see Ahsoka and Thrawn on the big screen.
It’s just as well as Dawson is having too much fun to stop now. When asked if she’d like to be in Filoni’s movie, she doesn’t hesitate: “Obviously!”
Despite John Wick’s apparent demise at the end of John Wick: Chapter 4, the franchise lives on with two spinoff projects: Ballerina, a feature film due out next year, and The Continental: From the World of John Wick, a prequel TV miniseries that explores the origins of the New York safe haven for international assassins.
Premiering in September as a trilogy of movie-length episodes, it’s an origin story for Winston Scott and Charon, with Colin Woodell and Ayomide Adegun taking over as the younger versions of the characters played by Ian McShane and the late Lance Reddick, respectively.
For Executive Producer Basil Iwanyk, getting from
. BY GENE CHINGJohn Wick to The Continental has been a surprising journey. “It’s really surreal because this was a bit like the accidental franchise,” he remarks. Iwanyk has produced every John Wick film since the very first one, as well as many other noted action franchises like The Expendables and Sicario. He’ll also be on board for Ballerina. “We created this universe, and a lot of our audience wants to know more about this world and not just about John, and so it felt like The Continental and Ballerina were the next steps in this evolution.”
Considering how beloved the films are, the pressure to deliver with The Continental is extreme. “I don’t think you have any idea,” sighs Iwanyk. “We have this incredible relationship with our audience.” Director
Albert Hughes didn’t feel the pressure during filming, but now that it’s in the can, the heat is on. With prequel series like Rings of Power, House of the Dragon, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, not to mention how Star Wars and the MCU have been expanding their mythology on TV, the director knows The Continental needs to stand out. “This kind of thing has been done; whether it’s Jon Favreau with Star Wars or Noah Hawley with Fargo,” says Hughes with trepidation, “but not in the same way because John Wick is unique.”
The Continental explains how the trappings of the Wick world came about. “[In the films], there hasn’t been any time to slow down and explain this world that we’re flying through,” adds Iwanyk, “and I think that one of the characters of the franchise that the people were most compelled by was The Continental, its rules, its denizens, and its history.” Iwanyk believes this expansiveness is the beauty of television. There’s more time to set up the characters and the setting. “That’s what I think was exciting about really addressing The Continental as the character.”
The last two John Wick films brought forth the strong female assassins Sofia Al-Azwar (Halle Berry) and Shimazu Akira (Rina Sawayama). In the absence of Keanu Reeves, the women of The Continental steal the spotlight, delivering the fiercest hand-to-hand fight scenes. KD (Mishel Prada), Yen (Nhung Kate), Lou (Jessica Allain), and Gretel (Marina Mazepa) are all on point when it comes to throwing down. Iwanyk claims that it isn’t connected to Ballerina, which focuses on the female assassin Rooney (Ana de Armas). However, Iwanyk admits the inclusivity of the cast (all the aforementioned actresses are women of color) has been a conscious decision. “We want to make this as varied of a cast as we possibly can, and I think it’s something that, across all the movies and the TV shows, we’re really, really proud of. And I think it’s part of what makes the John Wick world so f***ing cool.”
It was Hughes’ daughter Adrianne (who also serves as assistant director on the series) who pointed out the impact of all the minority women in The Continental. “Dominican, Puerto Rican, African American, and Vietnamese women. And I go, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize that.’ I did realize the women were kicking asses.” It’s not as noticeable at first, but by the second episode, the women rise in prominence—and lethality. “In the third episode, it just explodes,” says Hughes, “so to me, it’s very special, being a biracial man raised by a very powerful woman.”
True to form, The Continental delivers some thrilling action pieces. They deployed 87eleven Action Designs,
the daredevil stunt crew behind the films. And like any good actioner, the intensity builds to a climactic finale which Hughes calls “57 minutes nonstop” of action.
The Continental finale is open-ended enough to allow for a sequel series, but both Hughes and Iwanyk say it will only happen if this first series works for the fan base. “The biggest challenge is how do you make it [stand on] its own,” says Iwanyk, “but at the same time, people go, ‘Oh, I know what this is—a John Wick TV show,’ so I hope we pulled that off.”
Scott Grimes has worked with Hollywood royalty: Bob Hope, Art Carney, Burt Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ted. A fixture in Seth MacFarlane’s work as the golden voice of American Dad’s Steve Smith and The Orville’s Lt. Malloy, playing a racist Boston boor is just another twist in a storied Hollywood career.
How is Ted the show different from Ted the movie?
Seth MacFarlane likes to tackle societal and political issues. This is watching Ted and John (Max Burkholter) discover marijuana, sex, politics, and racism. Ted is like a real-life walk through the teenage years.
The movies are given two hours to be funny; this is deeper. We’re not making a cartoon. Seth loves oldschool sitcoms; he sent me All in the Family to get the idea. This is a classic sitcom with a foul-mouthed bear.
Matty Bennett is a conservative, blue-collar Boston guy who’s very narrow-minded. Matty’s not mean; he’s an ignorant asshole. You can do that if you have someone like Blaire (Giorgia Whigham) that’s teaching everybody how to be a kind human. It’s more crass, but we’re not just making fun of people.
Are you expecting pushback?
You can do all the screenings in the world, but you just don’t know. Matty is so exaggerated that he can’t be for real. He puts his foot down and says these stupid things, but nobody else changes their position. He doesn’t win
any of these battles. Everybody is smarter than him, and they allow him to be the person he’s always been.
There’s a great line that made the show work for me. Matty says to Blaire, “I was raised different.” I love those words because it’s true. If you are raised a certain way, that’s how you live.
There were people back in Archie Bunker’s time that agreed with Archie. You couldn’t make Matty too smart because you get a portion of the audience that agrees with him. We wanted to laugh at his ignorance. Seth’s like, “Even when he’s talking about dinner, he’s really fucking loud. He needs to be the loudest one in the room.” You have to go, “Why did he say that ridiculous stuff? God, I hope he comes around.” He has to have a tiny little light in his eyes. There’s love in there; he just doesn’t know how to show it.
The bear is easier than you think. Seth is doing the voice, but he can’t sit where the bear is. You spend most of your time stopping your head from turning because Seth is to your left and behind the camera.
People don’t like mustaches on people like me. It created such a douchebag look for this guy. It wasn’t pleasant to eat because lots of stuff was sticking to it. People would stop me in the grocery store and ask if it was real. Why would I go to the grocery store wearing a fake mustache?
Ted premieres on Peacock in the fall.
Season 2 | July 28
Michael Sheen and David Tenant return as angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley in the second season of this Neil Gaiman adaptation. Good Omens season 2 will find the unlikely duo hiding the Archangel Gabriel (Jon Hamm) from both heaven and hell.
Season 2 | July 28
The world of professional wrestling is positively dripping with drama—both real and scripted. Thankfully, Starz’s drama Heels is here to capture it all. Season 2 will find the Spade brothers dealing with the fallout of their climactic match.
Season 3 | Aug. 2
FX’s funny, affecting dramedy about the lives of four indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma is one of the TV’s best-kept secrets. Be sure to catch up with the stories of Elora, Bear, Cheese, and Willie Jack before season 3 arrives
Season 3 | Aug. 8
In its third season, Only Murders in the Building will do the unthinkable and investigate a murder outside the building. With the talents of Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez, and even Meryl Streep in the fold, the change of scenery should go just fine.
Season 2 | Sept. 1
Before The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power dropped to much fanfare, Prime Video was already the place for big-ticket fantasy adaptations thanks to The Wheel of Time. The battle between The Dragon Reborn and The Dark One continues in season 2 of Robert Jordan’s tale.
Part 3 | Oct. 5
Netflix’s international superhit is finally set to return. This time around, gentleman thief and Arsène Lupin enthusiast Assane Diop (Omar Sy) is supposed to be in hiding far away from Paris. But, of course, a thief’s work is
Season 2 | Oct. 6
Loki season 1 helped prove that its title character is one of Marvel’s most useful assets. Now, Thor’s brother (Tom Hiddleston) must continue his journey as an unlikely romantic antihero by finally setting things right at the TVA and uncovering the mystery of He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors).
Season 4 | Fall 2023
What started out as “that fun Netflix show about Gillian Anderson as a sex therapist” has blossomed into a surprisingly touching teen comedy. Joining Anderson and co-star Asa Butterfield in Sex Education season 4 will be Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy as an author and tutor.
Season 2 | Fall 2023
The first season of this procedural reboot was not only a pleasant surprise, but it also set up a season 2 that can take the Quantum Leap franchise to some fascinating places. Get ready to follow Ben Song (Raymond Lee) to places Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) never dreamt of.
Season 2 | Late 2023
After the bloody and traumatizing events of the season 1 finale, Mark Grayson, a.k.a. Invincible (Steven Yeun), could really use a break. Unfortunately for him (and fortunately for us), the second season of this Robert Kirkman comic adaptation will have a lot more to throw his way.
AND DIRECTOR ANGEL MANUEL SOTO SHARE THE SECRETS BEHIND THEIR JOURNEY TO BRING DC’S NEWEST BIG-SCREEN SUPERHERO TO LIFE.
When Angel Manuel Soto got the call from Warner Bros. about directing a DC movie, his mind was miles away from Blue Beetle. “I wanted to pitch ideas, and one of them was the Bane origin story,” Soto tells Den of Geek. “I always thought that there was something interesting in exploring his reality and how a character like that comes to be.” He quickly found out, though, that “the conversation was not about that.” Instead, the studio had a more youthful and heroic figure in mind, telling Soto, “There’s this character that we’ve been developing for a couple of years. The Blue Beetle, a Latino superhero.”
That fateful phone call was about a young 2000s superhero, Jaime Reyes, but the hero known as the Blue Beetle debuted in 1939 in the pages of Fox Comics’ Mystery
Men Comics #1. Like Batman, he’s a hero driven by revenge. The son of a policeman murdered on the job, Garret was originally more of a pulp figure with no powers until he gained a bulletproof suit and took a special vitamin that gave him superhero strength. And his mantle came from the scarab-shaped symbol he wore on his chest. Like almost all the other superheroes of the era—Garret was a middleaged white man, and his adventures soon became a massive success in the comics world.
Blue Beetle quickly spawned his own radio serial and multiple titles centered on his adventures, but by the mid-1950s, Fox was out of business, and Charlton Comics ended up with the rights to print Blue Beetle stories. Here, Garrett—the extra T was added at Charlton—was reimagined as an archaeologist who found a magical scarab
in Egypt that gave him fantastical powers. In 1966, Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man, reimagined the character as Ted Kord, a student of Dan Garrett, a genius-level inventor who used his creations to take on the mantle. Not only was Kord super smart, but he was also an athlete, which made him a perfect vigilante, and while he didn’t have the superpowers of his predecessor, his inventions made him a fearsome foe.
For decades, Ted was the most well-known Blue Beetle, heightened when Charlton Comics was sold to DC in 1983. Ted soon had his own Blue Beetle solo series—written by legend Len Wein—launching him into the superhero stratosphere, followed by a starring role in the new Justice League. But Ted wasn’t the last person to take on the mantle of Blue Beetle. In 2006, Keith Giffen, John Rogers, and Cully
Hamner introduced Jaime Reyes, a teen who gained powers from a mysterious alien artifact known only as “the scarab.” That nearly 70-year-long journey, from 1939 to 2006, was only the beginning of Jaime’s story, as he soon became a fan-favorite character both on the page and on the small screen thanks to appearances in several DC animated projects.
This year, Jaime finally makes the jump to the big screen in Soto’s Blue Beetle. But, as Soto tells us, at first, he wasn’t sure it was the right project for him. “I didn’t want it to be another story where 15 minutes in, something happens, and 50 minutes later, he’s dominating the experience, and by the end, he’s saving the world. I get it, I enjoy it, I go watch those movies and eat the popcorn and it’s fun, but it was hard for me to relate to an experience like that.” Soto explained. “If someone gives me a lot of power, the first thing I’d do is say, ‘I don’t want it.’ I just wanna provide for my family; I don’t need it, more power, more problems!”
That mindset led him to pursue a more grounded take on Jaime, which Soto—along with writer Gareth DunnetAlcocer—saw as a way to explore Jaime stepping up to the call of being a hero. As he explains, “He’s not going to save the world yet; he doesn’t deserve to yet. We wanted to find a way to really explore his growth, how it relates to how his family and community see him in this role, as well as how his relationship with Khaji grows as well.”
Khaji is the symbiotic alien who gives Jaime his powers and makes him the titular Blue Beetle. But while it’s the magical artifact that allows the teen to become a hero, Jaime is always at the heart of the story, which is why it was so important to get his casting right. Soto first met the young Cobra Kai star, Xolo Maridueña, at Sundance while showing his film Charm City Kings. Maridueña made an immediate impact. “He was just super real; that always stuck with me.”
It was during Covid that the director watched Cobra Kai and was blown away by Maridueña’s performance. “I saw how charming he is and how well people were receiving his authentic self.” It all began to come together. The fact Maridueña is bilingual was another immediate draw. And the cherry on top? The actor already had martial arts experience thanks to Cobra Kai.
“You might think that would have given me a leg up,” the actor laughs. “I definitely thought, ‘I’ve been doing martial arts for five years; what’s adding a couple of wings to it?’” The reality was much more intense, though, and Maridueña was full of praise for his collaborator in bringing Jaime to life. “I was really blessed with a wonderful stunt performer. He’s doing stuff that’s supposed to be fake, but he’s really doing it! He’s doing superhero stuff in real life!”
The demands of bringing every part of the Blue Beetle to
life—both as Jaime and the titular hero—meant that while Maridueña was excited to get in the suit and spent “ample time” in it, he “wasn’t hesitant to pass it off to the stunt guys.” He did sneak in at least a couple of Cobra Kai moves, however, while also promising fresh new action for the audience.
Jaime’s journey features an iconic high-tech alien suit. So what’s it like to step into the hero’s blue alien shoes for the very first time? “I’ve got to tell you; it makes you feel different, man.” Citing Hayden Christensen talking about being in the Darth Vader suit, Maridueña agrees with the actor, “It really changes how you feel about the character. There’s something about your expression and the way you move that changes.” Luckily, his own experience of being nervous and impressed by the suit helped him shape his young hero. “Jaime is just as shocked and in disbelief about the whole suit interaction as I was, so it provided a pretty natural reaction.”
When it came to designing Jaime’s iconic costume, the crew revisited his first appearance in Infinite Crisis #3—“a very bold look,” as Soto called it—as well as the Injustice games and the beloved Young Justice and Batman: The Brave and the Bold cartoons. One of the biggest challenges was crafting a full-face mask that could also emote. “One of the main issues was the mouth; showing the mouth just takes away the armored aspect of it.” To come up with their own design for the mask and suit, they merged the notion of organic alien tech and insectoid features. Designed by Mayes C. Rubeo and the team from 9B collective, the suit is “very practical,” Soto explains. “We didn’t have the biggest budget in the world, but doing it like this really does help. And you get a very cool suit!”
One of the unique powers that Khaji and the Blue Beetle suit offer Jaime is the power to create constructs from nothing but his imagination, leading to one of the most internet-breaking moments in the trailer. As Jaime gets into a fighting stance, he manifests a massive buster sword; it was a moment sparked by one of Soto’s lifelong loves. “I’ve always wanted to create something I would enjoy,” he shares. “If I had Jaime’s powers, why would I limit myself? Why would I limit my imagination? I have the opportunity to create something iconic. As a Latino, I embrace anime; I grew up watching anime. I grew up watching that sword. I always wanted to wield it, and even if I can’t, I’m wielding it vicariously through Blue Beetle.”
Every great superhero has a hometown. Originally Jaime hailed from El Paso, but during the production of the film, the creative team had a realization. “We wanted to have Jaime live in a world that felt like it fit his circumstances,” Maridueña explains. “Whether it’s Batman and Gotham or Superman and Metropolis, these are cities that are a character in themselves.” That’s where Palmera City comes in. “What we were looking for was a metropolitan of Latinos; we wanted to start in a world where it was understood that this is the
population.”
When Soto came on board Palmera City was already in play, so it was up to him to visualize the new location, taking nods from Akira and Neo Tokyo as well as Miami. But there are two sides to Palmera City, the fancy financial district and Jaime’s neighborhood. “Jaime comes from the other side of the tracks, the Edge Keys,” Soto shares. “It’s way more humble. Working class, struggling families, marginalized communities under the threat of gentrification.”
Speaking of family, one of the most authentic parts of Jaime’s story is the fact that his family knows that he’s a superhero, thanks to them witnessing his first-ever transformation. “It’s one of those things that comes out of our experience,” Soto says. “Right off the bat, one of the things that the writer and I said—and he crafted it in this really great way—‘good luck trying to keep a secret from a Latina mom.’ Our families are very nosy! The experience that we wanted to show was that family is our superpower to some extent. When we’re in trouble, the first people we call are our parents. It was about being able to hone into that and try something new.”
While the team was aiming to introduce a new hero, new city, and new vibe for DC, Blue Beetle is a character with decades of canon and multiple different mantle holders. Soto is keen to let people know that the movie understands that. “Susan Sarandon plays Victoria Kord, Ted’s daughter,” he shares. “Her relationship with Ted and the fact Ted has a daughter is very present in the movie. A lot of Ted’s gadgets are also important to the film. So being able to keep the idea of Ted and Dan Garrett in the movie and how that came to be, does help Jaime understand what he’s going through. Some of the people around him are fans of Blue Beetle. It’s Jaime’s story, but the context still exists, and a lot of it was thought out and executed and done with the intention of bringing someone back in the future,”
he teases.
As for whether the star of Blue Beetle is dreaming of telling more stories in Jaime’s world, “The short answer is, of course,” Maridueña chuckles. “But the longer, more nuanced answer is that when this movie comes out, the work will have already been done. And I will already feel 100% fulfilled with everything that Jaime had to offer. Of course, I’d love to have a saga of Blue Beetle characters, we have so much to offer and so much canon to dig into.” The actor is aware it’s all about how well the movie performs and whether it finds an audience, but he’s feeling content. “The universe will do as it will, and right now, I’m just so happy to be here for the ride.”
Blue Beetle opens in theaters on Aug. 18
THE THEME OF LEGACY AND THE TORCH BEING PASSED DOWN IS A THEME THAT’S ALIVE IN A LOT OF CHARACTERS. XOLO MARIDUEÑA
For decades he stood at the bleeding edge in his field of study, an undeniable prodigy whose aptitude for drilling down to the theoretical essence of things was only matched by an ability to apply that theory to technological innovation. For better or worse, his has been a talent that shaped worlds. This could easily describe J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist widely credited as the “father of the atomic bomb.” It’s not a bad fit either for the filmmaker bringing the scientist’s story to the biggest movie screen imaginable.
Christopher Nolan has spent nearly a quarter of a century pushing the envelope of cinematic spectacle to its most audacious and overwhelming. He is the ambitious director who first introduced the concept of using 70mm IMAX photography in Hollywood blockbusters, and he’s the one who
developed a surprisingly accurate approximation of a black hole in Interstellar shortly before the real thing was photographed by the Event Horizon Telescope.
And for much of this journey, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema has been there beside Nolan, trying to crack the code for the next big one, beginning with Interstellar
Perhaps that’s why van Hoytema’s chuckle is so knowing when we point out these similarities between artist and subject. As Oppenheimer’s director of photography admits, the comparison is tempting.
“They’re both very brilliant minds that do see the world in an alternative way that’s not necessarily, on a conceptual [level], graspable for the people around them,” van Hoytema says. “But they have the power and language to convey it and to make people look at things, to look at the
Hoyte van Hoytema is changing how we see the world in Christopher Nolan’s explosive Oppenheimer.
world, in a different way.” This seems to be at least part of the appeal of Oppenheimer’s story for meticulous craftsmen such as Nolan and van Hoytema. The cinematographer even muses Oppenheimer was something of an artist in his own right—albeit one who would eventually shudder at the applications of his works.
As the lead scientist on the Manhattan Project, which gave the U.S. government the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World War, J. Robert Oppenheimer is probably best recalled in our cultural memory for the great and terrible weapon he made possible, as well as his prescient quotation of the Bhagavad Gita. Upon witnessing the bomb’s first successful test in New Mexico, Oppenheimer lamented, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
However, Nolan’s new three-hour epic about Oppenheimer’s life is determined to introduce the real person behind the mushroom cloud to modern moviegoers, providing us with a fuller glimpse into a brilliant but contradictory mind who left academia out of a sense of patriotic urgency. With this decision, Oppenheimer would help his government develop a bomb that could win all wars… before being cast aside by that same government after he vocally opposed the development of even more powerful nuclear weapons, such as the hydrogen bomb.
In terms of historical subject matter for a film, there are few of greater importance to the world we have inherited. And yet, compared to the type of visceral stories Nolan and van Hoytema usually pursue, it is a departure.
“We had always shot things that were action-packed or at least were spectacles in weird worlds or wide vistas; they were in outer space,” van Hoytema says. “But for the first time, this is looking inwards. It suddenly was people in small, smoky, nicotinedrenched rooms reciting political and scientific rhetoric. So the human face became our vista in a way, and the way we previously treated the landscape in wide shots, we were now
going to do with intimacy.” The filmmaker even calls lead actor Cillian Murphy’s face its own kind of canvas, one that “we must drown in.”
To disappear into those reservoirs meant rethinking how to use Nolan’s beloved IMAX cameras as well. Traditionally, true celluloid IMAX photography has been reserved for the most spectacular set pieces or visceral screen moments, with their bulky weight and loud, mechanical noises as they churn 65mm film drowning out performers’ dialogue in quieter scenes (IMAX footage is filmed on 65mm but projected on 70mm). For a talky picture like Oppenheimer, this meant a smaller percentage of the film could be captured in IMAX 70mm than the last few Nolan joints (the non-IMAX portions of Oppenheimer are shot with 65mm Large Format cameras). Then again, the technical challenges could also be an invitation—an opportunity to think outside the box of what constitutes an “IMAX scene.”
“What we would often do is shoot a scene on 65mm until everybody feels confident we have the scene,” says van Hoytema. “Then we would usually reshoot the scene in IMAX, or we at least would do one take, just for us to see if we can actually get a long dialogue scene like that in IMAX with the help of either a tiny bit of guidance from sound or ADR or [see] if the sound itself works for that
specific scene. We were always trying to keep pushing the IMAX camera.”
Not unlike the team Oppenheimer built at Los Alamos, Nolan surrounds himself with proficient technicians intrigued about discovering new possibilities. Hence van Hoytema likening pre-production on a Nolan picture to that of moviemaking R&D. In the case of Oppenheimer, that
included the creation of 70mm blackand-white IMAX film stock—which will be used intermittently with color photography for the first time in cinema history. However, because black-and-white IMAX celluloid is thinner than its color counterpart, this, in turn, led van Hoytema and company to reengineer the mechanics of their cameras, changing the pressure plates, putting two cases around the reams of film, and altering how the lab processed the footage.
In its own way, a Nolan project can be a type of cinematic laboratory, and among the most curious innovations for Oppenheimer from that research was Panavision optical engineer Dan Sasaki developing what van Hoytema calls a snorkel lens for the IMAX camera.
“It is basically a very long, thin tube with a lens in the outer end,” the cinematographer explains. “It’s like a micro-lens that has a much bigger depth of field. It’s a two-foot-long, gigantic thing, and we could poke it into an aquarium underwater; we could put it into tanks. As opposed to standing a little bit away [from the scene] with a longer form of lens, you could really be in between things.”
This proved essential when it came to developing the movie’s most ambitious sequences: IMAX photography capturing the quantum world on film. As is true to form for a Nolan picture, Oppenheimer
IT’S ALL TO BUILD AN INTERPRETATION OF HOW A SUPER QUANTUM WORLD COULD LOOK ON A MOLECULAR LEVEL.” – HOYTE VAN HOYTEMAJ. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is comforted by his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt).
will eschew digital effects wherever possible in favor of in-camera photography—a prospect that is easier said than done when it comes to recreating the micro world in Oppenheimer’s mind’s eye.
“Quantum physics to us is very abstract, and at the beginning, to Oppenheimer, it was also an abstraction,” van Hoytema explains. “He started to understand something that very few people understood. So how can we show this with film, and how can we show that through his eyes?” The answer was to make the abstract literal and visceral by recreating the quantum world on film—or at least a version of it.
Working concurrently next to the film production, visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson developed what van Hoytema refers to as “micro photography.” This was using various types of practical effects to imitate the molecular world via things like molded glowing metal, ping pong balls skewered with metal pins, and miniature explosions detonated within specialized balloons. That aforementioned snorkel lens? It was inserted into actual water tanks where “Chris’ particles” could float as practical things, blissfully free from CGI enhancement.
“It’s all to build an interpretation of how a super quantum world could
look on a molecular level,” explains van Hoytema.
Still, there are times where visual effects will take you only so far. While Jackson was also instrumental in crafting specific images and effects that would be utilized during the atomic explosion sequence at the test site codenamed Trinity, Nolan still needed to film a very real—and very big—fireball. Just how big it was, van Hoytema remains circumspect about. But he laughs, “We had to be far away because otherwise your eyebrows would burn off.”
Recreating that demonstration is to capture world history at a turning point. With the discovery of nuclear power, the Second World War would soon end, giving way to American global dominance and the dawn of the Cold War. This is a profound piece of historical portraiture, although to the film’s cinematographer, it was never meant to be visually treated as such. Acknowledging that there is a certain museum quality to many films set around or near World War II, van Hoytema insists, “The film didn’t want to feel precious. It wants to feel pure and raw. I think Second World War films always become so precious, stately, and very much about getting some smell of the era. In that way, they can also become very distant-shaded.”
While period-accurate costumes and cars are present in Oppenheimer, the mission statement was not to emphasize the era; it’s a story a global audience should recognize because it is still their own. In van Hoytema’s mind, it reads like something that happened yesterday on an intuitive level, and in terms of the future Oppenheimer wrought, it did. Perhaps he was less the destroyer of worlds than the architect of our new one. It’s a concept that might appeal to a builder of cinematic landscapes, too.
“I’m very proud of the movie, and I’m very proud of Chris,” van Hoytema says. “This was a very risky one, and I think he put himself out there and really made something special.”
While most people consider picking the Bo Jackson-led Raiders to be cheating in Tecmo Bowl, that classic sports game does have actual cheat codes. In fact, one of the game’s most obscure cheats allows you to play as an “invisible” football team. Entering the code “397BFFA5” into the game’s password system allows you to play as a gray team on a gray field, rendering those gray team players practically invisible.
Only a handful of fans know about the strange things that can happen when you input “Engage Ridley Mother Fucker” (excuse the language) in Metroid’s password screen. What happens next depends on what version of the game you’re playing. Most simply load you into a bugged version of the game or crash the game outright. But this effect is actually triggered by the fact that Metroid’s password system relies on ranges of characters rather than specific characters. In other words, you could achieve the same effect with other series of letters and numbers; this one (hilariously) just happens to work.
Super Mario Bros. 3’s greatest secret wasn’t common knowledge until years after its release. It’s possible to unlock a special black-and-white version of Toad’s House on the world map if you collect a certain number of coins in specific levels—for instance, you need to collect at least 44 coins in Level 1-4 or at least 30 coins in Level 2-2 to spawn it. The placement of these levels and the exact number of coins you need to collect are so odd that it’s no wonder more players didn’t stumble upon this secret back in the day.
The Punisher game isn’t very good, but it was a novelty to play as such a dark comic-book hero in the NES days. It also contains one of the creepiest ending screens in Nintendo history. When you reach the default end screen, hold “Up, B, and Select” on your controller. For some reason, that combo changes Frank Castle into a blue, Frankenstein-like monstrosity.
One of Punch-Out’s most unusual cheat codes initially appears to do nothing at all. If you enter the code “800 422 2602” in Punch-Out’s password screen, you’ll trigger an 8-bit version of a busy signal that will play in the background. More than a simple gag, that password was Nintendo of America’s old customer service phone number!
If you name your character either Paul or Rachel in some versions of California Games, you’ll see the text “PP & RME” appear on the sidewalk during the roller skating level. These initials appear in some form in several other Raredeveloped NES games, including Marble Madness, Wheel of Fortune, and Wizards & Warriors. Those initials are a reference to Paul Proctor and Rachel M. Edwards, two programmers who worked on all of those games.
The NES version of Maniac Mansion had to be censored in order to meet Nintendo’s strict content standards. That means that quite a bit of content was cut from the original version, but the NES port still features a few hilarious audio Easter eggs. Look for the arcade room and insert a quarter into the Meteor Mess machine. When you do so, you’ll trigger the arcade game’s theme, which is the first few notes of Super Mario Bros.’ theme. Interestingly, the NES version of the game also features a chiptune version of the Indiana Jones theme that is triggered when you call the Meteor Police.
The NES version of The Lion King includes an absolutely bizarre hidden difficulty setting. To unlock this setting, you first need to trigger the game’s elaborate “Invincibility Code,” which requires you to complete part of the game, exit the title, and reload it in a specific spot. While following those steps, though, don’t reload the game. Instead, go to the “Options” menu, hold either “Up” or “Left,” and press the “A” button. That will change the game’s current skill level to an option called “Boy Love.”
Ninja Gaiden is widely considered to be one of the hardest NES games ever made. But in recent years, fans have found that the game contains a hidden move that makes even the toughest boss fights somewhat trivial. By holding “Down” and the slash button after a basic jumping slash, you can perform a series of rapid air attacks that make offing your foes much easier.
If you plug a NES controller into the console’s port while playing Duck Hunt’s “Game A” mode, you can use that controller to manipulate the flight path of the in-game ducks. While that information was actually tucked away in the game’s manual, most NES fans didn’t discover this option until years later. This was a favorite trick among siblings who wanted to get in on (or ruin) the fun.
Many of you will know that Zelda has a hidden “second quest” that changes some elements of the base game. What you might not know is that the modified dungeon layouts of the second quest are also a clever Easter egg. Try rearranging the new layouts in this order: Level 5, Level 1, Level 3, Level 4, and Level 2. Do so, and you will find that those dungeons spell out the name “Zelda.”
Castlevania II contains two secret endings designed to reward those who beat the game in record time. If you beat it in 15 in-game days or more, you’ll trigger a “Bad” ending in which both Dracula and Simon die during the game’s final battle. Manage to beat the game in eight to 14 in-game days and you’ll trigger a “Normal” ending in which Simon succumbs to his curse shortly after that final battle. And if by some miracle (or cheating) you manage to beat the game in less than eight in-game days, you’ll trigger the “Best” ending, which not only suggests that Simon survives his curse but ends with an animation of Dracula’s hand rising from his grave.
Yes, you can jump over the end-game flagpole by following a specific series of steps in certain levels (most notably, Levels 1-1 and 3-3). While it feels great to finally clear the top of the pole, you should know that your excitement for pulling off the “impossible” will be short-lived: jumping over the flagpole triggers a glitch that forces Mario to run purposelessly in an infinite version of the level.
In the Famicom version of Final Fantasy, the town of Elfheim contains a hidden grave that reads “Here Lies Link.” That’s a reference to The Legend of Zelda’s protagonist. However, Nintendo allegedly wasn’t thrilled about the joke and asked Square to remove it. The gravestone in the NES version of that game instead reads “Here Lies Erdrick” —a reference to the western version of the Dragon Quest franchise. What’s funny is that the Famicom version of Zelda 2 features a gravestone that references “Loto”: the Japanese name for Erdrick in Dragon Quest. Everyone was having a bit of fun suggesting that their RPGs would be the “death” of Dragon Quest.
The original Final Fantasy was a true NES epic that offered dozens of hours of gameplay when most console games were surprisingly short. But if those dozens of hours of adventuring still aren’t enough for you, you’ll be thrilled to know that Final Fantasy contains a secret minigame puzzle. Once you’ve obtained and boarded the ship in the NES version, press the “A” and “B” buttons together 55 times. While that probably sounds like a cruel trick, completing that lengthy task allows you to play a special tile-sliding puzzle game that challenges you with placing a series of marked squares in numerical order. Doing so rewards you with some extra Gil.
“Back then, the idea was just to further a storyline,” says Brent Moeshlin of Alabama’s Quality Comix, one of the biggest vintage comics dealers in the United States. “Nowadays, it’s about pushing the customer into multiple products.”
And push they do. DC Comics alone has had three massive continuity overhauls in the last 15 years alone—Flashpoint/The New 52 in 2011; Rebirth in 2018; and Infinite Frontier in 2021—along with several line-wide shifts and new initiatives. And while Marvel has never technically rebooted its continuity, it did completely destroy the multiverse in 2016’s Secret Wars, and has had a similar number of new initiatives.
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continuity didn’t really take hold until 1961. Right before Marvel had Spider-Man swinging through the world outside the Fantastic Four’s windows, the folks at DC decided to put all of their Flashes in the same book with The Flash #123, “The Flash of Two Worlds.” And since then, audiences couldn’t get enough— Amazing Spider-Man #1 in 1963 had Spidey trying to get a gig with the Fantastic Four, and later that year, the Justice League met their Justice Society counterparts in Justice League #21’s “Crisis on Earth-One.” And that one might be, if you squint hard enough, the first superhero comic summer crossover, an event that would change the world of comics collecting.
The dawn of the “event” crossover as a product came in the mid-1980s, first with Marvel’s first Secret Wars in 1984 and shortly thereafter with DC’s first full reboot, Crisis on Infinite Earths. Secret Wars was a blatant multimedia cash grab—Mattel, a toy company, licensed Marvel’s heroes for action figures on the condition that there was a story that would give kids an excuse to mash their toys together. That’s exactly what Marvel did, beaming a group of heroes and villains to Battleworld, putting them in new costumes, and making everyone fight. Some of the changes were long-term—Spider-Man’s black costume, which would eventually become Venom, debuted on the cover of Secret Wars #8, and things like that have a marked effect on a comic’s collectability.
“If there’s a really good cover, those will stand the test of time,” says Ali Mir of AnZ Comics. “It doesn’t matter what the storyline is; it still ends up going up in price.” Despite the quality of the interiors being a bit iffy, the cover of Secret
Collecting in the era of continuity resets can be complicated. We’re here to help!
by Jim Dandeneau
THE COLLECTOR’S GUIDE TO REBOOTS, RELAUNCHES, AND RETCONS
Wars #8—with Spider-Man looking puzzled at his new black outfit —has pushed its value up into the three-figure range.
But quality matters. Good stories are the ones that have legs in the
collector’s market regardless of covers. Crisis on Infinite Earths is dense and beloved, in no small part because of comics legend George Perez putting out some of the best art of his career. “Something like that still sells really, really well,” says Mir. Crisis on Infinite Earths #7’s depiction of a crestfallen Superman weeping over the dead body of his cousin Kara, a.k.a. Supergirl, is one of the most iconic images in comics history, making graded issues worth upwards of $75.
The recent glut makes the hunt for quality even more important for gauging collectability. Something like Secret Empire, Marvel’s 2017 summer event that saw a Captain America heel turn (to be generous), is not well remembered and has largely been relegated to dollar bins. “It took me years to get rid of all the
demand for it.” Spoilers for folks who haven’t read it: Secret Empire is bad, and even its variant covers— of which there were approximately a billion—can be found in dollar bins around the world.
Look for events that were well received in the moment and still generate interest a few years later. Something like Jonathan Hickman and team’s X-Men relaunch, House of X/Powers of X, which launched Marvel’s mutants back to the forefront of comic fans’ minds, has real staying power. Another sneaky pickup that Mir flagged for us: Devil’s Reign, a Daredevil event series from a few years back. “That was another really well-written story that I think in the long term, especially when you get Daredevil: Born Again coming out on Disney+, that people are going to look back on [fondly].” The multimedia tie-in probably won’t hurt, either.
The Flash #123
The first major reworking of continuity in comics history, the Flash of Earth-One (Barry Allen) meets his comic-book hero inspiration (Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick) and discovers that he’s real and from a parallel Earth. Silver Age key comics aren’t usually cheap, but this one can be had for a few hundred dollars, so it’s relatively affordable.
“BACK THEN, THE IDEA WAS JUST TO FURTHER A STORYLINE…. NOWADAYS, IT’S ABOUT PUSHING THE CUSTOMER INTO MULTIPLE PRODUCTS.”
– Brent Moeshlin,
The first time the Justice League and Justice Society met has been reprinted multiple times in several collected editions, but if you want a copy of the single issue, be ready to pay a premium: even poorcondition graded copies are going for upwards of $200. A near-mint copy might be tough to find and even tougher to afford.
The first time Spider-Man tried to join the Fantastic Four also happened to be in the first issue of his solo series in 1963, so it’s going to cost an arm and a leg to buy: be ready to shell out $5,000. But it’s worth it. This is one of the most important superhero books ever published, and when Spidey inevitably shows up in a Fantastic Four movie, it’s going to skyrocket.
The epitome of the “mash your action figures together” style of event comics, Secret Wars was a blatant multimedia tie-in, the first of its kind. But just because it wasn’t the best story doesn’t mean it’s not pricey—the first appearance of Spidey’s black costume is a big deal, and it’ll cost you around $50-200 for a good copy.
Crisis on Infinite Earths is beloved, perhaps because of its densely packed continuity porn—DC decided to restart with this event and try to streamline its intricate history by compressing all of the multiple Earths down to one universe, wiping away any complications. Like, well, Supergirl, for one. This issue has one of the most imitated covers in all of comics, with Superman holding his cousin’s corpse and weeping. As such, it’s a solid investment at $75 for graded copies.
Of course, nobody in comics stays dead, even if they are resurrected as a pocket universe puddle of goo pretending to be Kara Zor-El. Her “return” came shortly after the reboot, but this is going for about cover price.
Multimedia tie-ins aren’t just a function of shared movie universes. One of Marvel’s most inexplicably beloved summer crossovers is “Maximum Carnage,” a bloated mash-up of symbiotes and the bigger Marvel Universe, and it was eventually converted into a (justifiably) beloved beat-em-up video game, which you can grab for your vintage SNES for about $40. This game rocks—go buy it.
House of X #2
House of X #2 was arguably the biggest continuity shift in decades of reboots and relaunches in the X-Men universe. But it was good, and that means it’s going to hang around in collectors’ minds. Copies of this issue are a steal at $15, and if you snag a variant, you can make bank getting it graded.
Spider-Man is kind of the gold standard for event comics that mess with his continuity. Here we get the start of a widely loathed story that attempts to rework his continuity.
Devil’s Reign #1
Devil’s Reign is another recent Marvel event that has staying power, with Mayor Wilson Fisk turning the city of New York against the heroes. This one is still flying under the radar, but with Daredevil making an MCU splash soon, it might start climbing from the under-$10 range to something flippable.
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1. Kent Seki: Our big idea is that there’re these two worlds: the teenage world is unto itself, you and your friends hanging out. Then there’s also this adult world. And that would include Splinter being the adult father figure for the kids, or the turtles.
2. Yashar Kassai: The original toy line was a major influence on design. The amount of detail layered onto every mutant character in that lineup was insane. I haven’t seen anything like it since. The movie’s lighting and color oscillates between authentic New York nights and surreal alien color schemes.
3. YK:This is a coming of age film about teens. Jeff Rowe, our director, used the term “teenage energy” very early on. The design philosophy of this film is “draw like you’re 15.” Be emo and cringe. Draw very serious things but add levity by drawing them shitty.
4. YK: We make sense of it all with good lighting and color. We can help the audience see what’s important that way. We design everything in an asymmetrical, messy, and naive way but then bathe those things in really cool lighting and color schemes. It’s a satisfying combination for artists.
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OFFICIAL
EXCLUSIVE CAST INTERVIEWS
How do you keep a new Turtles movie feeling fresh and dynamic? Director and co-writer Jeff Rowe, co-writer and producer Seth Rogen and producer James Weaver tell us about focusing on teen energy. PG. 6
Get to know the actors who bring the characters to life! We catch up with the core four teen turtles, Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael as well as journalist and turtle pal April O'Neil, and mutant baddies Superfly and Bebop. PG. 12
In our in-depth, flagship interview we sit down with legendary comic book artist and writer Kevin Eastman, who co-created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Eastman takes us back to the origins of what's become a massive global phenomenon. PG. 28
Head of cinematography Kent Seki, production designer Yashar Kassai and lead character designer Woodrow White bring us into the wild world of Mutant Mayhem and showcase concept art. Plus, meet the rest of the mutant misfits that populate the movie. PG. 22
There’s a saying, often attributed to Brian Eno, but that may have been the legendary musician quoting the equally legendary Lou Reed, about how the first Velvet Underground album didn’t sell very many copies, but “everyone who bought one started a band.” You might be able to say something similar about 1984’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird—a self-published independent comic that the pair only printed 3,000 copies of. But for a time, it felt like anyone who read one of those early copies, especially as the legend grew about how such humble beginnings spawned one of the most enduring pop-culture franchises of a generation, started making comics of their own.
That was certainly true in my case. I was way too young to have gotten in on the ground floor of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics. Early printings of that legendary first issue were already fetching absurdly high price tags by the time I became aware of them. No,
like most Gen X-ers, my first exposure to TMNT came via the animated series and the first wave of toys, which sparked an immediate, profound obsession in my preadolescent brain. When my best buddy and I realized that the cartoon and action figures sprang from a little black-and-white comic that was self-published by a pair of friends, we spent the rest of the school year (much to the annoyance of our teachers) and the entire summer writing and drawing our own comics. And no, we didn’t think fame, fortune, or TV and merchandise deals would come our way. We did it because the sheer joy of creation and a sense of wild, unfiltered imagination was so clearly baked into the TMNT concept that it was infectious.
The Turtles were, for lack of a better word, my friends As an awkward kid who didn’t always do well socially, I envied their brotherly camaraderie, and I’ve tried to bring the way they always have each other’s backs (or um… shells) to the good friendships I’ve been fortunate enough to forge. I studied their effortless wiseassery as surely as
I wished for their martial arts prowess. It seems that at various points in my life, I find new reasons to rediscover and love some fresh iteration of their adventures, whether through new comics, video games, TV shows, and, of course, movies.
TMNT is a pop culture institution now. And like other prominent franchises, every generation deserves their own interpretation of the myth. Fortunately, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is imbued with that same imagination, humor, and sense that anything can happen that hooked me and generations of fans in the first place. It’s the perfect entry point for new fans, just as it is welcoming for those who have been prowling the sewers with the Turtle boys for years. It’s a group high-five from your four best friends. It’s a welcoming hug to anyone who has ever felt a little different. It’s an exciting martial arts action romp through (and below) the streets of NYC. In other words, it’s a great Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story. The kind that never goes out of style.
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ACTUAL TEENAGERS AND A FRESH, WILD ART STYLE MARK A NEW ERA FOR THE CLASSIC FRANCHISE IN TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM.
Almost everyone has a memory of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Their cultural ubiquity has been maintained for almost 40 years on toy shelves, game consoles, and Saturday morning cartoons, but there’s something about reptilian ninjutsu masters who binge
on pizza slices in the New York City sewers that conjures deeply personal recollections of halcyon youth.
No matter when you met Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello, you were a fan for life. This is true for the filmmakers of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. In interviews with Den of
Geek, director and co-writer Jeff Rowe, co-writer and producer Seth Rogen, and producer James Weaver all regale us with tales of growing up with TMNT fever, even dragging their parents on wild toy store hunts to complete their collections.
“It was the first thing that I ever loved in life,” Rowe tells us about
his fandom.
The animation director, whose work includes Gravity Falls and the Netflix movie The Mitchells vs. the Machines, remembers one Saturday during the release of the 1991 film
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze when he embarked on an epic quest for villain toys Tokka and Rahzar with his dad. “We just could not find them,” Rowe recalls. Finally, at a store, his father peeked inside a box that wasn’t yet stocked, and it was like unearthing the Holy Grail. “We’re holding them up and cheering, ‘We found them!’ That’s just
like, one of the best days of my life.”
Seth Rogen, an Emmy-nominated comedy writer and star of R-rated juggernauts like Pineapple Express and Superbad, also grew up on the cartoon series like anyone born in the ’80s, and had his mind blown by the live-action movies. He studied kyokushin karate for 10 years because of the Turtles’ influence. “My dad bought me a pair of nunchucks,” Rogen remembers, laughing about it in his signature way. “I could not have been more their target audience.”
Like Rowe, Rogen obsessed over Ninja Turtles toys. “They opened up
my imagination in a lot of ways,” he says. “The toys, honestly, are something we referenced a lot in the design of this movie—how detailed and fun and weird they were.”
However much the TMNT occupy childhoods, the new movie exists to encapsulate all the awkwardness and messiness of the next stage in everyone’s lives: being a teenager.
Rowe and Rogen, along with screenwriters Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, and some 120 artists from studios Mikros Animation and Cinesite, synthesize
past and present to chart a new future for the franchise. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem reimagines the iconic heroes, who originate from creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. The movie explores the origin of the team and even pinpoints the source of the ooze that gave them feet and fingers to spin sai blades. The Turtles also venture outside and meet people for the first time, like aspiring journalist April O’Neil.
The film brings to the table new and radical ideas for the franchise. In addition to a jagged, street-inspired art style that bursts over lines with restless energy, the Turtles themselves are—get this—actually teenagers, with a cast of real teenage voice actors.
“When we looked at the opportunity to work on Turtles, [we found] that’s the aspect that has been underplayed the most, being a teenager,” says James Weaver. “That freshness about what it is to be a teenager is something that made us excited.”
Rogen adds,“We wanted to make a coming-of-age Ninja Turtles movie that focused on the teenage elements. That, to me, was always kind of the last word in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When you’re young, you don’t get that they don’t act like teenagers. To make a movie that served that purpose was really appealing.”
Mutant Mayhem siphons its DNA from Rogen and creative partner Goldberg’s shared experience in teen comedies like Superbad, which Rogen began writing at 13. The two even met as teens; their production company Point Grey is named in honor of their Vancouver high school.
“What’s funny for me and Evan, [writing] was born out of not seeing a lot of movies that we felt represented our high-school experience,” Rogen says. “That was the motivation for Superbad. Then I started Freaks and Geeks. It was a weird convergence, speaking to a lot of themes I thought
were unexplored in the teen genre.”
Now after making influential comedy hits and boundarypushing adaptations of comic books like Preacher, Invincible, and The Boys, Rogen and Goldberg are all-in on Ninja Turtles. Given their background, Rogen felt uniquely qualified to give the Turtles their overdue teen movie. “It’s a genre that was formative to me, creatively,” he says. “This idea of making a Ninja Turtles movie that was focusing on the fact they’re teenagers who want to be accepted and have normal lives; it played so organically into many teenage themes.”
Director Rowe cites influences in Freaks and Geeks, Lady Bird, The Edge of Seventeen, and Pen15 (minor spoilers but a titan of the genre, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, also gets a nod in the movie). “Being a teenager is one of the most difficult times in a human’s life,” says
Rowe. “Your body changes, all these differences in your chemistry that lead you to have insane feelings. You’re passionate; you’re afraid, angsty, and nervous. You feel the most alone as a teenager.” He adds the best teen movies “engage with the preposterous drama and seriousness” of those years.
Acceptance is a keyword for Mutant Mayhem. Drawing parallels between the Turtles’ isolation from the world and any teenager’s wish to fit in, the movie follows Turtles raised under the overprotective eye of their father, Master Splinter (Jackie Chan), who fears the worst in humanity after being shunned by them. The Turtles live in sewers that no sane person willingly
visits, yet they yearn for that universal desire to live a normal life.
“That was a very early part of the pitch from Seth and Evan,” Rowe says. “It was something they thought was funny. Splinter’s a six-foot tall rat. If a humanoid rat went out in the world, people would try to kill it with fire. That’s something I’ve never seen Ninja Turtles do before. It acknowledges these fantastical things in a way that grounds them in the real world.”
Funny as it is to picture chasing giant rats, the filmmakers found a deeper emotional story. “That’s a great reason for Splinter to keep the family in the shadows,” says Rowe. “He’s a flawed dad who over-indexes on safety, and the Turtles are suffering because of that. It gives the Turtles something to long for because they’ve been denied it their entire lives.”
Pretty much everyone feels like a mutant between ages 13 and 19. “It’s a universal feeling of angst and anguish,” Rogen says. “From my experience, all
teenagers feel a desire to be normal. That was the great marriage of plot and story. If you were a teenage mutant who’s relegated to the sewer but fully ingesting pop culture, you would want nothing more than a normal life.”
In a strange way, one might see Mutant Mayhem as a complementary double feature with Superbad “Superbad is about the same thing,” Rogen points out. “It’s a timeless feeling. ‘Why are we weird? Why aren’t we doing things that everyone else seems to be doing? Why aren’t we invited?’ All those ideas are so relatable and worked with the weird plot Mutant Mayhem has.”
At first blush, Mutant Mayhem is unlike anything seen in TMNT
history. The New York boroughs it takes place in aren’t characterized by clean lines and ultra-realistic fidelity. Instead, the movie wholly embraces the franchise’s roots in independent comics. It also references urban photography and the chaotic doodles that pack a high schooler’s notebook.
Audiences may catch vibes reminiscent of another groundbreaking reinterpretation of a comic book icon: Spider-Man, and the celebrated Spider-Verse movies. But Rowe says that Mutant Mayhem is striving for something different. “We get a lot of that,” the director admits, who sees the Spider-Verse films as slick, clean, and symmetrical. “We’re the opposite, but I do think a lot of films being made now owe a little bit of debt.”
Mutant Mayhem’s north star lay in something different than what the Spider-Verse franchise aims for. Going back to the teen spirit of the movie, the filmmakers’ goal was to mix what Rogen calls “the scribbly doodles you make in the back of your binder during class” with New York’s own storied history as the backdrop for trendy, high-contrast street photography.
“We looked at the drawings you make when you’re a teenager,” says Rowe. “Everything you learn in animation school is to simplify and unify shapes, but [as a teenager] you don’t know any of that. You’re drawing nostrils and acne. You render with care and focus, which is betrayed by the fact you have no formal training. It’s that interplay between passion and not knowing what you’re doing we tried to capture, because it felt so decidedly ‘teenage.’”
Rowe, whose film The Mitchells vs. The Machines had a similarly unbridled lo-fi look that bucked mainstream animation standards, says movies like Mutant Mayhem are indicative of a new emerging style. “It’s sketchy; it’s lumpy; it’s deconstructed. It’s a humanist style that emphasizes imperfection, while CG animation spent 30 years trying to make things photorealistic. This is steering the ship 180 degrees towards something impressionistic and not conventional.” He adds: “It’s rebellious, it’s relevant. It’s like grunge music.”
Let us not forget those beloved Ninja Turtles toys the filmmakers
prized as kids. Of all the iconic franchises that pack a toy box, be it Transformers or Power Rangers, TMNT is marinated in gooeyness. “In the early ’90s, gross was an aesthetic,” says Rowe. The Ninja Turtles especially were “like molded plastic fever dreams.”
“They were so inventive… Like Michelangelo in a scuba suit had a starfish stuck to his butt. It had a huge influence on my taste, which is an appreciation and love for things that are weird and not slick and clean. It inspired me to tell stories and have a sense of humor.”
This appreciation dripped into the team’s approach to Mutant Mayhem
Seth Rogen says the filmmakers strove to keep what was drafted in the concept art. “I’ve been through this process so many times where you see the concept art and by the time you’re making the movie, it has lost all of its energy. That did not happen here,” he reveals. “It was asymmetrical and imperfect. I remember the first time seeing it dimensionalized, and it blew my mind.”
The story and style of Mutant Mayhem boast teenage vigor, but to hear adults voicing the core team would betray all that the filmmakers envisioned. So it was critical that, for the first time ever, the Ninja Turtles are played by actual teenagers. “Part of the spirit we were trying to capture was to make the movie fun, like kids playing with toys,” says Rogen, revealing that even his adult co-stars had fun playing off each other IRL. “That was something we talked about. How do we make it feel fun and silly? This reckless weirdness that almost every kid playing with their toys has?”
Actors Nicolas Cantu (The Walking Dead: World Beyond), Brady Noon (Good Boys), Shamon Brown Jr. (The Chi), and Micah Abbey (Grey’s Anatomy) voice Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello, respectively. In an unusual turn for any major animation project, Mutant
Mayhem recorded the cast in-person, together, allowing them to improvise lines. The goal was to capture the authenticity of teens hanging out— something that no adult screenwriter can replicate in Final Draft.
Casting was “arduous,” according to Rogen. Citing his own experiences in voiceover work, Rogen strove to mitigate factors that can sometimes leave animation projects feeling inauthentic. “A recurring frustration I have is that you never perform with the other actors,” he says. “The magic of our work that people like is a result of being in the moment and playing off each other. That energy was important to capture. So we went through painstaking lengths to make sure that as much as possible, they all recorded together.”
Fittingly, this approach to recording enabled the filmmakers to see their adolescent stars slowly become their characters—and vice versa. “They’re very much [acting like] themselves,” Rowe says. “So much of the dialogue is just things they said to each other.
I cannot think of another animated film at this scale that’s worked that way, in casting kids and letting them be their authentic selves. We wanted these characters to be complex and feel like people you knew.”
“I remember seeing them between takes, eating snacks in the lunch room. They were yelling at each other, talking over each other and making fun of each other. I remember being like, this is what it needs to feel like,” Rogen says, remembering how similarly his earlier teen comedy hits came together. “It can’t be scripted. It can’t feel overly written. It was important to have them together and guide their improv in a way we knew would be usable. We gave them as few specific words as possible, because we knew we’d never be able to word stuff in the way they would.”
Rounding out the cast are a few grown-up actors you may know. The Bear star Ayo Edebiri stars as April O’Neil, now a high-school student
who dreams of being a TV journalist. Seth Rogen lends his own voice to the iconic mutant warthog, Bebop, partnering with John Cena as Rocksteady. Paul Rudd, Rose Byrne, Maya Rudolph, Hannibal Buress, What We Do in the Shadows’ Natasia Demetriou, and rap star Post Malone (who, Rogen says, gave him “one of the funniest [voice recording] sessions I’ve ever experienced in my entire life”) all fill out the cast as an array of mutants who serve terrifying underworld boss Superfly (Ice Cube). Giancarlo Esposito, who thrives in a career playing bad guys, voices Baxter Stockman, the iconoclast scientist whose unhinged experimentation is responsible for the Ninja Turtles’ creation.
And then there’s legendary martial artist and action star Jackie Chan as the voice of Master Splinter. “I’m the biggest Jackie Chan fan,” Rogen raves. While most of the cast recorded lines together in person or via Zoom, Chan’s time zone in China meant he couldn’t engage with his co-stars in real-time interaction.
But still. He’s Jackie Chan. “I would wake up at four in the morning and do these long recording sessions with Jackie,” remembers Rogen, “Every time, the whole time, me and Jeff were like, ‘I can’t believe we got Jackie Chan.’ He’s so funny and so good in the movie.”
“I love his contributions to cinema,” says Rowe. “Getting to direct him was a gift to me. He’s everything you hope for. He doesn’t shy away, and he works so hard. We’d wake up groggy like, ‘What are we doing?’ And then we leave the recording sessions dancing on the Moon, screaming, ‘That was amazing! Jackie Chan!’ It’s better than coffee, directing Jackie Chan.”
The Ninja Turtles have saved New York from the likes of Shredder,
Krang, and a dozen more bad guys for almost 40 years. They can go another 40, easy. But Mutant Mayhem marks the first time these crime fighters take a few hard left turns, even in a franchise that always reinvents itself. By staying true to the first word in its name that is often overlooked, Mutant Mayhem features a new way of seeing these icons of childhood.
“There’s an emotional center, that is, what does it mean to be a teenager? That’s why we focused on it,” says Weaver. “We knew we could really connect with the audience. There’s a quick read to it. There are high stakes and high emotions when you’re a teenager. Everything feels absolute, even though it ultimately is a period of time. It feels forever.”
Says Rogen, “We tried to do these characters justice. We loved Ninja Turtles. This was made by people who have a genuine love for these characters. We wanted to make the best movie we could, so if you love them already, you’re getting something new and additive. If this is your introduction, hopefully, you’ll get on board right away and love them as much as we did.”
Playing with Ninja Turtles toys as children led Jeff Rowe and Seth Rogen to careers telling stories— stories that were sometimes gross but always heartfelt. “There are things [in the movie] that would excite me and make me want to play in that world and pretend I was in that world,” says Rowe. “The Turtles are funny. They’re not stuffy superheroes who fight for ideas you can’t understand, like justice. They feel like human beings, friends you want to hang out with.”
A teen slant to the Ninja Turtles echoes Rowe’s own adolescence. After growing up with the TMNT, Rowe found anime, an art form that doesn’t look down on its youthful audience.
“For the first time in my life, I was like, ‘This doesn’t feel like this was made for kids,’” he says. “That felt thrilling and exhilarating. This movie, by not trying to be all the ways animation traditionally is, hopefully it’ll inspire kids in the same way and make them feel seen.”
“IF YOU WERE A TEENAGE MUTANT RELEGATED TO THE SEWER, BUT FULLY INGESTING POP CULTURE, YOU WOULD WANT NOTHING MORE THAN A NORMAL LIFE.”
GET TO KNOW THE CAST OF TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA
TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM, FROM THE CORE FOUR
WHO ARE THE FIRST TO PUT THE “TEEN” BACK IN THE NAME, TO BELOVED ALLIES LIKE APRIL O’NEIL, AND BIG BADDIES SUPERFLY AND BEBOP.
Q:How did you and the other Turtles go about creating that sibling-like dynamic in your acting?
MICAH ABBEY: It was really smart to put us all in a room together when we were recording. Instead of just reading lines on a page, you get to bounce off each other’s energy and feel what the vibe is. On top of that, because we were together in person, we were able to spend time outside of the studio just hanging out as friends, and we really created a tight bond between us just because we spent so much time together in and outside of the studio.
What was a typical recording day like for you?
MA: They made sure that all four Turtles were either on a Zoom call or all together in LA, recording together. Whether it was with us and the villains or just us by ourselves, it was always with the other four Turtles to make sure we had that energy that we are constantly bouncing off each other. When we get together in the studio it’s all jokes…. It doesn’t even feel like work to me. We’re not even going directly off the script because they encourage us to improv a lot. We’re
just making our own jokes and adding things that we felt would fit. If I said something then Brady thought he could add something and then Shamon would add something and then Nicolas would add something and then we’d just keep on making it funnier and funnier.
What did you bring to the character of Donatello? Did you draw on your own experiences?
MA: I would say I’m kind of smart. I wouldn’t say I’m Donatello genius smart, but I took a lot of the characteristics of being inventive and intelligent from my friends. My friends are very smart and inventive. Donny, specifically, really likes K-pop and anime, and I have lots of friends who are very into those things. So I grabbed those personality traits from my friends. I also took parts from older movies and series in this franchise.
Donatello gets labeled as a nerd, but some fans have referred to him as “smooooooth Donatello.” Does he get to show off any of that smoothness in this movie?
MA: I think they’ll get a little taste of it, because Donatello is so intelligent that he gets to play things off really smooth. He’s a little bit of a show-off because when he does something right, he wants everyone to know it was done by him, and he’s the man. The smoothness definitely comes off in this movie.
What do you hope audiences will take away from the character of Donatello and your portrayal of him?
MA: That it’s okay to be nerdy. It’s okay to not be like your siblings or your friends. It’s okay to stick out sometimes for being yourself. Donatello is the one who sticks out most from his brothers because he’s more into technology than fighting. It’s important to remember that it’s okay to be the odd man out. It’s okay
to be yourself. You will find a group that can relate to you.
What do you have to say to the longtime Ninja Turtles fans who are coming into this movie?
MA: Be prepared to have some laughs. Be prepared to have some fun. I know there are a lot of different versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and it’s good to switch it up sometimes. We kept a lot of the original stuff, but we added our own little spice to it. Be excited for this movie.
In the trailer, Splinter says that Michelangelo has “heart.” How would you describe him?
SHAMON BROWN JR.: He’s a family man; he loves his brothers. He loves pizza. He’s a party dude. He’s the funny one out of the brothers. But he is always there for his family and the people who love him. He’s reliable.
How did you and the other Turtles actors create that sibling-like vibe to your performances?
SBJ: Just talking. We have a group chat with each other, where we learn about each other and joke with each other all the time. That’s why everything you see in the movie is so authentic, because we’ve made that connection.
What was it like getting to record together with the other guys? What’s a typical day like?
SBJ: Chaotic, but fun. We are always cracking jokes whenever we have breaks, and even in the middle of takes, so the whole movie, it was just overall authentic brotherly love. In
What do you think of the look of the animation?
MA: When I first saw it I was literally freaking out in the booth. I was like, “oh, my gosh, this is gonna be the best animation of the year.” The animation is so unique and cool. Although there’s always gonna be different versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there’s always gonna be that same energy—but because of the different animation it adds a whole different feel. It brings a new character to the whole franchise.
the time that I’ve known these guys, it’s just been amazing and incredible. A lot of people don’t get to be in the same booth together. It’s kind of crazy, but it’s also fun at the same time.
What did you think when they said that, finally, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are going to be teenagers?
SBJ: I think it was just a sense of honor, just to have that opportunity
where we’re the first to do something. A lot of people don’t get to do that, so it was an honor and a privilege to have the opportunity.
Do you think that the Turtles feeling like outsiders makes them continually resonate with audiences?
SBJ: Definitely, because sometimes we don’t always fit into the crowd. That’s not always a bad thing, but as long as you can find your group of people that relate to you and feel exactly how you’re feeling or know what you’re going through, you can strive through anything. The Turtles have always been one of those things where they’ve never been accepted, but they’ve always had each other. Always having each other’s backs is an important thing that I think people can relate to.
How did you go about creating your version of Michelangelo?
SBJ: Back during the audition process, I didn’t want to do the
AS MIKEY
IT WAS JUST OVERALL AUTHENTIC BROTHERLY LOVE. IN THE TIME THAT I’VE KNOWN THESE GUYS, IT’S JUST BEEN AMAZING AND INCREDIBLE, AND A LOT OF PEOPLE DON’T GET TO BE IN THE SAME BOOTH TOGETHER.”
–SHAMON BROWN JR.
typical “surfer dude” voice that people are used to. One of the things I did was watch [animated TV show] Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Michelangelo, who was played by Brandon Mychal Smith. I noticed that he didn’t do the surfer dude voice. So I was like, “Let me try to do my own thing with it.” And from there, I just made the voice how everyone sees Mikey now.
What do you hope that audiences will take away from your character after they see the movie?
SBJ: That he’s still the same Mikey he’s been after 40 years but that he’s a bit more modern. He’s a loving person and a loving Turtle. And that it’s okay to not fit in with the crowd. It’s okay to do your own thing.
What do you have to say to the long-term TMNT fans who are going to be coming into this movie?
SBJ: I hope that I can make you proud. This has been a long time coming, and I’ve loved every minute, second, and hour making this movie. I hope you enjoy it just as much as you enjoy all the previous versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Did you have a favorite scene you did voice work on?
SBJ: My favorite scene is probably [when the Turtles are] sneaking in from doing the watermelon video, and Mikey has this whole Pink Panther sneak thing. That’s my favorite thing that I did, for sure.
Are you excited about seeing it in the theater with other fans?
SBJ: I’m gonna see it every day that it’s out in theaters just because it’s my first animated movie as a lead and it’s gonna be exciting. Just to see people’s reactions to it, to hear all the loud bass and everything and feel the theater shake, and all that type of stuff. I’m excited.
What was your history with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise before you were cast in this film?
NICOLAS CANTU: My history with the franchise was seeing everybody in the schoolyard with Ninja Turtle backpacks or lunch boxes and kids bringing action figures to school. They became part of my world through merchandising. I just thought they were the coolest dudes ever since I was four years old.
Even just seeing them on backpacks made you go, “These guys are cool….”
NC: It’s wild because they really are very well designed and they bring out your imagination from your first sight of them. I have made up more about the Ninja Turtles in my head than any other fictional character.
How would you describe Leonardo?
NC: I would say the way that he’s different from his brothers is that even through all the turmoil of being a teenager, he still sees the end goal of having him and his brothers become this famous crimefighting team. He still has that dream, that’s the goal he’s working towards, and he’s the most serious. He’s still a teenager, so you’re always gonna be goofy. But he’s the one always trying to keep the brothers on track and he’s got a lot of anxiety because of that, I think.
Do you see any of yourself in the character of Leonardo?
NC: His position regarding his brothers is very similar to how I grew up. I was the middle child; Leonardo’s the oldest, so not that part, but the part where his brothers are getting up
to something and he’s the one trying to reel them in to behave. That was very much me growing up with my brothers. We’re very similar in that sense.
How did the four of you create the brother-like connection in your performances?
NC: I think [co-writer and producer] Seth [Rogen] really helped because he set the precedent for the banter, like, “We have the script. We love it, and it’s great. But if you guys want to step over each other? That’s how people talk. Not every line is delivered and then people wait to speak.” It’s this mishmash of a conversation that is so real. You get that a lot with brothers. People don’t let each other finish sentences. They try to get their ideas out before the other one. It’s a really brotherly thing to just disregard what somebody else is saying and say something completely different in the middle of it.
What was the audition process like for Leonardo?
NC: Although this was a voiceover project, and usually those auditions are just recorded through a microphone, they wanted to record me on video. They wanted to see my full body as I did the lines. I think they did that
What were your experiences with TMNT growing up before you got this role?
BRADY NOON: Growing up, I was a huge fan of Turtles. I watched the 2012 version on Nickelodeon, so that was my jam. Now being able to be a part of it is just a dream come true.
because they just wanted to see more of my personality. When you’re recording your voice, you can kind of get a “character” coming through. I think casting wanted to see who the kid behind the voice would be. But it was also really silly because they asked us to do 30 seconds of dancing. I just remember thinking, when are they ever going to use this? Why do they need to see me dance for a cartoon? But I busted a move, and now here I am as Leonardo. It was the dancing that did it!
Are we going to see Leonardo bust a move in this movie?
NC: Yeah. They’re Turtle boys—they love to dance, they love to celebrate, they’re teenagers…. They’re going to be moving.
What do you think of the way the movie is animated?
NC: The first time I saw anything complete it was like a camera test that they did, and I think it was Donatello, just on a skateboard skating through the city, and it looked incredible. Mutant Mayhem has got this hand-drawn feel to it. It’s like if you took a note or a page out of some kid’s textbook that he doodled on in the corner. There’s stuff like that in the visual style and I thought it was sick. I was already excited to be a part of a Ninja Turtles thing and play Leonardo, but then I saw the first little glimpse of what it’s actually gonna look like and my excitement just skyrocketed because I’m a sucker for cool animation and it looks sick.
In the trailer, Splinter describes Raphael as having “bravery.” How else would you describe the character?
BN: Raphael has definitely got a mixture of everything. I mean, there’s definitely some bravery in there, leadership, and a lot of heart as well. A lot of people forget about that because Raph is such a hothead. Raph’s leadership gets developed more and more when necessary.
Do you think that the Turtles feeling like outsiders makes them continually resonate with audiences?
BN: I think so. Audiences will definitely be able to connect with characters that are different or unique. Something that I hope people take away after watching the film is that it’s okay to be different. Sometimes even the most unique people can be heroes.
How did you and the rest of the turtle cast go about making it feel like you were really lifelong siblings? It definitely comes across in the trailer.
BN: The first time that I met all the Turtles actors was in a chemistry read and we just kind of knew right there when the four of us were trying to read the script. The producers and the people at Nickelodeon and Paramount were just cracking up. We all knew at that point we had something special. Working on this in the last two and a half years or so, I’ve seen the other Turtles actors every week. It’s like these guys have become my brothers in a way
Did you guys ever ad-lib dialogue? There’s such a flow to the way you all talk together.
BN: A lot of times we would start recording and [co-writer and producer] Seth [Rogen] would be like, “Argue about a topic related to TikTok!” And in character we would start arguing and we’d just riff and see where we’d end. We know when it’s a safe place to ad-lib and when to not. The movie is actually hilarious and it’s partially because of the improv.
Your versions of the character seem like the most teenage these characters have ever been. What’s that been like?
BN: Us being actual teens and us putting forth our actual experiences being in this new generation, we got to be hands on with this movie. Seth and Jeff Rowe would ask us, “What’s new?” We’d consistently talk about certain slang that we’d use nowadays and incorporate that so it’s relatable to people our ages.
How would you describe this film to your friends and family?
BN: It’s action-packed, lighthearted, exciting, thrilling, hilarious. It has got everything. So grab your popcorn and enjoy.
Was there anything for you that was particularly challenging?
BN: Any of the fight sequences. It’s so
hard to match that animation! I will be fully acting out in the booth as if I’m on camera. Just to get the authenticity of me running through the woods. “Now jump.” So now I have to jump. So I’ll be like [makes running noises] and then start running again. I haven’t done a lot of voiceover work. I’ve mainly done live action. This was definitely a challenge for me. It definitely took me out of my comfort zone. But I eventually thrived and I love it.
Were there other things that Micah and Nick and Shamon were doing that you were copying?
BN: We were throwing fists in our own little corner of the studio. Nick, who plays Leonardo, had his own guardrail for his recording sessions because he gets really into it. He’d just grab it and shake it. So we gave him a little rail. Here you go, have this.
How would you describe April?
AYO EDEBIRI: April is a young high school student. She’s dealing with a lot, she’s got a lot of feelings and a lot of things she wants to do, but she doesn’t always have the confidence that she might present at first…. She’s a very dedicated journalist, and she wants to get a good story. As soon as she meets the four Turtle boys, she’s like, there’s something here; I gotta crack this.
Why is she so important to the Turtles in this film, and why are they important to her?
AE: April and the Turtles really help each other, and they find each other in spaces where they really need friendship. It maybe starts out as a bit more of a transaction. The boys are like, “We wanna be cool and know a human.” And she’s like, “I wanna win a Pulitzer.” But they’re just beings who are looking to belong and looking for friends.
Talk about the energy performing with these four teen boys.
AE: It was an unforgettable experience;
being in a room performing with four teenage boys who were just sort of talking and making jokes. It really was so cool and so helpful for me because I think something that [co-writerdirector] Jeff Rowe and [co-writer and producer] Seth Rogen really wanted to prioritize in this iteration of the movie was the fact that they are teenagers… and the energy of the boys is just so infectious. You can’t really replicate that, the way that they bounce off of each other. I feel like it gave me more leeway when I would be with them or when I would do a recording with something that they had already recorded to sort of figure out how April would speak and respond in that situation. It just left room for a lot of play, and I think the sense of humor feels really authentic because of that.
What is different and interesting for you about this project, as opposed to the movies, cartoons and comics in the past?
AE: I think the thing that stands out to me the most is that they feel like real teenagers in a real New York City, and
How would you describe Superfly?
ICE CUBE: Superfly is the most gorgeous creature ever known to man. I mean, as a mutant, he’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.
Superfly is an original character for this iteration of the Ninja Turtles. Can you explain how he is created in the film?
IC: Superfly is created through an experiment. His father is one of the most brilliant men ever. So he was experimenting, it went a little wrong; the police had to rush him, and it got
a little mishandled. I don’t want to give too much away, but Superfly was born from that mishandling.
Were you excited when you got the call for this, and they explained to you that you were going to be playing an original character?
IC: The franchise has been around as long as I can remember, it seems like. So to be a part of it in any way, shape, or form, I knew it was a cool opportunity. I knew with Seth Rogen [on board] that it would have some
that sense of life and fun is so active. There are so many comedians and incredible talent and really funny people involved on every side of the project, from writing and directing to acting, so I think people’s individual senses of humor were really allowed to shine. But also, the sense of humor of the project was really allowed to find its voice organically and in a fun way.
Talk about the visual style and your impressions of it.
AE: Just seeing something that’s so distinct, authentic, and unique is always really exciting. And I think it just looks gorgeous. But, also, the way that Jeff talked about using the camera and capturing sort of a handheld feel, capturing the feel of when you watch a skate video, how the camera is very dynamic and always moving was really exciting.
What’s your own past with the Ninja Turtles?
AE: I have maybe 50 cousins, and like 40 of them are boys, so growing up, I was very well versed in Turtle culture. I actually showed Jeff and Seth my first skateboard. My skateboarding career is long over. But my first board was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles deck—it was a Michelangelo deck. So I was a big fan.
edge to it. It would be clever, fun, and fresh. I was really excited to be able to play a supervillain. Who doesn’t want to play that in a movie?
What do you think of the animation style?
IC: I think the illustrations, the animation, and the flavor of the movie are just as exciting as the story. It’s fresh. It looks amazing. We’ve seen so many animated films by now, so to see somebody take it even further and give you something even fresher than what we’ve seen already…. The style, to see the way they used lights and colors. That’s what I’m here for.
How were the voice sessions different from others you’ve done in your career?
IC: It was really about: do what you feel, and we’ll get the lines down, but we really want you to ad-lib and have personality and not just stick strictly to the script. I think that lets you loosen up. They don’t discourage anything. I think when you’re doing a voiceover, you have to show not only the director, not only the producer, but you’ve got to show the audience why they hired you.
What can you tell us about Superfly’s crew of mutants?
IC: At the end of the day, they all want to be liked, you know what I mean? They just want friends. They want it
so bad they’ve gotten bitter. Usually, with a movie like this, when you have a second wave of characters coming in, they can get lost in the sauce. But here everybody made a great impression.
If Superfly could have his pick of what borough of New York City to live in, where would he live?
IC: Superfly is either a Bronx guy or a Brooklyn guy, you know what I mean.
What did you think of Jackie Chan as Splinter in the film?
IC: He’s the heart of the movie. I just wanted to hear him talk; to hear him give his philosophies on how things should be. It was perfect casting, and he brought the heart to the movie.
What do you have in common with Superfly?
IC: He’s a cool supervillain, and I’m a cool supervillain. He’s somebody that, when you get to know him, he’s probably a party animal, and you could hang out with him. I’m the same way. I think we’ve got a lot in common.
What is your history with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?
SETH ROGEN: I grew up watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The animated series came out in 1987 when I was five years old. And then the live action movie came out in 1990. I was eight. So it was perfectly geared towards someone my age, and I loved it. They were funny; they made a lot of references I honestly didn’t understand, and in retrospect were even outdated by the time they were making them. I started taking karate [classes] probably because of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. My dad bought me nunchucks because of the
AS BEBOP I WAS REALLY EXCITED TO BE ABLE TO PLAY A SUPERVILLAIN. WHO DOESN’T WANT TO PLAY THAT IN A MOVIE?”
–ICE CUBE
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was just kind of obsessed with them.
Why are you playing Bebop?
SR: I only play warthog-type creatures. I had this funny idea of Bebop and Rocksteady being two angry, New York bros. I love John Cena and so yeah…. Whether I was Bebop or Rocksteady was ultimately, you know, somewhat interchangeable in my head. But the idea of being a part of the Bebop and Rocksteady team with John was something I knew that I wanted.
What else can you tell us about him?
SR: I mean, honestly, [Bebop and Rocksteady] are just kind of angry New Yorkers. Part of the joke is that Superfly has kind of dysfunctionally raised this family of mutants, and throughout the movie, you’re seeing them realize that all these issues they have in their lives are maybe due to their bad upbringing, which is also kind of a theme in the film. But yeah, this idea that Bebop and Rocksteady are kind of best friends and a little co-dependent but also both incredible rageaholics that are slowly realizing that they’ve been raised poorly was a very funny idea. Just to see them be like angry New York bros was really funny to me, as well.
Did you record in the same way that all the turtles kids recorded together? Did you record with John Cena as Rocksteady?
SR: Yes. We weren’t always in the same city, but we recorded over Zoom together. I think we did one that had me, all the turtles, Ice Cube [Superfly], Rose Byrne [Leatherhead], and Natasia Demetriou [Wingnut] all at the same time. Any time we did a recording session I would just be like, “Get whoever is available who is in these scenes and have them try to participate,” because it just adds so much to it.
Was there any contrast with the dynamic of the kids playing the Ninja Turtles in them interacting in the same space when you got all the mutants together? What was the vibe?
SR: It was fun! It was silly and goofy and I remember Rose Byrne screaming like a maniac in this Australian accent. Everyone is just so funny and we really had fun with it. I think part of the spirit that we were trying to capture honestly was to make the movie fun and to give it this wild energy. That was something that we talked about: how do we make it feel fun and silly and obviously have a good story and good plot and all the things that the movie needs to have, but also have this kind of reckless weirdness that’s almost like a kid playing with their toys.
How do you voice a character like that?
SR: I watched every season of Jersey Shore. I love it. So, yeah, kind of like an angry, aggressive Jersey Shore guy was where I started.
Director/co-writerJeff Rowe and co-producer/ co-writer Seth Rogen in the studio.
THIS IDEA THAT BEBOP AND ROCKSTEADY ARE KIND OF BEST FRIENDS AND A LITTLE CO-DEPENDENT BUT ALSO BOTH INCREDIBLE RAGEAHOLICS THAT ARE SLOWLY REALIZING THAT THEY’VE BEEN RAISED POORLY WAS A VERY FUNNY IDEA.”
–SETH ROGEN
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem brings back the iconic reptilian quadruplets for another wild adventure in the animated world of New York City. But for this story, director Jeff Rowe and writers Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, and Rowe himself bring two new ideas to the screen: casting
BY KEVIN JOHNSONactual teenagers as the Turtles themselves and applying their own unique spin on the current trend of stylized, exaggerated visuals, jump-started by Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and continued with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and The Mitchells vs. The Machines, which Rowe also co-wrote and co-directed.
Still, there’s a plethora of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles visions out
there: several comics, more than five different TV shows, and six movies, not to mention the churn of toys and merchandise that have spawned from Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s original creation. Mutant Mayhem seeks to stand out by emphasizing the youthful adolescence of the turtles, not just by casting teenage actors to play the heroes, but the very visuals themselves—the animation, the shot selection, the colors—are meant to support this radical take on the familiar coming-of-age story.
Kent Seki, Mutant Mayhem’s head of cinematography, wants to emphasize the ephemeral youthfulness of the main four by keeping the camera close, handheld, and alive. “We shot it with a handheld style, almost like [you’re] on the run, [as if] you’re hanging out with your friends, they’re goofing around, and they ended up kicking the skateboard into the window or the door of the bodega, and they have to run off. That’s what we all did when we were teenagers getting into trouble. And that became
a source of inspiration.” Seki sought to utilize a “cinema vérité” style to film Leo, Raph, Donnie, and Mikey as they engage in their antics, both comedic and action, with the seminal work of Emmanuel Lubezki and Spike Jonze informing that look.
The film’s lead character designer, Woodrow White, goes even further when describing the individual look of each sibling, moving away from the “mono-style except by mask” of the classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and applying elements to truly showcase the four heroes as young, budding teens.
“Jeff and I were on the same page with the Turtles, the ‘teenage’ being emphasized in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—we wanted them to sound and look like teenagers,” White says. “So we were always pushing for a less bulky version of the Turtles compared to the previous versions…the vision in our head was that we wanted something new and fresh and more relatable. We always had in mind a slightly skinnier version of the Turtles, kind of more teenage builds.”
White even expands on some of the finer details of some of the brothers. “We always knew we wanted Donnie to have glasses. It’s just he’s commonly [known as] the brainy one,
but also, I just think a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle [wearing] glasses is funny. Not necessarily as a defining trait of wisdom or geekiness but rather a defining trait of adolescence. Glasses on Donny, braces on Mikey… they’re all these sort of visual growing pains that we can all relate to being a teenager.”
The Turtles’ adolescent narrative journey is meant to butt up against the adult world, at once steady,
confusing, and… well, ugly (but in a good way). If the Turtles’ world is shot to look spontaneous, reactive, and “in the moment,” the adult world around them is more controlled, formalized, and grounded.
“What we wanted to do was contrast the handheld Spike Jonze of it all with the kids,” Seki says. “We took another inspiration from early Paul Thomas Anderson [and] his work with [cinematographer] Robert Elswit on Boogie Nights, where there’s a more formal camera language. So, we have the spontaneous, where you’re just trying to follow the action, and then we have the more formal, camera-driven world of PTA. Those two worlds are separate.”
Seki continues: “When we shot scenes, we would use these different techniques to support the subtext of what was happening. So if the kids were being reprimanded by Splinter, [we] would be much steadier with the camerawork, and then when we cut back to the kids, they’d be a little bit more handheld, a little more loose, and those kinds of things started to creep into the cinematography. So we had this dichotomy of the teenage world and the adult world.”
Both worlds are a treat to look at. Spider-Verse may have kickstarted the new wave of hyper-stylized CGI animated films, but Mutant Mayhem has a style all its own, with an overall visual look that came from a fairly unlikely place: a teenager’s sketchbook, a “design philosophy” that production designer Yashar Kassai describes as “draw like you’re 15,” “be emo and cringe,” and even
IN THE CURRENT ANIMATION LANDSCAPE OF PERFECT AND SYMMETRICAL CHARACTERS, IT’S REFRESHING FOR US TO PURSUE SOMETHING SO IMPERFECT.”
–YASHAR KASSAI, PRODUCTION DESIGNERLeft: Concept art for Mutant Mayhem’s take on New York City. Right: The four Turtles were designed to look like actual teenagers, with a scrawnier, more imperfect look than we’ve seen before.
“draw very serious things but add levity by drawing them shitty.”
“A lot of this film’s look is inspired by my own sort of loose sketching and painting style,” says White. “We wanted it to resemble the looseness of not only my work but also of teenagers’ work—the way a teenager might draw in a sketchbook, all these crazy monsters and people.”
“We’ve all been young, untrained artists in class doodling in the margins of our notebooks when we should have been paying attention,” Kassai says. “I think that it’s very relatable. In the current animation landscape of perfect and symmetrical characters, it’s refreshing for us to pursue something so imperfect.”
Indeed, New York City in Seki’s camera looks sketchy, scribbly, and asymmetrical, like what any kid might draw in the margins of their notebook, but with a full-fledged studio budget behind it. Offbeat and slightly askew NYC iconography fills the screen with vibrant but familiar colors, turning the skyscrapers, streets, and sewers into a playground from a kid’s imagination.
“I can definitely say that one of the big color influences were the toys themselves,” Seki says. “I feel like we chart our own path, but there was amazing attention paid to the color
palette of the toys, the chunkiness of those toys. Even the color palette of the original cartoon series was very influential on the film itself. And even in the beginning, when they have the white eyes, it’s very much a nod to the comic book…. So there are little elements of that throughout the whole movie.”
“The amount of detail layered onto every mutant character in that [original toy line] was insane,” adds production designer Yashar Kassai. “As for the movie’s lighting and color, it oscillates between authentic New
York nights and surreal alien color schemes. The photography of Alex Webb is a strong influence.”
To be clear, trying to apply so many of these ideas—the live-action camera language, the “teenage sketchbook” look and feel, the point-of-view of a much younger take on the Turtles—proved to be quite a challenge. Or, at least, a different challenge.
“It’s not that one is harder than the other; it’s a different problem to solve,” Seki says when describing how to apply live-action principles
WE WANTED A FRESH NEW SPIN ON THE TURTLES, BUT WE ALSO WANTED TO BRING THE ENERGY OF THE TMNT TOYS FROM THE ’80S AND ’90S.”
–WOODROW WHITE, LEAD CHARACTER DESIGNER
to animation, much of it in various stages of completion. “We have to make sure that the camera feels authentically real, and creating that realism in the camera is very challenging with a CG-perfect camera. How does the camera start moving? How does it stop? Does it have a jostle in it? We had a moment in the making of the movie where we had tried to infuse this live-action handheld feel. It feels weird, especially early on in the animation process, because you’re working with previz characters in previz animation, which isn’t complete, so it’s very wooden. If there’s a camera with a lot of movement and then you pair it with wooden animation, which will eventually be replaced, it feels strange.”
Seki recalls: “We actually went to a screening room in Nickelodeon, and I brought a ton of live-action references that [utilized handheld cameras]. When we watched it and then watched our sequence, Jeff [Rowe] said, ‘You know, this is really going to have to be a leap of faith. We have to believe that this camera that feels a little jarring right now will work when it has the final animation, which will be months later.’ That alone says something about how difficult it is to really know what’s
going to work. We had to take that leap of faith.”
No doubt the Mutant Mayhem team hopes that audiences will take their own leap of faith when the film drops this August. But the balance between the original depiction of the Teenage Mutant Turtles and the more updated version on display has been carefully, craftily curated. “We
wanted to bring a combination of new and old,” White says. “But what I mean is that we wanted a fresh new spin on the Turtles, but we also wanted to bring the energy of the TMNT toys from the ’80s and ’90s. The creepy, gross-out visual aesthetic that I loved as a kid, and energizing it with this new contemporary style.”
“We wanted to lean into the dad aspect of Splinter in Mutant Mayhem. He’s very disheveled looking from the stresses of parenthood. But he’s still a ninja master, so he wears a kataginu that he cut from a discarded bathrobe. This reflects his improvisational, D.I.Y. way of life. He’s working with what’s available in the sewers to create a comfortable environment for him and his four sons. And then there’s the sweatpants, which are a common staple of stay-at-home parents. Jeff Bridges’ The Dude character from The Big Lebowski was a big fashion inspiration. Splinter’s build was partially inspired by Danny DeVito, with his short stature and long arms. One gripe I had with Splinter in many different versions of TMNT was that he wasn’t ever quite authentically ratlike enough. So I studied a lot of photos of rats.”
“I didn’t want to make Leatherhead muscular because I felt like I was leaning too much into Killer Croc territory, the Batman villain…. I just started sketching out an alligator, and I started asking myself what an alligator would look like if it could stand on two legs. And so that’s how you get that upside down L structure to the character composition…. I feel like a more humanoid alligator wouldn’t look quite as funny carrying a shotgun the way an almost-alligator looks carrying a shotgun and hunting goggles.”
“Our production designer Yashar Kassai helped out a lot with this one. I knew one of my desires in creating Genghis Frog was to make him a pixie frog [another name for the heavy-set African giant bullfrog]. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one before. But one of my goals was to use a pixie frog as a basis for Genghis. I did some sketches, and Yashar did some sketches. And I think Yashar really tied that one together himself.”
“In previous versions, I was a little frustrated by the size of Rocksteady’s head, him being a rhinoceros. A rhino’s defining feature is his horn. So I imagined Rocksteady with a humongous, imposing head just to bring out what really gives a rhino his strength: the incredible charging power of a rhinoceros horn.”
“I decided that Mondo is a raver because I love rave culture and I love the fashion, and I thought it applied well to Mondo’s very chill, sort of “go with the flow” attitude. The original Mondo Gecko is a product of ’80s radical skateboarder energy, and this is Mondo Gecko a decade or two decades onwards into the ’90s and 2000s sort of fashion.”
“I wanted to give him a more menacing edge. And I wanted to also inject more actual manta ray into his character. Ray Fillet is like an action movie scuba diver commando character—like a Jean-Claude Van Damme or Arnold Schwarzenegger type. So I gave him these tactical scuba suspenders and gave him a knife and made him really hardened and rugged.”
“I definitely leaned into the very animal aspect of Wingnut. Earlier versions of Wingnut had two arms, two wings, or two legs, and I wanted to keep Wingnut more bat-like by keeping her two arms on her wings and giving her cybernetic arms because [she’s a] cybernetic mutant. [Original Wingnut] has mechanical wings. The more I fussed with the mechanical wings, I became a little too frustrated…. So I placed the cybernetic part of Wingnut on her arms to sort of retain that futuristic, high-tech element.”
Approximately 40 years after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird first jokingly sketched a masked turtle standing upright with a pair of nunchaku strapped to its little arms, TMNT is one of the biggest franchises in the world. Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo are now veterans of not only years of comic book storytelling, multiple beloved animated series, blockbuster films, video games, countless toys, and more, but their Renaissance-inspired names are now household ones, and their adventures have delighted multiple generations of children and adults. In short, the TMNT are a genuine pop culture institution, a status that’s only going to be further cemented with the release of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, a breathtakingly animated new feature film with an all-star voice cast and an authentically “teenage” attitude and sense of humor.
So, naturally, TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman would have something to say about it. You might think that after nearly four decades, Eastman would be tired of talking about his most famous creations. But when we catch up with him via Zoom, literally half the world away, as he visits Perth, Western Australia, to make an appearance at a convention, you’d never know it. Wearing a baseball cap adorned with that original Ninja Turtle sketch, Eastman still lights
The co-creator of TMNT takes us back to their humble beginnings, gives us a little franchise history lesson, and explains how it all ties in to
up when he recounts the tale of how he and Laird first dreamed up the world’s most beloved reptiles. He’s still grateful for the fact that the pair were able to keep their creative control as their humble independent comic became a multimedia empire, a move that certainly isn’t the norm when talking about superhero success stories throughout history. But most of all, he still gets excited when talking about these characters and the expansive world they now inhabit.
No, Eastman clearly still has plenty to be excited about with TMNT. A big part of that is the impending release of Mutant Mayhem, which he has no shortage of praise for, and he gets visibly animated himself when we turn our conversation toward it. It may have been the end of a long convention day for the creator when we speak, but he has plenty of time and energy to share with fans about where the Turtles have been and where they’re going next.
Honestly, the idea of the Turtles came from such a place of passion and purity for [TMNT co-creator] Peter Laird and me. Growing up as huge fans of comics, we bonded immediately over our mutual heroes, like Jack Kirby and many others, who led us down this path of inspiration to tell our own stories. We wanted to put everything we loved about comics into an idea.
So late one night, Peter and I were working on a couple of ideas. I had this idea of a martial artist like Bruce Lee or
Jackie Chan as an animal, and what would be the stupidest animal it could be? I thought of a turtle. So I did the first sketch of a turtle standing upright with a mask on and nunchaku strapped to his arms, put it on Peter’s desk, and said, “This is a Ninja Turtle. It’s going to be the next big thing” with a big laugh. So Peter did a sketch and changed some things, and we immediately said, “Well, why not a group of them?”
I did a pencil sketch: four turtles, all with different weapons in this sort of comic book cover pose, and when Peter inked it, he added the “Teenage Mutant” to the “Ninja Turtles” title that I had put on the drawing. It was laughout-loud-funny. We said, “This is the dumbest thing we’ve ever seen. This is the coolest thing we’ve ever seen. We love it. Let’s come up with a story that tells how these characters became the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
We spent the next several months creating a 40-page comic that told the origin story. We took all our favorite bits
from all the things we loved about all things comics and put them into this one book. We only did one book with a beginning, middle, and end because we never thought there’d be anything more than the first issue [at the time]. But we had big grins on our faces because we’d done it. We’d created our own characters and put out our first comic books with the help of some family crowdfunding to help cover the cost of the first 3000 copies…We were bound and determined we were going to be comic book storytellers.
What has given them such timeless appeal? And what makes new interpretations like Mutant Mayhem so vitally important?
Take, for example, something like Marvel’s Fantastic Four, where you have this family, both a specific family and adoptive family, a group of people that have different strengths, different powers, who could bicker and argue and have differences of opinion, but when they are bound together as one, focused as a family, they would always
succeed. That was very adaptive to a school group that you’d hang out with or friends in the workplace, those kinds of things. So I think that there were a lot of familial elements. And then you combine that with characters being the heroes we always hope we’ll be when the chips are down and people, especially family and the ones we love, are counting on us to do the right thing.
And then there’s the fact that the Turtles aren’t of any specific race, creed, or color, so to speak. I love that I can be anywhere and talk to anyone of any nationality or race and ask, “Who’s your favorite Turtle and why?”... It’s the underdog factor, the hero that we all would like to be, that Peter Parker/Spider-Man aspect of “I just want to be a teenager.” It’s all those things.
We just put things that we liked into it. What we liked about ourselves… things that we wanted to see in the characters. I think that made them special to us. We weren’t writing for anybody else. We never thought anybody else would actually buy the book [laughs]. So it’s amazing to think that we’re having this conversation nearly 40 years after that first issue, and it’s still resonating in some capacity with the original fans and the newer fans that have come on board throughout the years. It’s become this fantastically humbling generational concept. It’s wonderful. I think that’s probably what I like about going to conventions, getting to meet these people.
But looking at a project like Mutant Mayhem, the people that brought this story to life grew up as fans [so] the things that they’re putting into it are things that they loved about it, or they wanted to see in it, and that got their imagination going. So when they put that same passion into the idea, it works because it’s meaningful and it feels so good.
When did you realize that you had something special on your hands?
It really did come in a series of milestones for us. The first issue of the comic came out in May of 1984. The first five episodes of the animated series ran around Christmas break in 1987. The first toys shipped in June of 1988. For us, the first milestone and probably the most important was in 1985, when we were getting orders in from distributors for issue two, and it was 15,000 copies, [12,000 more than issue one]. Peter quickly did some math, and we figured that if we could do six of these comics a year, we could pay our rent, eat, and draw comics for a living full-time. And it just continued to grow from there.
Then suddenly, we were presented with opportunities to develop a cartoon show and a toy line. We loved the idea, but we felt very protective of it because it was an idea that we owned, and being huge fans and respectful to the heroes that we followed who didn’t have the rights to control their
“I think fans are really going to love his version of Splinter. It’s quite endearing and polite. It’s heartwarming.”
L-R:Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo, and Raphael strike a heroic pose in Mutant Mayhem
properties, we were very careful. So we said, “We’ll do this, but on our terms, we’ll have full approval; nobody can do anything with the characters without it,” and we kept it really restricted and limited. So when [the animated series and toys were first released], we hoped for the best. But it really clicked with fans, and before we knew what we were doing, we had jumped on board this very fast-moving train, but in control of the train, at our pace, so to speak, and thrilled that we get to have the participation we wanted to with the characters.
But I sort of sum it up by… my grandmother used to send me $5 in a birthday card or Christmas card most of my life. She was watching TV one night, and the TMNT were a question on Jeopardy. And she finally felt at that point that I was successful enough and that the Turtles were popular enough that she didn’t need to send me $5 in my birthday card or at Christmas. She was very proud.
What is the one fundamental quality that is most important for each of the Turtles?
As the Turtles were designed, however naively and happily, almost accidentally, if you will, we modeled personalities in the early days based on either pop culture characters or comic characters or genres. Donatello was based on Peter Laird, he was the geekiest guy I knew, and I always thought about him when we wrote him. Raphael was the tough guy in school. I feel like it was that core [concept of] four turtles as lost orphans adopted by this incredible father figure, Splinter, even as we expanded the family to bring April O’Neil and Casey Jones in… this wonderfully adoptive family seemed to be the heart and soul.
How is Mutant Mayhem the logical evolution of that for 2023 and this generation’s TMNT fans?
It seems like every generation of the TMNT can build upon those personalities [but] it’s still built around that heart and soul family aspect. What immediately struck me about Mutant Mayhem was that the family aspect is really the core. It’s the love and appreciation. You know what they say, “You don’t always like your family, but you always love your family.” That seems very prevalent. One of the things that struck me the most about Mutant Mayhem is the dialogue and the ebb and flow of how the family talks. They overtake each other, and they’re talking at the same time, and it’s going back and forth. You can be all over the place, but you’re still on the same page, and the love is there. I think that’s the core that’s held them together throughout their entire history.
Did you know when you introduced April O’Neil in issue two that this character was going to be the human anchor of all their stories going forward? No, and what I mean by that is, when we did issue one, we never imagined there would be an issue two. When we did issue two, we hoped it would be received well enough that we’d be able to do an issue three and more. So when we brought in April, we immediately fell in love with her as a character. We were big fans of characters like Sarah
Connor [from the Terminator films] or Ellen Ripley [from the Alien movies]. So by the time we finished issue #2, we knew we wanted to keep her in the family; we felt she was a perfect, strong, kind of sisterly character that brought another perspective. She was more of a specific connector to the above-ground world, the “real world” for the Turtles, who had been underground the whole time. So it gave us a wonderful character and a plot point that we could develop further into telling bigger stories.
It’s almost like when you meet somebody new, and you already know you’re gonna be good friends. You know, even though you’ve not really known them that long, they’re going to be part of your life forever. And I feel like that’s the feeling [we had with April]. That’s the approach that we took to bringing April into the family.
I think about so many different and wonderful creators that I’ve had the chance to work with over the years. But the importance of updating the character into a person of the here and now who makes the kinds of comments and does the kinds of things she does, it just feels fresh, alive, and modern, and it works so well.
Peter and I, in the early days, were big fans of characters like Yoda and Mister Miyagi. It was about having a Sensei, having a parental figure that was very tough on you, but it wasn’t without love. I feel like we had that with Splinter in
“Everyone gets their moment, and it’s pretty awesome. It’s called ‘Mutant Mayhem’ for a reason.”
the early days of the TMNT when he was very protective. He was the father figure.
What about his portrayal in Mutant Mayhem?
I love how in Mutant Mayhem, they took it to even more of a protective level. Because we never completely touched on a lot of pre-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles history, I feel like some of the approaches they’ve taken here, it’s very reminiscent of the ways that I grew up, and I can definitely see the inspiration of, you know, “be careful, it’s a cruel world out there, be safe.” And I think it’s a very interesting character take for Jackie Chan as well. I think fans are really going to love his version of Splinter. It’s quite endearing and polite. It’s heartwarming.
We’ve never seen this many mutants in a TMNT movie before…
One of the things that has been so much fun is watching how the stories evolve and come together. One of the first licensing things that we did back in the day after the original comics was a role-playing game with Palladium Books back in 1985, which [featured templates for] all these different mutant characters that you play against or as. When we started developing the first cartoon show, we already had a wealth of material in this mutant universe that we could play with and build upon. Just about every version of the TMNT since the first cartoon has built on the ooze and the mutants. I like the fact that this movie doesn’t feature just one bad guy. Everyone gets their moment, and it’s pretty awesome. It’s called “Mutant Mayhem” for a reason.
What do you think about this voice cast?
I just love that they chose to do things like having real teenagers [voice the Turtles] and record them all together, interacting and responding to stuff, and allowing some of the improv and the organic nature of some of the conversations to ebb and flow the way that they did. It didn’t seem like, “Hey, let’s get this name because it would look good on a marquee;” it’s, “Get this person into this movie because they’ll do an incredible job as this character.” Nothing felt like an afterthought; it was all done with great purpose. And it comes across. Seth Rogen’s voicing Bebop! Paul Rudd doing Mondo Gecko! Ice Cube as Superfly! I’m looking at this stuff going, “Oh my god, this is so awesome. It’s really funny. This is really good stuff.” I was watching some of the scenes with my jaw hanging open. It’s perfect. It’s great.
How would you describe the animation style?
It’s a beautifully, wonderfully organic approach to the characters’ shape and how they move in depth in so many of the scenes. But what struck me, in particular, was how everything had weight and balance, and it felt grounded. You can stylize [animation] in a way that can be distracting or pull away from the story that you’re trying to tell, but everything that they’ve done with the style furthers the story. What [director and co-writer] Jeff did so well is really put the focus on the story and the moments and the beats. It has substance. It just felt good. It isn’t distracting. It keeps you engaged, and you forget everything else. All you care about is where the director is taking us. It’s fantastic.
1980
May 1984
1983
Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird first come up with the idea of the TMNT.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 debuts with a print run of only 3,275 copies. Demand fuels additional printings and an ongoing series that will run for nearly a decade and spawn countless other comics.
December 14, 1987
The first animated series debuts. It will run for 10 seasons and 193 episodes.
Summer 1988
The first wave of TMNT action figures arrives, becoming one of the most successful toy lines in history.
Oct. 11, 1989
The TMNT arcade game is released. While not the first video game to feature the Turtles, to this day it remains the most beloved!
March 30, 1990
Feb. 8, 2003
A new animated series reboots the Turtles for TV. It runs for six seasons and spawns another successful wave of action figures and toys.
March 23, 2007
TMNT, an animated movie featuring the voices of Chris Evans, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Patrick Stewart, and others opens.
Sept. 28, 2012
Nickelodeon debuts a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series to critical and fan acclaim. It runs for five seasons.
Aug. 8, 2014
A new live action TMNT movie, produced by Michael Bay, arrives. A sequel follows in 2016.
July 20, 2018
Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a stylish take on the TMNT’s early days, premieres on Nickelodeon.
2020
The first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie hits theaters. Sequels follow in 1991 and 1993.
Nov. 2, 1996
The final episode of the original animated series airs. But you can’t keep a good Turtle down for long!
Nov. 21, 2009
Animated TV movie Turtles Forever airs. Years ahead of the multiverse trend, this story unites the 2003 animated Turtles with their 1987 TV versions and the Eastman and Laird comics versions.
August 2011
IDW Publishing kicks off a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic series that is a brilliant entry point for new fans of the comics. It’s still going strong today.
Aug. 2, 2023
CAPTURING 40 YEARS OF TURTLE POWER IN ONE PAGE IS IMPOSSIBLE, BUT HERE ARE SOME HIGHLIGHTS!