Yeah. The first trailer actually gave me a little bit of hope that this might not suck. I wasn't even that big of a fan of TMNT as a kid but I think this counts as rape of childhood. Instead of pounding out new movies based on old childhood classics, maybe someone should make something new, like a story about a police officer who's also a duck and is sexy. :)

It's worth mentioning that it's not actually being directed by Michael Bay, if that's who you were referring to. He's directing Transformers 4, which is led by the only actor worse than Shia LeBouf. This is simply being produced by Bay and all of Bay's associates. The director is some other, equally bad talent that was behind Wrath of the Titans.

I do make the realization that this is a totally pointless distinction, mind you.

Ah ok, I stand corrected.

I only ever got around to watching Transformers 2 and it was probably the worst film I have ever seen.

This. I don't completely, or even mostly, blame Bay for this. In fact, I enjoyed the first and third Transformers films for what they were (stupid over the top explosion fests that you go see with a group of half drunken friends).

The more I see of this, however, the less forgiving I am. This looks like it will be a silly explosion fest just like the films mentioned above, but I can't really get past just how much more bastardized everything seems, particularly the designs of the turtles...they look horrific. The original design they had in mind was pretty close to how they've always looked, and I personally thought it looked a whole lot less ridiculous than the final product. I mean seriously, look at this and tell me it isn't far less worse than what you just saw in the trailer above:

http://cdn.screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/Leonardo-Teenage- Mutant-Ninja-Turtles-2014-Traditional-Design-688x1024.jpg

That's what was so wonderful about the Transformers films. Even though they took large creative liberties with the source material and wrote a piece of shit script, Optimus Prime and company looked phenomenal, as good as any Transformers fan, young or old, could have hoped for. It's a lot easier to enjoy a terribly written action film milking childhood characters you grew up with that way.

Ah well, if nothing else, I think I now understand a bit more how Avatar: The Last Airbender fans felt when it's respective live-action cinema adaptation came out.

Avatar was just...confusing. It was impossible to figure out who that adaptation was supposed to be for. If you weren't already a fan of the animated series, it was too disconnected and confusing to be enjoyable, as you'd rarely have any idea of what was even going on.

If you did know enough about the series to follow the movie, however, then you were bound to hate it. Everything you can imagine somebody doing wrong, he did, including changing the pronunciation of half the main character's names.

I have no idea who that movie was meant for. It wasn't made for those new to the series. It clearly wasn't for fans of it, either. I think Shyamalan may have actually just made that movie for himself, and accidentally sent it to a publisher at one point.

And remember that the original writers of Avatar: The Last Airbender also signed off on everything about the Shyamalanadingdong version.

I get the impression that Eastman doesn't really pay much attention to his canon and whatever and he's just all "Oh, you want to do something different? That's cool." Every single version of TMNT has been vastly different in many different ways, and sometimes that works out (like the Nickelodeon 2012 series which is fantastic despite being incredibly dissimilar from the original comics) and sometimes it doesn't (like the 2003 series which stays pretty true to the original comics plot-wise yet feels like a shitty cynical pile of toy-selling crap).