adamwarren
patreon
FAILED PROJECT FRIDAY: Early stages of a never-pitched TMNT proposal, part 2!
🕑 Added 2023-03-17 13:00:04 +0000 UTC[UPDATE: Re: the power outage I mentioned earlier in the week, I am happy to say that electricity was restored to my street last night after three highly unpleasant days. By unfortunate coincidence, the gas stove was out and my generator completely inaccessible, two missing items which normally make a garden-variety power outage relatively bearable.
The good news? With nothing else I could work on whilst freezing my ass off, I cranked out something like 12 g-d pages of story notes and concepts for The Chaste and the Chained, an amount which would normally take me a month or two (or three) to produce whilst working on other material. That now puts Chaste at 26-odd pages of notes dashed off in 2023 as opposed to, say, 38 pages so far for the merged project The Last Party written during 2022 (not counting the notes for earlier iterations Party of Two and Hushed Half-Elf). Yay?
And now, on with today's regularly scheduled content!]
So!
At some point in the distant past, possibly the early 2000s, I must've had a conversation at a comic with somebody from comics company IDW about a writing-only Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pitch. Obvsly, nothing ever came of this vague idea, but I did work up an initial pitch document covering the overall direction I had in mind.
After a Failed-Project Friday post two weeks ago addressed the first half of that overview, which dealt with my takes on the Turtles themselves, here's the rest of the rather vague "pre-pitch" document:
VAGUE INITIAL OVERVIEW DEALIE FOR TONAL ISSUES
ON A FUTURE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES PITCH (part 2)
*Ninjutsu emphasis: It would definitely be fun to play up the Turtle's ninja skills beyond just their weapons usage, whether from exotic "urban climbing" skill sets to camouflage and infiltration techniques to the many, many stealth practices of ninjutsu. (Seriously, I have access to the ahem, "real" names of a dozen different modes of "sneaky walking" supposedly used by the ninja.) One amusing variant to consider: When the Turtles (or their enemies) use specific ninjutsu skills, I'd love to occasionally break out the actual Japanese names for the techniques, complete with big, glowing kanji, romaji transcriptions ("MOKUTONJUTSU") and English translations ("ART OF CLIMBING TREES AND USING FOLIAGE FOR CONCEALMENT"); note that this can also be used to describe fighting stances and specific attacks (KIKAKU KEN NO KAME: "Turtle Head strike"). Given how commonly the trope of "cool Japanese kanji names for exotic martial arts" is used in widely popular anime (see Naruto, next bullet point), this practice wouldn't be especially oft-putting nowadays, as opposed to back in the time of the Turtles' 80s-era appearances. Anyhoo, I have multiple translators already on call for Japanese- and Chinese-language riffs in Empowered, so this wouldn't be a problem to arrange.
I'd also like to emphasize the Turtles' stealth and concealment skills in part because they're fighting in urban settings where they're repeatedly on the verge of being spotted by the civilian population... but they always use "mad ninja skillz" just in the nick of time to avoid discovery.
*Ninja magic: In a slightly "metatextual" fashion, here, I wanted to address what's made by far the biggest splash in ninja-related pop culture since the Turtles' heyday: the terrifyingly popular ninja-centered manga and anime Naruto. Specifically, this property took an old trope of ninja lore—that some ninjas can perform supernatural acts—and turned it up to 11, pretty much. The ninjas in Naruto use what is effectively full-on, Harry Potter-level magic (via "chi" internal power usage, but there's little difference between this and Western-style magic spells). They can control elements, wrap gravity, conjure spirits, control minds and so on, seemingly all the way up to Dragon Ball-level superpowers.
While I wouldn't want to take things quite that far, I would very much like to have the Turtles' foes in this arc be a clan of "ninja magic-users," but using less exaggerated supernatural skills more closely derived from older depictions of ninja: weaving illusions, low-level manipulation of the five classical Japanese elements, summoning animal familiars, Spidey-style ceiling-clinging, flying via improbable kites and so on. One old-school skill that must be used: Ninjas could legendarily spawn short-lived "shadow clones" of themselves for an attack en masse—and thus, we could briefly return to old-school "Turtles vs. boatload of bad guys," if only for one action scene.
The idea would be to contrast the Turtles' earthy and practical approach to ninjutsu, featuring impressively jaw-dropping but not supernatural physical feats, with an enemy clan's more mystic, esoteric, magic-oriented take on ninjutsu. In a way, this isn't entirely unlike Miller's over-the-top but not that unearthly Daredevil facing fully superpowered foes, to refer back to the Turtles' earliest influences.
Wellp, that was the rest of the early TNMT pitch overview, folks, which would've theoretically wound up skewing in a "Turtles vs. Naruto" direction, more or less. As usual, though, nothing came of this concept, which never even developed into a proper proposal... as opposed to, say, the quite complete pitch for a forgotten Tomb Raider miniseries I recently stumbled across. (Stay tuned for that in a future month, needless to say.)
NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Dunno at present what's coming up in the next M/W/F slot, but you should be seeing something awesome shortly, okay? (Or at least "pretty cool," if not "awesome.")
Comments
RanmaChaos
That ninja magic stuff sounds really fucking cool and is something I have wanted in TMNT for a long time.
Burninator
Now that you've finished your darkness retreat, are you planning on signing with the Jets?
Eric
Glad to hear that you have warmth once more!
