Superfly (Ice Cube) is putting the “mutant” in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. In theaters August 2nd, the new movie starts 15 years after radioactive sludge ooze mutated four turtles into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Leo (Nicolas Cantu), Raphael (Brady Noon), Donatello (Micah Abbey), and Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr.). As it turns out, that same sludge ooze transformed a housefly into Superfly and created his army of mutants: Bebop (Seth Rogen), Rocksteady (John Cena), Genghis Frog (Hannibal Buress), Leatherhead (Rose Byrne), Wingnut (Natasha Demetriou), Ray Fillet (Post Malone), and Mondo Gecko (Paul Rudd).
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“Let me guess. 15 years ago, right? Some sludge was dumped in the sewer. And y’all came from that?” Superfly says in the clip (watch it above). How does Superfly know the secret origin of the masked heroes in a half-shell? Because the “same ooze made me,” Superfly explains.
“My dad, Baxter Stockman, he’s the one who dumped the ooze down the drain, baby,” Superfly tells the turtles about genius scientist (voiced by Giancarlo Esposito). “So technically, we’re cousins!”
“The story is that we meet the Ninja Turtles and they have been mutated from turtles into turtle-humanoid creatures at a young age,” producer and co-writer Seth Rogen says in behind-the-scenes materials. “When we find them, they live in the sewers because their father [Splinter] has instilled in them that humanity will never accept them and will hate them, and they’re like monsters, basically.”
“He’s taught them martial arts to defend themselves from humans, who Splinter thinks are evil,” Rogen continues. “But they just want to be normal teenagers and they want to do normal teenage things, and they absorb pop culture. They want to do stuff that normal teenagers do and they long for acceptance and a normal life.” When they meet human high school student April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), “They get this idea that if they stopthis criminal Superfly who’s terrorizing the city, maybe that’ll be a thing that proves to people that they’re good and that they should be accepted. So it’s a very personal motivation for them to take on this big, giant villain.”
In moving away from their archenemy Shredder and the ninja Foot Clan, the Mutant Mayhem creative team wanted to put the “mutant” back in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
“When I was a kid, I collected the toys, and I loved them. In the cartoon, they always had so many mutants,” Rogen recalls. “They would pop up from time to time on the cartoon, but they never were in the movies as I saw them. To me, there was this huge well of mutant characters that were underutilized. And also, I think we were trying to come up with ideas that hadn’t been done before and this idea of bringing it to this monster movie-type place was really fun and exciting.”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem opens only in theaters August 2nd.
