[quote name='Jodou']You know, IIRC the original concept for the turtles was dark, like Batman dark. The only thing we grew up with was the cartoon show/comics and while the first movie was slightly dark (and obviously my favorite for that reason), it was still wacky enough to be a kids movie. If anything, this is an opportunity to actually get closer to the source material and. . .yeah, it's Michael Bay.
Never-
ing-mind.[/QUOTE]
The Turtles were originally created as a satire of Frank Miller's work, which was becoming hugely popular at the time but still obscure outside comics geekdom. (This was before The Dark Knight Returns) The Turtles were ninjas because Miller had almost single-handedly made ninjas a big thing. A few years earlier most people had never heard the word and even some Asian movies were dubbed in such a way that characters who were plainly ninjas were never referred to as such. And they weren't big in Japanese culture, as they were historically regarded as scum. Hired hands with no loyalty to anyone in a culture that took loyalties very seriously.
The cartoons lost all of that because it meant nothing to eight year olds and instead cranked up the cute. It made the creator super rich so they could marry Penthouse Pets and indulge all kinds of expensive whims.
If you can find it, there was another really good series of Frank Miller parodies that crossed over with the Turtles. This was the GnatRat by Mark Martin, a character who veered from being a Daredevil parody to being a Batman parody and others along the way.
It tends to be very inside baseball, with a fair chunk of the material meaningless to anyone who wasn't a comics geek at the time and following the various industry battles and scandals.
Another comic that originally had a lot of great parodies was Cerebus by Dave Sim. It was great stuff for about the first 100 issues but became incredibly dull and pedantic as Sim decided to crank up the DEPTH setting way past the factory recommended limits. This went on for another 200 issues, where the series ended as he'd announced it would almost twenty years earlier.
Cerebus had a character who was perpetually becoming different super-heroes, all with some sort of cockroach theme while also being Moon Knight, Spider-man, etc., because he was simply insane but also a huge frightening thug who was easily manipulated by, well, almost anybody.
