Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is probably the most successful independent comic ever, and since the green foursome debuted in print, they’ve seldom not been ubiquitous. Movies have followed suit, even before it was easy to re-create the Turtles digitally — the first cinematic Ninja Turtles series, with physical costumes, lasted three movies, followed by one animated semi-sequel. The second live-action movies lasted two installments, followed by the animated feature reboot Mutant Mayhem. It feels at times like anything TMNT is guaranteed to be a hit, but it turns out that’s not inevitably the case. At least one movie — the mature-themed The Last Ronin — has been canceled. And it might not be the only one.
Movie character designer J.S. Marantz, who has worked on many superhero movies for both Marvel and DC, and more, occasionally posts designs he did that were not used in any final product. Often, this just means alternate takes of things we saw in a popular movie. Recently, though, he has mentioned a Ninja Turtles movie that never happened.
It’s not clear which canceled movie he’s talking about, but the designs he’s showcasing are of the brain-shaped villain Krang. Krang doesn’t feature heavily in The Last Ronin, so it’s most likely some other aborted version. The only live-action movie so far to feature Krang is 2018’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, and it depicted the villain much as the TV cartoon did — as a brain lodged in the chest of a giant, bald robot body. Marantz’s designs are different: one looks like a fancier take on the original Playmates Krang action figure, which came in a more affordable, basic mechanical body. (The cartoon one was eventually made, but needed to be huge to fit in scale.)
The other design goes back to the Mirage comics, in which Krang’s forerunners, called Utroms, rode around in Terminator-style, human-sized android bodies. The TV cartoon departed from comics canon and had Krang as the living brain of a reptilian race called Krangazoids; the Utroms in comics simply look like brains but are born that way. The Utroms use the bodies to blend in, disguising the robot forms as humans; Marantz has added extra arms to make his more terrifying. If the original Utrom bodies are akin to actual Terminators in their infiltration functions, these designs are like more weaponized Terminators for battles where Skynet doesn’t give a damn about secrecy. They also resemble some of the Decpticons from the Michael Bay Transformers movies, like Lockdown, or the female Pretender who seduced Sam in Revenge of the Fallen.
Assuming this wasn’t for The Last Ronin, it’s entirely possible some executive looked at it and deduced there’s no way to sell plush toys of this. Kids are resilient when it comes to stuff like this, but parents aren’t always fond of scary machines that look like they choose violence. Even Krang, in the robot’s chest, looks like a horror movie version of himself. He’s a powerful villain, yes, but we’re also supposed to believe he and Shredder would bicker, rather than try to eat each other. The fact that Marantz is showing these means they will not be used — if there were even a chance, his deal would be extended and he’d be under NDA. Perhaps, though they can inspire future designers to think of other possibilities.
Would you like to see these types of designs for Krang onscreen? Pick your brain in our comments.
