The Nickelodeon TMNT show has been on hiatus for a while, but this behind-the-scenes video is hyping the finale of the series, so hopefully that means it will be back on track soon. This extremely cheesy video from Nick features “Noah and Gabby” hamming it up with an uncomfortable-looking Ciro Nieli to look at the upcoming hour-long special that will introduce Roseanne’s (apparently male) Kraang Prime character.

Her voice isn’t at all what I expected, but since it’s Roseanne I’m sure she’ll get a little more animated than that. TMNT geeks online are speculating that Kraang Prime is going to be the Nick series’ answer to OT Krang, and I really hope so. I think “The Kraang” should take a backseat in season 2 and leave Kraang Prime and Shredder as the main baddies. Oh, and the Technodrome, they definitely need to bring back the Technodrome.

In other TMNT news, did you hear that Mos Def is going to play Baxter Stockman in the new TMNT movie? Even though I still don’t care about that movie, but you have to admit, that’s an awesome bit of casting.

I don’t know why toy companies didn’t use stop motion animation to market toys to me when I was a kid. I was obsessed with stop motion and often made (crappy) action figure movies on my own, and I’m sure if they were doing it too I would have begged my parents to buy me even more toys.

A reader tipped me off to this new video from Playmates using the new toys based on the Nickelodeon show, and it’s pretty awesome.

I hope they keep making more of these videos, I can’t get enough stop motion Turtles. If I had more free and patience time I’d get back into doing stop motion animation, but yeah…I don’t.

One of my favorite things about looking back at 80s/90s Turtlemania and collecting bits and pieces of TMNT memorabilia is the wide variety of art styles that were used in all the licensed stuff. Some products had horrible character art that made you wonder how it ever got made, while others had awesome art that I could (and sometimes do) frame and hang on my wall.

One of my favorite styles of TMNT licensing art is the half cartoon/half comics style, for lack of a better term. The Turtles don’t look as cartoony as some versions, the lines are usually a little thicker, and overall it looks more serious. The TMNT board game art is a perfect example. I have a few pieces of TMNT stuff that look like they’re all from the same artist, and I wish I could track down who illustrated it all. Some puzzles, children’s books, and stickers have the same style and I can’t get enough of it.
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I promise I don’t care about a TMNT movie produced by Michael Bay and starring Megan Fox, but since I’m completely obsessed with the Turtles I’m at least keeping an eye on the news. Set photos recently pegged Arrested Development’s Will Arnett as playing the whiny cameraman Vernon Fenwick from the 80s cartoon, which is actually kind of cool casting. Still, Megan Fox?

For a movie that is already shooting and supposedly comes out next summer, there is a surprising lack of casting and plot details. The no-name actors that were revealed as being the Turtles could be voices or motion-capture only, but no one has said. Weird.

I was checking IMDB to see if anyone else had been announced and saw this plot logline that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. If this is official, it kind of explains Bay’s dumb comments about the Turtles having extraterrestrial origins in the movie.
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Have you had a chance to check out the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rooftop Run game that just came out recently for the iPhone and iPad? I bought it not knowing if it would be any fun or not because I want to support Nickelodeon’s awesome TMNT effort as much as I can, but thankfully the game is actually pretty fun.

Rooftop Run is a Canabalt inspired running game, and even though there’s plenty of money grubbing ala Tiny Tower and Jurassic Park Builder, the game is still fun for TMNT fans who need to be distracted for a few minutes here and there.
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