The Mutant Mayhem Turtles Return with a familiar villain in a new short preceding The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants
Turtlemania!! With a new short in theaters, a new season of the animated series, a reboot of the IDW Comics series, and a scorching hot Arrow Video Limited Edition box set of the original movies, there’s no question it’s totally Turtlemania time! Join us as we celebrate the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!
This Friday Spongebob SquarePants and Patrick Star return in their fourth movie, The Search for SquarePants. It’s a hilarious and silly family adventure worth checking out, but in this mutant dojo the bigger draw is what will precede it. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles return to the big screen in a shellaciously fun animated short, Chrome Alone 2: Lost in New Jersey.
The short takes place in the in the same universe as Mutant Mayhem and its spinoff Tales of the TMNT, and features the returning teen Turtle cast: Micah Abbey as Donatello, Shamon Brown Jr. as Michelangelo, Nicolas Cantu as Leonardo, and Brady Noon as Raphael.
A storefront display draws the boys’ attention to a shocking revelation: a new knockoff line of (laughably crappy) “Tubular Tortoise Karate Warriors” action figures are trying to cash in on their image for the holiday season. The company’s headquarters address happen to be in nearby New Jersey, demanding an immediate investigation.
What they end up finding is the reintroduction of a familiar secondary villain from Turtles lore. And while I won’t say who it is to preserve any possible surprise, the title is pretty upfront with a conspicuous clue .
Chrome Alone 2 is a super fun return to this world, but beyond that it’s also an incredibly timely and meaningful tale: a plea for originality and a repudiation to soulless generative AI. The knockoff figures are a direct avatar for algorithm-generated “art”, the result of AI engines behaving as vehicles for the mass wholesale theft of artistic intellectual property. The Turtles had me laughing, but the giant middle finger to AI had me cheering.
– A/V Out
