After weeks and weeks of speculation and tense anus clenched waiting, we finally get our first Official glimpse at Michael Bay’s new take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And when I say Official, I mean OFFICIAL. Not those leaked set photos, or those model shots of the inevitable cash-in turtle action figures that found their way onto the internet only to be quickly assassinated from existence by Paramount. No. Instead of the hazy photos that got us scratching our heads, we’ve now got actual moving images to tickle our brains.

It’s only a teaser, but we do get a sense of things: typical of Bay, we see buildings falling over and lots of startled people. We also get our first true glimpses of the turtles, specifically Leonardo. The others do appear briefly, but we all know Leo was the most badass, so who cares. Unlike the 90’s low budget movies (of which I have fond memories), the turtles here are CGI (or motion captured) and look a little less like people in suits, and little more like anthropomorphically correct teenage mutant ninja turtles.

Regardless, it looks pretty much the same as every modern re-imagination of everything we once found so awesome as children be it Batman, Superman, Battleships, et al. So instead of naked green mutant bandits running around the sewers eating pizza and shouting “Cowabunga”, we’ve got gritty real world realism, with real problems and real people and real cities, real dilemmas and the real heroes to keep that shit locked down real tight. Because it being real makes it really better. Really.

The teaser does feature the mutagen – the crazy goo that mutated the turtles into their current forms, and we can only surmise that Bay has kept his word that they will not be aliens after all. While Bay butchered my other beloved cartoon fetish, Transformers, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one; his Pain & Gain made me a believer once again, I guess. Megan Fox (Transformers, Jennifer’s Body) is prominent in the teaser, though doesn’t actually speak a word, which only helps things in my view.

And it also doesn’t look like William Fichtner (Heat, The Dark Knight) has done a Christian Bale-style pump up to appear as the Shredder either. However, Fichtner has paid his dues, so I’m going to wait and see on this one. Finally, we get no signs of Splinter, Bebop or Rocksteady, and Krang and his Dimension X portable rave wagon the Technodrome. Alas. Hopefully these appear in the extended trailers that will undoubtedly be getting revealed closer to the release date on August the 8th.

Turtle Power!