The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem did not have a massive opening weekend at the box office, but it is getting very strong responses from critics as one of the best (if not the best) Ninja Turtles movies to date. It’s got impressive animation and action, but the film’s humor is one of the things being singled out as impressive. Although apparently even the filmmakers weren’t aware just how funny it is.
It turns out there was one particular joke that producer Seth Rogen thought was so stupid he wanted to remove it from the film. Director Jeff Rowe recently told Slashfilm, about the line, which he actually speaks as a bit of a vocal cameo. It comes as the Turtles are at a low point, realizing how far away their dream of being able to exist among humans truly is, when one of those humans puts a specific voice to their pain. Rowe explained…
When the Turtles are sadly returning to the sewer, they overhear a human remark, 'I love being young and free to go places,' which is a joke that we had. We just scratched into a screening and Seth was like, 'This is stupid. We have to kill this.' And then we showed it at a test screening in Burbank and it killed. It was a huge laugh. And then I think Seth was begrudgingly like, 'Okay, fine. I guess we'll keep that.'
The point of test screenings is to get an audience’s reaction to a film, and potentially make changes. But when you see an audience likes something, you kinda have to go with it, even if you feel differently. While Seth Rogen apparently thought the “young and free” joke was stupid, others did not, or at the very least they thought it was so stupid it was hilarious.
Producers are out in that position because somebody thinks they are the right people to make final decisions on a project, but certainly, they’re all only human and can certainly make mistakes. Rogen seems to have been wrong about this one. He seemingly still thinks the joke is dumb, but he understands not everybody agrees with him.
Test screenings have their strengths and weaknesses, of course. Some filmmakers, like Rian Johnson, love test screenings, and others clearly do not. Justin Simien, director of the new Haunted Mansion movie recently praised the process. Apparently, it strongly influenced his decision to completely change Haunted Mansion's ending. Test screenings have also led to other infamous decisions. Jeffrey Katzenberg famously wanted The Little Mermaid's iconic "Part of Your World" cut from the movie after it went badly in a test screening. Luckily he was talked out of it.
Apparently, the reason that director Jeff Rowe used his own voice was that the line was simply inserted into the movie on a temporary basis, with plans to get somebody else to do the line in the finished film, assuming the joke hung around. In the end, they decided the director’s reading of the line was best, so he remained.
