Pineapple Express Does Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” – P.J. O’Rourke

“Giving money and a franchise to Seth Rogen is like giving LSD and a shotgun to a seven-year-old.” – The Dark Herald

Paramount does it again!

Sure, you may have thought that Paramount couldn’t do worse than giving Star Trek to Bad Robot’s retarded little brother Secret Hideout and giving HALO the Last Jedi treatment. But CBS/Viacom shouted, “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!!” Picked up the gauntlet and gave Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to (*deep barrel-chested sigh*) Seth Rogen.

I’ll wait right here if you need to smash your laptop after reading that.

…

Desktop all booted up now? 

Good.

Continuing their rocket-powered Thelma and Louise style Evel Knievel jump off of a cliff face,  Paramount has now handed another crown jewel to somebody who not only can’t be trusted with it.  But it is insanely obvious to everyone and his second cousin that he can’t be trusted with it. 

I will grant that twenty years ago, Seth Rogen was an extremely promising young comedic actor.  But that was back when his neurons hadn’t been marinating in THC for a couple of decades.  He fell in with Judd Apatow when he was on his way up and it was a mutually beneficial relationship. It looked like Rogen was going places, 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked up, Kung Fu Panda. 

And then around 2008 something bad happened called Zack and Miri Make a Porno.  This flick seems to mark a sharp cutoff for Rogen.  The film was stillborn at the box office for the clear and obvious reason (to anyone with his synapses firing in the right direction) that you won’t get a theatrical release for a movie with “porno” in the title. Everyone in the business knows that, how didn’t Rogen?  Well, we all know the answer to that one.

 Qualitatively, Rogen’s films had been getting better and better as he matured as a writer and actor.  But after Zack and Miri his career hit a glass ceiling.  The problem is when you are smoking bail after bail of pot, waking and baking day in, day out for years, you will stop maturing.  

He was also famous enough to pick up a good-looking wife, who is, of course, an actress and would be light years out of his league had he remained a nobody.  Rogen’s a Gamma Male and no Gamma will ever be happily married because no woman is happy to be married to a Gamma.  Sex becomes an annual event pretty quickly if the woman married to the Gamma is way above her husband on the sexual hierarchy.  I recall just how deeply Cerno got under Rogen’s skin when he mentioned something to that effect.

“They” stated they weren’t going to have children.  Which means “She” decided they weren’t going to have children.

Rogen isn’t quite a Fallen King (a Gamma who makes it so big he is no longer a Secret King but inevitably fails epically), however, he is close to one.  The success he had and the trappings of success that he was able to acquire didn’t make him the man he dreamed they would. So, like a Fallen King, he has become intensely toxic.  This is as good as life is ever going to be for Seth Rogen and deep down inside, he knows it’s all downhill from here.  He hates anyone who is happier than he is and that is damn near everybody.

All of these things have combined to turn him rotten inside.  He’s actually worse than Adam Sessler.

Santa Inc was (from what I heard) one of the most vicious unfunny shit piles of Woke attacking the American traditions of the Christmas holiday that has ever been made.  It was a show that was deliberately trying to harvest hate-clicks.  It costarred the voice of Sarah Silverman, whose onscreen avatar looked like a pastiche of anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda from the 1940s.  Seriously, her character looks like some kind of kewpie doll Goebbels would have been handing out on the opening night of Jud Süss.  You don’t do that unless you want anti-sematic attacks.  

They didn’t have much luck with that because the show was getting attacked for being hideous in every other way.  Netflix’s Santa Inc was so bad it made Netflix’s Deathnote look good. Rogen, naturally, claimed that the comments that YouTube removed were all anti-semitic attacks against him and Silverman but they were mostly along the lines of “The Elf cries out, ‘Merry Christmas’ as he strikes you.”

Santa Inc has the distinction of being the lowest-rated TV series of all time.  Yes, it has even beat out Batwoman. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles requires a showrunner who is both a fan of the franchise, cool and funny.  Rogen would have been eight when the only decent Ninja Turtle movie to ever come out was in the theaters, so possibly a fan. That is the only thing he has going for him, assuming he ever was one. Back in the early 2000s, Rogen qualified as funny (at least as an actor) but those days are long over and he was in no universe, ever cool.  

His plan for the Ninja Turtles is to “concentrate on the ‘teenage’ aspect of their lives.”  We all know what that means coming from Rogen. The jokes about why the toking terrapins are always eating pizza practically write themselves, and frankly, they’d be better off doing that, because if Rogen writes them they going to suck.

Another magnificent fail for Paramount is warming up in the batter’s box. 

Okay, I’m done here.