Teenage Mutant April O’Neil
Well, I knew it was going to be bad, and I didn’t want to know how bad, but I do now.
I wrote this a year ago.
“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 bale after bale 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 attractiveness scale. 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.
However, he has managed to get another fifteen minutes of fame by lucking out in animation.
Sausage Party came out in August of 2016 one month after Sony was left reeling when their “billion dollar tentpole” Ghostbusters 2016 bombed to the tune of $229 million. Rogen’s food porn movie (literally) was made for a paltry $17 million and pulled in $141 million. It was by no means a blockbuster, but it was very profitable clearing $100 million before its minimal marketing budget is added in. That made up for the losses inflicted by Ghostbusters (2016) putting Sony/Columbia in the black for that quarter, if only just.
It also made Seth Rogen a low grade hero in Hollywood. *
He says all the right things that a Mercedes Marxist is supposed to say on Twitter. When one woman complained about her car getting broken into, Rogen punched down and went on about how his car has been broken into at least fifteen times since he moved to LA but it has never bothered him.
Well no shit! If I was that fucking stoned all the time I suspect I would be incapable of feeling personal violation, or upset that my wife as railing Paulo the pool boy, or the passage of time, or indeed much of anything else except hungry.
None the less an out and proud Canadian Socialist who had just saved Sony’s bacon (a little ironic), was going to be getting a lot of calls from producers. Especially after Covid-19 locked down all the studios leaving only animated shows in production. And let’s not forget, even though Sausage Party wasn’t funny it did have all kinds of anti-Christian tropes, stereotypes and themes. That always goes over well in Hollywood these days. These trends would be continued in Santa Inc.
Santa Inc was (from what I heard) one of the most viciously 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 nasally 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 Turtles movie to ever come out was in the theaters, so he’s possibly a fan. That is the only thing he has going for him, assuming he ever was one. But given what the Canuck Commie with the retard laugh did with April O’Neil I doubt it. It looks like the moment someone got through his perma-haze that April was depicted as a sexy redhead with pale skin her fate was sealed.
Admittedly the very first iteration of April was mixed race but she was never repulsive and Eastman is on the record as saying he regarded her as white. Besides which she been in her best known form for better than 35 years now.
No one was thirsty for this version April. Rogen was faced with the choice of deliberately making a clay figure look attractive or disfiguring her. It wasn’t even close to choice for Rogen. Making the beautiful ugly is a spinal reflex for Hollywood these days.
Okay, I’m done here.
UPDATE:
*Frankly, the real hero was whoever cut the trailer for Sausage Party. He actually managed to make it look like it would a funny. In reality, the film should never been longer than a trailer, that was the length the concept was good for.
