Quarantine Control #204: The Short Name of Better Mayhem

DC Staff | February 29, 2024 | Animation, Features, Movies, Reviews, Videogames | No Comments

Do you know what the recent Quarantine Control ledes have lacked? Something, anything, about Black History Month. That’s not good, considering that two of the three contributors to these posts are Black. It’s also not good when attacks on history, including Black History, have been intense over the last few years, especially in the United States’s southern contingent. Some of the worst people are attempting to change school curriculums to make them “anti-woke” so to speak, and some have succeeded. They aim to make sure the worst parts of history are covered up so only the “patriotic” parts remain. At least one of us reviewed something made by someone Black this week.

Still, this acknowledgement doesn’t feel like enough, so… let’s do better next year.

Geoffrey Barnes

Damn, I didn’t even watch any Black media for Black History Month this year. But the movie I watched was kind of Black through some of the voice cast and song choices.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)
Source: Amazon Prime Video (It’s also on Paramount Plus and MGM Plus)
Episodes: 1 movie (with a sequel coming)

I knew all along that the Turtles in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem wouldn’t be my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the ones I grew up with in comics and animated material in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But I was somehow still taken aback at this fact after starting this movie. The designs of the Turtles themselves have been changed and updated for the modern younger audience, depicting a group of mutated teens clearly just getting started with their adventures in fighting crime and having fun around New York City. The personalities have notably been adjusted, though most of them are still similar enough to the old Turtles that they’re easily identifiable outside their colors.

But it only took minutes into the movie for me to realize that it was just fine that these weren’t the Turtles I grew up with — more than “just fine,” in fact. This might clue you in as to how much I enjoyed it.

Mutant Mayhem takes place in a New York City that’s far from accepting of mutants, the reason why Splinter (Jackie Chan) doesn’t want the Turtles to venture too far out into the city to protect them. Unfortunately for him, the Turtles are very much teenagers, and simply had to instruct them of the dangers in the world outside the sewers they call home. This was only exacerbated when they ran into April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), the first human to bond with them. They certainly seem to get in over their heads when they run into Superfly (Ice Cube) and his massive posse of familiar villains. Superfly, it turns out, hates humans more than any other characters do, which means that they’ll have to fight.

The premise is as simple as anyone would expect from a new generation of TMNT primarily aimed towards the young’uns. The way in which the story is told is what sticks out the most, with both great character development for multiple appearances from characters themselves despite its short-ish runtime (it’s around 100 minutes), and a great sense of humor. It’s only further proof that “different” doesn’t mean “bad” when it comes to new TMNT adaptations, assuming anyone needed convincing of this. The characters, including the heroes and villains, are very different from prior interpretations, even compared to other TMNT adaptations that have involved different versions compared to my Turtles like those form the 2012 series and Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — the latter of which also featured a Black April.

It’s also a looker. Mutant Mayhem uses a style made familiar to the audience through the Spider-verse films from Sony and Marvel, and it fits the Ninja Turtles’ style just as well as it fit with those movies. This isn’t surprising either considering the Turtles’ origins as comic book heroes, though this interpretation of the heroes is very different from the older comics from which they originated. Every single character looks spectacular in the style, which benefits and strengthens the very modern overall aesthetic. It’s a remarkable feat for a movie made on a mere $70 million budget.

For as much as I enjoyed Superfly, and Ice Cube’s villain fake-out at the start was unfortunate. The movie appears to set up Baxter Stockman to be an important villain in the movie, pronounced by his voice actor being the venerable Giancarlo Esposito. He’s unfortunately, let’s say, done away with before the title of the movie is even shown. It’s unfortunate, because it would have been nice to see a great new version of Baxter in a theatrical Turtles movie powered by Esposito’s very fitting voice. The other villains in Superfly’s gang, who also include Bebop and Rocksteady, Leatherhead, and Wingnut. But there will be future movies — with the next installment being confirmed for an October 2026 release yesterday. Real shame about Baxter, though.

Mutant Mayhem has been left off a bunch of lists for the best animated films released in 2023, with the movie having the unfortunate luck of releasing in the same year as The Boy and the Heron and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse, and Elemental to a lesser extent. This is the best Turtles movie I’ve seen since the first 1990 installment (and is, remarkably, the first Turtles film that critics actually liked), and I can only hope this high continues. I know how some dumb execs view animation, so I should feel a little concerned. I’m glad it will at least be continuing with a new movie.

Angela Moseley

Here’s where I admit my plans for Four In February have gone off the rails to a degree. I found myself quite busy on the day that I planned to wrap up the final short game on my list. The game itself is only 3 to 5 hours long, but I haven’t even started playing. Other things have just popped up and require my attention. It’s a good reminder that one has to actively carve out time to game and enjoy hobbies. It doesn’t just happen spontaneously, especially as an adult.

Next week you’ll know if I finished that Four in February challenge, as today is literally the last day I have to get one more game in before the midnight deadline.

In the meantime, here are a few things that have taken away my attention from the 4iF challenge.

I’ve been dealing with the bombshell news that Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com and Tumblr, has inked a deal to share user data and content with MidJourney and Open AI. It seems the data has already been collected for the purposes of being shared, and users who don’t want their data (likely going forward) shared, have to opt out. I recently had a small side blog hosted on WordPress.com, and I just moved it to self-hosting a day before this news broke. That said, all three of my sites have WordPress.com integration. Looks like I’ll be spending part of my Saturday night disentangling my sites from those connections. As a quick reminder, WordPress software which powers this blog, is different from the managed hosting found on WordPress.com and is not owned by Automattic.

Better Offline (2024)
Source: iHeart, any podcatcher
Episodes: 3 as of this writing

This extra busywork resulting from shady deals is another reminder of the late-stage tech capitalism treadmill that we’ve been running on for years. First crypto was the next big thing that was going to revolutionize finance. Then NFTs were going to revolutionize art with collectable digital assets. Now it’s generative AI that will replace writers, artists, voice actors, actors, and even programmers to somehow “democratize” skills that tech bros don’t want to take the time to learn. I miss the days when tech news used to be exciting, and didn’t feel like a both a scam and a bubble about to pop at any moment.

Which is why the new podcast, Better Offline, hosted by Ed Zitron has been perfect listening. This show explores the darker side of the tech industry, including how leaders have impacted and manipulated society as a whole. I discovered this podcast because of recommendations from Behind the Bastards and Internet Today. There are only three episodes as of this writing, but so far I do recommend giving the podcast a try. The first episode was a strong introduction to this series, and the concept of digital rot dovetails nicely with enshittification. (Even if Zitron is not a fan of the term.)

Short Adventure (working title demo) (2024)
Source: Supernerdyguy (not publicly available yet)
Episodes: 1 video game demo

I’ve also been running extra livestreams on Saturdays in the hopes of giving my friend, Supernerdyguy feedback on the RPG demo he’s developing in RPGMaker. The game’s working title is Short Adventure. It features a mixed-race woman with cursed blood trying to make her way in an unfriendly world. The combat system is heavily inspired by the older Final Fantasy games’ Active Time Battle system.

I’m enjoying the game, and Nerdy has already made a number of adjustments to his demo based on the feedback from the livestream. Unfortunately, the newest version of his demo is no longer compatible with the version I’m running. So I’d have to play the demo over again to see the changes. Which I plan to do, offline of course.

I’ll do a full QC contribution for this game once I finish it on Saturday, and try the reworked demo.

Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness (2017)
Source: PlayStation Vita (also on Steam)
Episodes: 1 video game

Otherwise, I’ve been continuing my playthrough of Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness. Inspector Nadeshiko Kugatachi’s route is indeed where most of the intrigue in this visual novel is concentrated. She even has a different decision-making mechanic where if the right choices are selected, she starts to regain some of her missing memories. I’d probably be further along on her route if I hadn’t taken a break to play some of the Unicorn Overlord demo.

Joseph Daniels

My quest to watch all of my physical media continues with today’s film, purchased in person from Sunrise Records in Prince George, British Columbia. Part of physical media preservation also involves the preservation of those places where physical media can be bought and/or found. It may be easy to just load up Amazon and buy whatever you want, whenever you want, but there’s no replacing the feeling of browsing shelves at a store, looking for hidden treasure. There’s also no replacing browsing the shelves at a library, looking for the same. You never know what might become your favourite novel, and if you do find one at the library, it shouldn’t take too much longer to receive it if you order it from a bookstore instead of Amazon. You still have to wait for it, but you’re supporting the little guy against the big bully Jeff Bezos.

Your Name (2016)

We actually have a thoughtful review already on the blog from our resident anime expert Alex, so I would suggest reading it instead, because it doesn’t get into any spoilers. Well, neither do I, but I’m about to launch into two or three tangents that aren’t going to be about the movie itself and you’ll soon realize that I might tangentially discuss the movie, but I don’t really say anything about it.

This is such a beautiful story about two people from different parts of Japan connecting in an unusual way, and it makes me wonder why no one else has done anything quite like it. Without spoiling it, I was expecting a film with an impossible romance, and I did not expect there to be actual stakes for one of the two main characters. Also, as Alex said, this movie ends on a hopeful note and feels pretty satisfying. So I don’t think I need to really talk about the movie itself.

Instead, I’d like to wonder what it would be like if there was a series with a similar premise. Maybe a twelve episode show about two characters constantly swapping bodies for no real reason that we can see (at first), and they find themselves gradually getting to know each other as they try to live each other’s lives and teach each other about passing as one another and in the end, they have to meet in order to stop swapping with each other. Maybe they might realize they like it better swapped and also that they want to continue to be in each other’s lives.

I can’t quite decide how it ends, though. I don’t know if I want them to decide then and there to remain in each other’s bodies forever or if they get swapped back to normal first and must find a way for one more swap so that they can truly be happy. It has the potential to be a story about gender affirmation and I think such a series would be very beautiful.

I’m kind of surprised no one has done anything quite like this, as far as I know. Anime is so full of overlap, there’s no reason there shouldn’t be a show like what I’ve outlined above. The isekai genre itself is a good source of repeat stories. If you want an isekai story about eating food obtained from killing monsters, there’s at least two of them, and at least two more about people from an isekai world eating Japanese food in a restaurant that connects the isekai world directly to Japan through its front door, meaning that you’ve got at least four shows that combine the categories of Cooking Anime and Isekai Anime. There’s at least two that I know of where a pharmacist from our world is working in an alternate world. There are also anime remakes to consider, meaning there’s literally two Fruits Basket shows. Like, not just the same general premise, but two shows about a girl named Tohru Honda meeting the Sohma family and learning about their curse that turns them into zodiac animals when hugged by someone of the opposite gender, and which includes the cat as an outcast.

There’s also a new version of Spice & Wolf coming this year. So where’s my Your Name inspired body swap romance anime?

~ ~ ~

I can’t say that I’ve had any dreams quite like the ones that constantly swapped Mitsuha and Taki into each other’s bodies. But that’s not to say I’ve not had dreams where it seemed like I was connecting to someone else. There’s one that stuck with me for years where I found myself in a world, a version of Earth, that was slowly being eaten and terraformed by a mechanical presence from space which landed on the planet and started to consume it. It felt kind of like the presence would grab more of our planet and convert it as if by nanomachines into more alien metal to continue its spread. There’s not a lot you can really do against this kind of threat, but I suppose with enough time to study it (assuming you have enough time to study it), you can figure out how to fight it. Honestly, dropping a nuke on it might be the only real option, but you’d have to be absolutely certain you could incinerate every nanomachine and that some of them weren’t going to survive and continue eating the planet in several new spots.

In the course of witnessing this world for myself, I met up with someone else who I somehow knew was also visiting this world in her dreams. We both had a kind of talisman, I think it was a button of some kind, which denoted our status as visiting this world in our dreams, and it was kind of like we would hold onto each other’s talismans to keep them safe, or find a way to keep them safe if neither of us were in the world.

In the course of the dream, she demonstrated that she was able to transform herself to resemble the Marsupilami species created for French comic books. The comics were later adapted for television and various shows were broadcast around the world including a Disney version made in the 1990s and a more authentic French version that began a decade later, so I don’t have any real reason to believe that the girl in my dream lived in France. She could’ve lived anywhere where a Marsupilami show was broadcast, or maybe could’ve discovered the show on the Internet.

She woke up first, meaning I was holding onto her talisman for her when I also woke up and unfortunately, I never saw that world again, so as far as I know, it might no longer exist, or I was unable to keep our talismans safe. Since then, I would think about this dream off and on, and watching Your Name reminded me of it again. I don’t know if it was truly a connection I made with someone or if she was a product of my imagination. I can’t imagine someone like her is very common, a person who turns herself into a specific fictional French animal in her dreams.

Thinking about it academically, the fact that it was the only time I ever dreamed about that world, the talismans and her probably means that it was all a product of my imagination, but I like to wonder, what if such a thing was real? What if that world really was in the process of being destroyed? What if she really does hop to other worlds in her dreams as well? However, there’s no reason to think that she’d be from this particular version of Earth if she did exist, and if that’s the case, then the only place we could even meet would be in our dreams.

I don’t think cross-dimensional travel is actually a thing for us right now anyway. I know we’re supposed to pretend that the Marvel universe is similar enough to our own that it’s happening to our world, but I should think that the alien attack on New York City in The Avengers proves that it’s not really our world, despite that most of our popular culture is pretty much the same as that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Anyway, there seems to be a multiverse thing happening in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Phases 4, 5 and 6, but as far as I know, this isn’t happening at all in our world, so if Marsupilami Girl does exist somewhere out there, I’ll likely never get to experience my own personal version of Your Name.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I caught her name either.

This Week’s Short Film
大江戸火消図会 Oedo Hikeshi Zue (2013)

Black History Month is leaving us on this day, the very last day of February in a leap year. But don’t forget it, especially considering conservative efforts to cover it all up. Until next week, folks, in a new month.

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