We live in a society —heh— in which it is common for the anger of many —perhaps too many— people to be unleashed every time a fictional character is reinterpreted in a new work with another skin color. Curiously, this reaction tends to occur especially when the change affects white subjectsdrawing a timely thick veil, with few exceptions and no matter how much the largest is denied, in reverse scenarios.
The release of the advance of ‘Ninja Turtles: Mutant Chaos’, the new Ninja Turtles movie produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg —and which, by the way, looks fantastic— has once again generated quite a few Comments on April O’Neil’s complexion tonewho is often associated with paleness and a mane of red hair.
race chaos
In ‘Mutant Chaos’, as in the animated series ‘Rise of the TMNT’, the good April is a black person, which has led to a proliferation of various outbursts to the cry of “woke”. But, what if I told you that there is some other probability that the case of the New York reporter is, in reality, a “whitewashing” handbook? I explain it to you.
If we go back to the original Ninja Turtles comics created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, April’s “breed”—if we can use the term—is quite difficult to discern, since the use of black and white does not help to clarify whether her physical features correspond to those of an African-American or Latina woman. However, the speculation was always there, and the jump from her to the color of her, to the animation in the 87 series and to the live action in the 1990 film as a Caucasian person, fueled the rumors about the change.
Honoring the truth April O’Neil’s racial identity issue has always been tremendously chaotic. In Kevin Eastman’s book ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Artobiography’, the author explains that the character “was originally conceived as an Asian character in Pete’s notes [Laird]but it was named after an African-American woman I once knew.”. Lairdon the other hand, has his own theory about it:
“Depends on which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator you ask. If you ask me, I’ve always seen April O’Neil as a white woman. If you ask Kevin, I suspect he would say, as he has in many interviews, that she was a kind of mixed race, very similar to his old girlfriend – who later became his wife, and later his ex-wife – April”.
Reading the points of view of both artists allows us to better understand the chaos that marked the conception of a character whose representation in the collective imagination It seems to obey more to a marketing decision than to the strictly creativeso, as it is always advisable, before tearing our hair out for what we consider an unjustifiable modification, it is convenient to scrutinize all the angles of the matter.