Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem was a hit for its parent company, but sequels take a long time to produce (as any fan of KPop Demon Hunters right now will tell you). It won’t be until 2027 when the second TMNT movie in this series appears, but a stopgap has been put in place. Later this month the Seth Rogen Turtles will make a fresh appearance in Chrome Alone 2: Lost In New Jersey, a new short playing before The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants.

A new interview with director Kent Seki and producer Jeff Rowe, conducted by the website iO9, reveals how the short came to be and what the thought process was behind it. According to Seki, it’s what you first might assume: the second movie was going to take too long to make: “There was all this concern that we would lose the zeitgeist.” The short was meant to keep the production crew working as well as provide the toy licensors with potential new figure ideas, since the first wave of Mutant Mayhem toys sold very well.

Several different ideas were pitched for shorts, and being Christmas-themed wasn’t a requirement. It was just the pitch they settled on: a story about the Turtles discovering somebody was making bootleg figures of them without their permission.

Bootleg Turtles toys, of course, have been a problem for TMNT since the beginning, and that’s just one of several meta layers in the short. It’s also about studio execs at Paramount having bad ideas about how the Turtles should be rebooted. Someone in a suit wanted really muscular, ridiculously buff reptiles. “People wanted us to essentially make the fake version of the Turtles in this short, but we held the line on that,” says Seki. “‘They’re teenagers. They can’t be that ripped.’”

The short’s also about the encroachment of AI and slop, summed up in its choice of villain, a robot who generated the Turtle knockoffs from its own algorithms. “[We] found the narrative around AI and made the robot an AI robot that ran the entire factory, and that’s when all gelled for us,” says Rowe.

Finally, the name of the short wasn’t what it was originally called. The first title was “Christmas with Chrome Dome,” but no one liked it. “We were just sort of batting around different ideas, and we were in a lighting review, and one of the artists said ‘Chrome Alone 2,’ and another artist said ‘Lost in New Jersey,’ and we all started laughing. We said, that’s got to be it.” Even though the name is a parody, there had to be negotiations with Disney.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey will debut alongside The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants when both launch in theaters December 19.

The post The Story Behind This Month’s Ninja Turtles Theatrical Short appeared first on Anime Superhero News.