It’s very possible that I am completely blinded by my overwhelming desire for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie to be good that I’ll think anything related to it is fantastic. That could be – it has to be – the case with the movie’s official song, “Shell Shocked,” right?
Like Vanilla Ice’s “Ninja Rap” from The Secret of the Ooze, this newest reboot of the franchise features its own accompanying tune, but I somehow doubt Juicy J and Wiz Khalifa are going to show up and hang out with the turtles at a club. But if they do, you’ll need a bag to pick up all of the brain matter that gooped out of your ears from seeing it.
Anyway, when I first listened to “Shell Shocked,” I was adamantly against it, sure that my ears were being abused in ways never thought possible. But, I took a step back and realized that I was holding “Ninja Rap” on a ridiculous pedestal God Himself couldn’t reach.
It’s an utterly absurd song, and so is “Shell Shocked.” It’s pretty much exactly what a TMNT song would sound like these days, and since Juicy J has been whoring himself out at a breakneck pace recently, it adds an even deeper wrinkle of pop culture posterity to it.
Fun fact about “Go Ninja Go”: When I was a freshman in college at Ohio University, Vanilla Ice came to perform at our brand-new student center. There was a tiny stage (with Insane Clown Posse-esque stuff hanging all over it) in the middle of a huge grand ballroom and it wasn’t really dark enough in there, making it even more surreal. For most of Vanilla Ice’s performance, the crowd chanted “Go Ninja, Go!”, and Ice obliged numerous times by performing the song. It happened at least six times and, at one point, he brought up on stage any attractive girls he could find while doing it. It got weird.
There is still the very real chance that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will be a terrible movie, and that I’ll never be able to stop wondering why all the turtles got on steroids and wore random cloths around their body parts. Well, I’ll be wondering that no matter what.
But hey, maybe this movie will capture the spirit of the movie-based turtles, which is really that they’re a bunch of fun-loving ninjas who love pizza and cracking jokes on each other. That can’t be too hard, can it? If “Shell Shocked” is any indication, it would seem its on the right track (pun…intended? Who cares).