Oh dear oh dear. If you take away the mutations and you take away the teenage wise-cracking, what exactly is left? Ninja Turtles. And that’s exactly what Michael Bay is planning to deliver. Having announced that in his new imagining our half-shell heroes will be aliens rather than mutants, we can confirm that Bay will be streamlining the entire operation, calling his film simply Ninja Turtles.

The problem we have with a Michael Bay take on our beloved turtle crime-fighters is that Leonardo, Michael-Angelo, Donatello et al were brilliant back in the early 90s because they were mostly ridiculous. Come on, sewer-dwelling, pizza-eating, nunchuck-tossing amphibians – if you don’t have a sense of humour about proceedings then what’s the point? Bay has already stated that he’s looking forward to creating “incredibly real” alien turtles, failing to see that WE DON’T WANT INCREDIBLY REAL ALIEN TURTLES. No-one has ever wanted that. What we want is the boys LOL-ing their way through a barely comprehensible crime-fighting romp with bad-ass guitar riffing, Shredder shouting “NOOOOOOO” and an almost dangerous amount of high fives. Is the creator of the world’s most po-faced action film (that would be Transformers: Dark Of The Moon for those at the back) the right man for this job? Can’t we get Philip Lord of 21 Jump Street involved instead?

Stay tuned. We’ll soon be announcing Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as April, so…