Mutant Mayhem’ Short Turns Donnie Into a ChatGPT Stan

Good news: we’ve got a new look at the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Christmas special, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey. Paramount Pictures has released footage of the short, which hits theaters this December. Bad news: it confirms that one of the shelled quartet teens is a ChatGPT bro.

In the footage, we see Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, and Leonardo walking down the bustling streets, window shopping for a present for Master Splinter, who, for your reminder, is voiced by the incomparable Jackie Chan. While Mikey goes the DIY route, making a mug in his adopted daddy’s image, Donatello, the “smart one,” does a very uncharacteristically smooth-brained thing by saying he would just ask ChatGPT.

This warrants a groan from his brothers, who might as well be a stand-in for the audience. What, pray tell, is the purple-color-coded teen’s retort to his rightful shaming? “Don’t blame AI. It’s only as good as its prompts.”

Mercifully, we cut away from the Donatello slander to see a live-action toy advertisement for… well, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sorta.

But hark, the whole uncharacteristic ChatGPT mention debacle is still a clever jabait, with the TMNT footage’s in-universe toy advertisement seemingly poking fun at something AI would shit out in response to an artless prompt like “What does a rat dad want?”

Instead of showcasing all their titular hallmarks, the very off-putting “tortoise-powered” toys talk up their love for cheeseburgers while having an uncanny valley’s worth of fingers. Donatello, in an effort to redeem his previous character assassination from earlier, echoes the sentiment of his brothers about New York’s knockoff heroes in a half shell, saying, “If anyone should be making money off of this, it should be us.”

We end on the brothers steeling themselves to take a harrowing trip to New Jersey to air out Authentic Imitations Toy Company’s blatant copyright infringement. If that’s not a compelling bit of Christmas tale drama, we don’t know what is.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey comes two years after director Jeff Rowe (Mitchells vs. the Machines) and producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. In io9’s review, we said the film was absolutely phenomenal, writing, “In a year that’s already given us unforgettable animation with films like Nimona, Elemental, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is right up there” as a “near-perfect movie” we couldn’t wait to revisit again and again.

It turns out that the bigwigs at Paramount caught on to everyone else’s meaning and announced that a sequel film and TV show were in the works.

Although the sequel film was hit with delays, initially slated for release next year before being pushed back to October 2027, director Kent Seki told Variety that he hopes the theatrical release of this animated short will tide TMNT fans over.

“I think audiences are hungry for new ways to experience these characters,” he said. “We’ll always love seeing them in New York, but throwing them somewhere unexpected opens the door to new humor, new stakes, and new visual possibilities,” Seki said. “If people connect with this one, I’d love to keep exploring that.”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey hits theaters December 19 with the feature The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants.

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