TMNT Concept Art Reveals Designs For Bebop, Rocksteady, And Krang
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This year’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was riding a rocky road from the very start. Even though Michael Bay was only producing, not directing, his mere involvement was enough to convince many fans that it was a shitshow in the making from the start. Then there were the designs for the Turtles themselves, which looked a bit too much like Shrek for anybody’s liking. That being the case, maybe we should be glad that director Jonathan Liebesman’s film steered clear of fan favorites such as Krang, Bebop, and Rocksteady, but now we can at least see what they might eventually look like thanks to concept art by Tsvetomir Georgiev.
What’s surprising is how good these baddies look compared to their reptilian nemeses. Bebop and Rocksteady, the mutant warthog and rhino, respectively, actually look pretty great, and are considerably more faithful to their original designs than the Turtles were. I imagine these guys would have gone over really well if they’d made it into the film. Oh well, there’s always the sequel…
And then there’s Krang. Krang is a brain with a face that drives himself around in a robot body. It’s an inherently silly concept, but props to Georgiev for at least making the robot look badass. Interestingly, the folks at ComicBookMovie (who first drew attention to the art) claim that, at one point, Krang was actually going to be riding around in Shredder’s gut…which is impressive in that it would have proved that you could come up with a stupider idea than a brain driving a robot body. If the fans didn’t like the flick’s extra-spiky Shredder, I can only imagine how much of a fit they would have been driven into by Kranger.
Speaking of Shredder, Georgiev’s art also includes two designs for the baddie, the first of which is about as close to the look of the cartoons as you can get. The second version adds a gun and gives the whole outfit a grittier, more paramilitary feel, but still isn’t nearly as over the top as what we eventually got on screen.
You can see more of Georgiev’s art below, including his take on the Turtles themselves, Splinter, and some sort of big freaky unidentified mutant.
