April 23rd, marks the 25th anniversary of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”. Variety announced today that to celebrate, there were not only festivities planned in New York City, including the illumination in green of the Empire State Building but also the announcement of a reboot of the live action film franchise.

A new live-action ‘Ninja Turtles’ movie is absolutely awesome news!

2011 is shaping up to be a great year for long forgotten franchise reboots. First we had the announcement that there will be a third “Ghostbusters” film and now we have news that we’ll get to see the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles kicking butt again on screen. 2007’s CGI ‘TMNT’ by Imagi Animation was a welcomed addition to the ‘Ninja Turtle’ mythos but there will be nothing like seeing the turtles in a half shell running around in those rubber suits again. That’s actually not confirmed (the rubber suits part) but according to Laird, they will most probably use face replacement technology to allow for more expressive faces. This probably means that the turtles will be less CGI and more rubber suits. Either way, hopefully they will do a good job. In all honesty, they could easily do a few upgrades to the suits used in the original 1990 film and they’d look awesome.

Nothing is yet known about the story however. Laird, who is also an executive producer on the film, has said that the film will be true to the original comics he and Eastman wrote in 1984 and that they will explore the origins of the turtles as well as their master Splinter. Hopefully this means they will be in the same urban gritty tone as the comics.