Where did TMNT succeed while Heman failed?
 

Following the "real end" of the 1990's in September 2001 (you already know why), 1980's nostalgia began to kick in.

In August 2002, a second animated Heman TV-series began to air, rebooting. It lasted two seasons before cancellation in January 2004.

TMNT, however, managed to successful run an animated TV-series lasting for seven seasons between February 2003 and February 2009. Even if it wasn't as popular as the 1987-1996 animated TV-series, it's easy to say the second TMNT series was a bigger success than Heman.

Today's children enjoy a third generation of TMNT animation. But when it comes to Heman, for them it's probably Whoman?

So how and where did TMNT succeed in reintroducing, while Heman failed.

He-man failed due to the company that had the rights basically imploding. They over-reached and soent too much, doing too much all at once.

It's also due to the fact that back in 2003 4kids was still riding on Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh money which made them filthy rich, so they had enough funds to keep TMNT going for a while. 4kids lost the rights to dub Pokemon in 2006, so that's around the time they started on the road to their eventual bankruptcy.

My reasoning behind it is that He-Man failed after a while because it was based off a line of toys. TMNT was based off a comic which has more development put into it.

You would say that, but then Transformers and MLP wouldn't still be thing.

Would a series about one mutant Turtle on his own in the world have made it this long itself? It might have still been popular at one time, but I doubt it would be as enduring, or endearing. TMNT as a band of brothers and their adoptive father have some themes at the heart of it that will always be relatable to viewers of any decade so it's easier to form a real attachment to them. It's hard for them to become outdated; they can be updated for the times, but the important stuff doesn't age.

I didn't watch too much of He-Man as a kid, so maybe my knowledge/view is limited, but I imagine it might be a bit harder for He-Man to update itself to what's appealing at this period of time without losing its core identity.

Thundercats had the same problem. Maybe it's just Cartoon Network.

True to an extent but both of those properties have more toys made to keep those franchise's alive.

The real name is "Heman and the Masters of the Universe" so Heman, Manatarms, Orko and Sorceress together work like a band. But I don't know if the Heman peak (not even sure when it occurred) was bigger than the TMNT-peak around 1989-1990.

I rember that the toys was really scarce with the Mike Young MOTU show, like only 1 store had them, and it was a bits'n bobs type store and not a toy store. Same with the Biker Mice From Mars revival, the toys was a pain to find. And I don't think the 2011 ThunderCats even came here beyond our LCS that mainly took them in cause the owner was a fan and knew I wanted them.

It's a bit sad cause the 200x MOTU figures looked great, sculpted by FourHorsemen, a toy group that should be well known by TMNT collectors for sculpting one of the best Turtles figures out there. I only got to buy one figure for my youngest little brother, a ice armor Skeletor, and he adored that figure. But the next time I went to that store to get more figures, they where gone.

As I recall... going back to the logic of a 7, 8, 9 year-old kid around other 7, 8 , 9 year-old kids, it seemed like at a certain point, the overall consensus was that liking He-Man meant you were "gay" or far worse yet, a "gaylord." Nobody wanted to be known as a lord of the gays, so that was that (seriously, that's about how I remember the quiet dying of He-Man's popularity). Ninja Turtles somehow avoided that stigma with other boys.

I dunno man, Lord of the Gays sounds like a pretty epic job title.

It's not one reason but all of the reasons posted here basically and a few more:

-He-Man is more 80s than the turtles and a much harder franchise to make "cool" again.

-It aired on Cartoon Network as opposed to SatAM over the air (2k3 also failed on CN)

-4Kids had a lot of money thanks to Pokemon/anime so they could spend money on 2k3 even if it didn't make as much money.

-4Kids needed shows to fill up their kids programming block they had (FoxBox/4KidsTV) so 2k3 was an easily renewable show

-They messed up the toys by releasing figures no one wanted

The original He-Man show only lasted three years, and New Adventures didn't really take off, so the 200X didn't have the same footing as TMNT. There was also a longer gap between He-Man shows.

As a little kid...

With something like TMNT, you can fall back behind that they're not even human. They're just Turtles. With weapons.

With something like Transformers, it's robots that shapeshift into cars (cool!) and gigantaurs with weapons (cool!).

With He-Man, it's a muscular dude with no shirt with a pretty weird haircut. That's hard to reconcile. If you're in the 80s/early 90s. I don't feel like it ever really recovered or repurposed itself adequately after that to gain or regain an audience. It's still this odd thing that some people swear by, but most others are like, "Eh, that's pretty weird." Stuff like "Son of Zorn" plays with it by poking fun at it, but I'm not sure there's much to reboot in it unless it goes the aforementioned 21 Jump Street-meets-Thor 1 route.

According to Wikipedia, the original Heman series aired 130 episodes between 1983 and 1985 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He-Man...f_the_Universe while Shera aired 193 episodes from 1985 to 1987 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She-Ra:_Princess_of_Power so that's four years of the Masters of the Universe franchise. The New Adventures of He-Man aired 65 episodes in 1990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ne...ures_of_He-Man

It was normal for most shows to go the standard 65 episodes. He-man had two 65 episode seasons which was rare at the time. She-ra's second season only lasted 28 episodes, but still. Real Ghostbusters and TMNT went for a lot longer. Maybe rules were different in 1983-1985 and cartoons couldn't get away with it back then?

I was in the demographic at the time and watched a couple of episodes. I remember that it only aired late on Saturday nights on CN. Maybe if it had more exposure (more ads? a slot on Toonami perhaps?) it might have caught on more.

I don't recall any commercials or promos for it, and the only time I saw a He-Man '02 toy was in the seasonal bargain bin at my area ALDI store.

During my college years, I bought the DVD box set of the series, and I think it's rather impressive, especially when compared to the original. Very good animation and solid character arcs. Too bad they never got to introduce She-Ra.

Comparing TMNT to He-Man or Thundercats, I feel that TMNT never exactly went away, given its larger cultural impact. The movies and original cartoon were at least known and understood peripherally by the kids in my age group, who would have been 9-12ish years of age when 2k3 premiered. I saw Thundercats reruns on Toonami, but still saw it as kind of dated. Also, the 2002 series was my first exposure to He-Man.

Yeah I guess if you ad She-Ra to the run, it's more than 3 years. It was mostly a new cast of characters though, so it's not really analogous to TMNT - it would be more like if Turtles ended in 1990 and they made a Punk Frogs spinoff set in China.

Part of He-Man's problem was the mandate from either Mattel or Filmation that there was to be no character development or story arks. Every episode had to start back at square one. That gets pretty stale after a while.

The toy factor absolutely had to be a major reason that the 2002 He-Man didn't have the success that the 4Kids TMNT did. He-Man's toys were unbearably hard to find. The only ones that I ever saw in stores were He-Man, Skeletor, and Orko. All of the other ones that I have, I found online. I think I've got about fourteen toys from the series, and I only ever found three of them in stores. Whereas with the 4Kids TMNT series, I'm pretty sure I bought 100% of them in stores.