[pferreira]

One thing I've always found difficult to defend is the FW cartoon's variable animation quality during it's ten season run. The show was constantly off model. Now as we all know Toei did the first season but when the show was retooled beginning with Season 2's Return of the Shredder a style was set for every episode to follow, a style I liked the most but had trouble maintaining.

Now the problem is with all the different animation studios working on the series the show's animation never looked consistent. I'm not talking about the animation errors littered through the seasons, I'm talking about the actual look of one episode looking entirely different from another. Maybe I'm wrong but I doubt very much this was intentional but it does raise one question: why was the show so off model in design? Why did an episode like The Mean Machines or Enter: The Fly look so different to most of the other episodes of a season?

The set style of Return of the Shredder remained the same about 50% of the time right passed Planet of the Turtleoids through to Season 7 but 50% still isn't anything to brag about. Of course when you have different studios working on an animated series it won't always look perfect but next to any other cartoon from the 80s like The Real Ghostbusters or a 90s cartoon like Batman: The Animated Series it always looked like five or more studios worked on the show, not one, i.e. off model. Those shows had numerous animation studios working on episodes but the style remained consistent. I wondered what you guys thought about this?

Now I'm not saying that some of these different types of animation were bad, some of them I quite liked such as Turtles on Trial by TMS but at the end of the day that wasn't the standard set by the Season 2 premiere so you could say even TMS messed up. Curious to know what you think? Also if anyone could provide screenshots of the different animation styles that would be cool.