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Old 02-22-2021, 10:11 PM   #1
neatoman
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How much Creative Control did David Wise have?

When he was still alive, David Wise had an unfortunate tendancy to spread false information, in particular about what ideas on TMNT season 1 were his ideas. We know for a fact that many of his claims were false because some are contradicted by the comics, such as the claim that he was the first person to depict April as a major character or that he came up with the Turtles' personalities. Others are contradicted by what we know about the toyline, like how he claimed to have created Bebop and Rocksteady, even though we know they were designed for the toyline and Fred Wolf himself made that clear. Sometimes his word goes against the claims of others who worked on the show, like how he claimed to come up with Cowabunga as the catchphrase whereas the voice actors claim it was adlibbed. And others are just too bizarre to be trusted, like his claim that Krang as an alien brain creature who created the mutagen and needs a robotic body was entirely inspired by some old movie, and that the Utroms only inspired the stomach cavity placement by the end of his creation, which is totally ass-backwards considering what he was working with.

Of course, David Wise was still the writer of the first season. There is no way that it wasn't, to some extent at least, his creation. The problem is just that because he wasn't honest, we can't know for sure how much was actually his ideas. As far as I can deduce, what were most likely all actually his ideas amount to this:
  • The Neutrinos.
  • The Channel six crew.
  • Bebop and Rocksteady's origins as humans (though probably nothing else about them, like their names or appearence).
  • Most of the events and plot connections in the first season, but not most of the key concepts and certainly not anything that was established in the comics.
  • Whatever characters that debuted in his episodes but never had any toys or got toys like three or four batches later.

The way I figured, if it's in line with the first three batches of toys and their descriptions, it was probably decided upon before David Wise got around to it. So for example, Bebop and Rocksteady were in the first batch so they were going to be in the show regardless of Wise's involvement, but the descriptions don't reference them starting out as humans meaning Wise could have been responsible for that. The descriptions also state that Splinter started out as human and that the Foot Ninja are robots, so this was likely decided upon before he got on board.

The second part of this is questioning wheter or not it even makes sense as a purely creative decision. One of his claims is that he created the Technodrome out of a need to explain the robotic ninja and in turn Krang to explain where it came from. Now even ignoring that the Technodrome was obviously always meant to be a playset (just look at the damn thing), the creative process described doesn't quite make sense. The robots could just be created in a factory if that was the first idea and the other two are directly tied to the origin of the main characters, not to mention how it would have been easier to work in the opposite direction, create the alien and then his tools.

Of course, David Wise himself is no longer around to confess and the only way we'll know for sure now is if documentation makes it way to the public. Which is sad, if he had only told the truth when he was alive we would have a much clearer picture of how the show ended up the way it did without the need for some document leak.

Anyway, the bottomline, what do I think the first season of the show would have been if David Wise had full creative control? Honestly, a child friendly mishmash of the first seven issues, a very loose but still more recognisable adaptation than what it ended up being. Not because he had any appreciation for the material, but because it would have been easier for him than to write what he actually did.
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