05-10-2018, 01:56 PM | #1 |
Foot Elite
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Fred Wolf Animation Quality
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. |
05-11-2018, 12:45 PM | #2 |
Mad Scientist
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The Fred Wolf toon’s inconsistent animation never bothered me, tbh. It was the same for other 80s/90s cartoons as well such as Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and Spiderman.
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05-12-2018, 03:53 PM | #3 |
Overlord
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Which other series at the same time do you think had the best animation (starting in 1983 with GI Joe and Masters of the Universe, and until animated Batman)?
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05-12-2018, 04:40 PM | #4 |
Emperor
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The not so great animation in several seasons 4 episodes makes some episodes seem worse than what they were. Like that Rondo episode, the Grybyx episode or the episode of that guy who made and collected wax figures of Turtle related stuff.
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05-12-2018, 05:45 PM | #5 | |
Foot Elite
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I'm sure sure which had the best but all unlike TMNT were never as off model in visual design as TMNT. It really is quite baffling going from It Came from Beneath the Sewers to The Mean Machines and seeing a different look and then back again. |
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05-12-2018, 05:48 PM | #6 |
Emperor
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The latter of which being the WORST episode animation of the entire series, IMHO.
This show had about 3 sets of teams. A, B, C+ and C -. I would say C+ would be shows like The GRybnx and Super Bebop and Mighty Rocksteady, or Son of Return of the Fly. the models are right, but they are super cartoony and fluid frames. A, would be episodes like Big Break In. Shredderville....Turtles Turtles Everywhere, Turtles On Trial. All on model stuff....all drawn to proportion...nothing looking weird. B would be stuff like Donatello's makes Time. Name That Tune. Menace Maestro Please. 4 Turtles and a Baby. stuff that looks close, but moves alot more fluidly and can be off model at times to the cartoony side. The Rare C- stuff is shows like Turtle Maniac. Repeated scenes, oddly framed shots. bad looking animation all around.
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05-12-2018, 05:59 PM | #7 | |
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I would be lying if I said I didn't prefer certain animated episodes to others (Give me Turtles on Trial anyday over most of season 4), but I didn't think the inconsistent animation was too much of a put off for a show as a whole.
It made me look forward to the next episode more (since I wondered what the animation would be like), and many episodes become more memorable because of their animation (for e.g. the squishy animation of Cowabunga Shredhead added to the comedy). The one complaint I do have however is sound quality. For the first 3 seasons, it was pretty crisp and the background music was excellent. However, season 4 onwards the audio became pretty "blurry" and doesn't improve until late season 5 which really ruined the joy of listening to the voice actors and music for me.
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05-12-2018, 06:08 PM | #8 | |
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One more note of interest is that it was not until season 6 that the turtles began having a consistent look per season.
Even in season 1, there are some pretty noticeable differences between the look of the turtles when comparing episodes. Seasons 2 and 3 were the worst offenders with some episodes looking like they're not from the same season at all. (e.g. Return of the technodrome and Return of the Fly). Seasons 4 and 5 became a bit more consistent with 2 major animation styles employed rather than a million, one animating the more realistic looking episodes like My Brother The Bad Guy and Planet of the Turtleoids and the other making more cartoony episodes like Hokum Hare and the Muckman episode. Season 6 and 7 look consistent all throughout. Season 8 then changes the aesthetic completely but the look per season stays the same until the end of the show.
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05-12-2018, 06:26 PM | #9 | |
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Also, Donatello's bandana seems to change between light and dark purple throughout the entire show. As for season 1 animation, I kinda like the Japanese vibe of it. Which is fitting for a show about ninjas and with a main Japanese villain. |
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05-13-2018, 05:34 AM | #10 | ||
Foot Elite
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Agreed, Season 6 and 7 were pretty consistent to the style of Season 2 and CBS Season 4 episodes. |
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05-13-2018, 05:53 AM | #11 |
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05-18-2018, 02:18 PM | #12 |
Foot Elite
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05-24-2018, 03:54 PM | #13 |
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That's been my dream for years. In fact, I think the only decent chance we have at getting a more mature TMNT animated series is if the Japanese are ever allowed to make a TMNT anime. Unless they do something like that OVA from the 90s again...
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05-24-2018, 05:27 PM | #14 |
Foot Elite
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As I said I think it would look more like Toei.
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06-30-2018, 05:35 AM | #15 | |
Stone Warrior
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I will say on the subject of multiple outsourced animation studios animating various episodes, that was just how it was back then, esp. with tight time-constraints. They had to get an entire season done quickly, so multiple studios were needed to complete this arduous task! I think even the 2003 TMNT toon had a few overseas studios that were used, though talking about models and all, it wasn't as obvious with the 2k3 toon that multiple studios were used because they were pretty consistent throughout. The 1987 TMNT toon and BTAS however, were more noticeable as there was less model consistency (same for PP&P and Gargoyles).
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07-13-2018, 02:50 PM | #16 | ||
Foot Elite
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The shows you listed that I left out of your quote from what I remember all looked stylistically the same even with different studios working on them. |
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07-13-2018, 03:08 PM | #17 | |
Overlord
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I do think that Fred Wolf TMNT became a much more consistent looking show after it made the move to CBS Saturday mornings. But for Seasons 2-4, it was trying to catering to the syndication market, and it needed to churn out episodes as fast as possible to meet the scheduling demands, so they got shopped around to various cheap studios. Then there was the Dublin group, and I think those episodes are some of the worst looking episodes of the bunch. Fred Wolf wasn't going to bother with requesting reshoots to fix mistakes or bad quality. If they did focus on quality control, it would probably be choosing not to do business with the poorer quality studios again.
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07-13-2018, 03:37 PM | #18 | |
Foot Elite
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With TMNT it wasn't so much inconsistency but a totally different art style between episodes. |
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07-13-2018, 03:50 PM | #19 |
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07-13-2018, 04:44 PM | #20 | |
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