Having the same villains in almost every episode....

[TurtleFan2012]

I notice some people complain about Shredder and Krang being absent in most of the Red Sky episodes.....but.....isn't having the same villains in every episode tiresome?!?

For some reason, having the same baddies popping up in over 100 episodes work in this series. Having Joker show up in every episode of BatmanTAS would make people row their eyes. I guess Shredder's comedic and insane plans kept the show going. How come it works for the OT, but not other super hero shows?

[CyberCubed]

Since the OT wasn't a serious show, this allowed them to get away with using Shredder/Krang/Bebop/Rocksteady in most episodes.

This is what made kids love them because we saw them as much as the heroes. Keep in mind there are probably a good 60 episodes of the series where Shredder/Krang don't even appear.

[MikeandRaph87]

To me The Shredder HAS TO BE reoccuring every few episodes because he is such a great character. I cannot get into the black and white comics or Next Mutation partly because he has such little time in use even if he is a driving force for the origin.Whether Shredder is with Krang or on his own he needs to be reoccuring. Its different with him than The Joker and Lex Luthor who were overexposed. Was Shredder? Sure,but his character is not as limited and can have a continued presence. Joker is not tied to Batman's origin and neither is Lex to Superman though thanks to Silver Age retooling they have a long established relationship. The TMNT were roughly four years old at the point the classic cartoon debuted and it needed a solid villain presence instead of four to five different ones. The continued use allowed the villains to develop and become a solid part of the cast as well as apart of TMNT lore. Having Shredder continueously be apart of the TMNT gives better product at least IMHO. Turtles Back In Time and TMNT did not have Shredder or an established villain(unless Karai counts in the later) just one made up for the film. Thus is less memorable. It works differently for different characters, how their use began,thier role,their popularity among other factors. I would like Shredder to be in 1 out of 3 episodes with Rat King, Krang, and others in a certain amount of the other 2 out of 3. I think TMNT works best that way. I don't think its hypocritical to want Shredder constantly and The Joker and Lex Luthor held to a minimum.

[sdp]

Having Shredder/Krang and generic mad scientists was very tiring in the OT, with such a large cast of colorful enemies it's a shame many of them were underutilized and others only left to one appearance while others didn't even appear once. Only a few were handled well like Baxter Stockman. I know Shredder/Krang were the main villains and they needed to appear alot but they could've easily cut down 20% of their appearances and they'd still be appearing in more than half of the season.

Now as to why people wanted Shredder/Krang in the red sky season is they were actually being treated with respect and it was a grittier, so people wanted more of Krang/Shredder in a more serious take. It didn't help the fact that Lord Dregg was rather a lackluster villain.

[Icebot]

I notice some people complain about Shredder and Krang being absent in most of the Red Sky episodes.....but.....isn't having the same villains in every episode tiresome?!?

I could never get tired of seeing new episodes with Shredder and Krang in them. I especially liked seeing them in the red sky episodes, that's when they got really interesting. After seeing season 8, I was excited to see more of them in season 9 and they shouldn't have been replaced by Lord Dregg.

[MikeandRaph87]

I could never get tired of seeing new episodes with Shredder and Krang in them. I especially liked seeing them in the red sky episodes, that's when they got really interesting. After seeing season 8, I was excited to see more of them in season 9 and they shouldn't have been replaced by Lord Dregg.

In "Turtle Trek" Splinter said that the Technodrome's engines may be destoryed but Shredder and Krang will be back soon to cause more chaos. However,despite that promise we got Dregg. I will assume the CBS suits had not decided that Shredder and gang should not come right back as Splinter hinted after that episode was made and aired.

[the_minimizer]

If the episodes with Shredder and Krang were an hour long, the writers would have had more options. There's only so much you can do in a 21-25 minute window. The Technodrome could have also been on the loose in more episodes. There would be fewer episodes but more would happen in each episode.

[cammy85]

In "Turtle Trek" Splinter said that the Technodrome's engines may be destoryed but Shredder and Krang will be back soon to cause more chaos. However,despite that promise we got Dregg. I will assume the CBS suits had not decided that Shredder and gang should not come right back as Splinter hinted after that episode was made and aired.

No, actually in "Shredder Triumphant", Splinter reminded the Turtles that while they no longer had the Technodrome at their disposal, they were still a threat. Splinter only appeared at the beginning of Turtle Trek, and was sadly underutilized after Wrath of the Rat King.

[Coola Yagami]

It was different kind of show. The Turtles (at least the 80's version) was all about stopping the Shredder from taking over the world (OF COURSE!!). Batman is more about 'which villain will he take down today?' Spiderman was similar, but I hated how they had to keep using the Kingpin in every episode somehow.... Spidey needed more episodes that had 100% nothing to do with Kingpin.

[MikeandRaph87]

No, actually in "Shredder Triumphant", Splinter reminded the Turtles that while they no longer had the Technodrome at their disposal, they were still a threat. Splinter only appeared at the beginning of Turtle Trek, and was sadly underutilized after Wrath of the Rat King.

Perhaps we both should watch it again.I will have to watch it again,but at the end of the episode I remember Splinter saying that Shredder and Krang would be back yet there were not...for a good while anyway.

Great point,Coola! Though I admit I liked having Kingpin used in that capacity. He is not my favorite villain or anything but I liked the role he played. I believe that Rupert Thorne was used that way however seen only so often in Batman:The Animated Series.

[ABrown]

The Shredder is probably my favorite villain, not just in the TMNT universes. So I love having him as a recurring character. Dregg was great also. I just wish the Shredder could've appeared in more than just seven "red sky" episodes. At the same time, I wish that more of the series had been in the red sky style. I think even as a kid I had wanted the original cartoon to be closer to what the red sky style was, or at the very least closer to what it was in the original five part mini-series.

[cammy85]

My guess is because Shredder is a ninja master (though he cheated to earn the title) and Bebop and Rocksteady, while incompetent, can put up a pretty good fight if they wanted to, even without weapons. Normal crooks and the occasional robbers didn't have the edge they had so it was hard to write stories about them. They used blasters as their edge. That's probably we had so many Saturday morning stories involving one Turtle versus a villain of the week where the others join him just in time to clean house. Other villains are no fun. Though I did like those episodes as it brought something different to the show then the same old. TMNT syndicated only had four episodes out of 65 not involving Shredder at all.

[pannoni1]

In honesty, it depends on the tone that the show was taking. Early on, since Shredder had so many fresh ideas, he could have come up with a new plan pretty quickly. But once the Technodrome ended up on the Dimension X asteroid and Shredder had tried over 60 times, having him appear only about every other episode seemed to be a fresh pace, as it allowed for more secondary characters to be used (too bad the OT had too many mad scientists as we definitely couldn't have gone wrong with more Mutagen Man, Tokka, Lotus, and even Rat King and Baxter episodes to give the second tier villains a better chance, in which the 2k3 series did a good job of providing. If Shredder somehow became somewhat successful by kidnapping or destroying the Turtles' allies or making them weak, then it would be more interesting for Shredder to appear in multi-part arcs. Even some of the mad scientists in the OT had Shredderesque traits with insults and soft spoken sadist goofiness. It just depends on the tone of the series.

[Bill]

I could never get tired of seeing new episodes with Shredder and Krang in them. I especially liked seeing them in the red sky episodes, that's when they got really interesting. After seeing season 8, I was excited to see more of them in season 9 and they shouldn't have been replaced by Lord Dregg.


I couldn´t agree more. Back in those days, everytime I started to see an episode, I always wanted to hear the Technodrome music in the first episode minutes (That was a Krang and Shredder garantee).

[CyberCubed]

When I was a kid I liked seeing Shredder/Krang in most episodes, but I also loved it when a mutant villain showed up too.

So for me it was pretty much half and half.

[Cipher]

I honestly feel Shredder outlived his welcome after the opening mini-series in this show.

Not that he doesn't have plenty of great moments afterward, but that's all we really needed of him being the go-to villain.

It's a shame, too, because the Fred-Wolf series gave us one of the greatest rogues galleries in Turtles history. If only they'd taken the Batman route and actually rotated through the likes of Baxter Stockman, Slash, the Rat King, any of the other one-off mutants, etc, on a regular basis.

[Weirdo-Warrior]

I liked Shredder and Krang being in every episode since they were the only true villains, and I hated every episode in which they weren't there, just like I hardly liked, say, MOTU episodes without Skeletor.
What annoyed me was that the writers didn't try to change at least the set of henchmen. I mean, we all love Bebop and Rocksteady, but there were so many cool villains in the toys and comics, why not giving them a chance? Why not replacing Bebop and Rocksteady with another couple, like Rahzar and Tokka, or Groundchuck and Dirtbag? Why no Wyrm, Pizzaface, Scratch, Scale Tail?
In the end, the cartoon was created to sell toys, and other cartoon series introduced new characters and tried to promote them as much as possible, so I still wonder why it didn't happen with TMNT.