Venus: The Unwanted "Child" that ruined the "marriage" of Eastman and Laird?
 

In his most recent "Ask PL" blog post, Peter was asked about Venus. Here is the back and forth:
Could this back track, be the rift that broke up the dream team of Kevin and Peter?

If nothing else, it was surely the straw that broke the camel's back. Toyfair photos from around 1997 show Eastman living it up at the Playmates Next Mutation booth but Laird was no where to be seen.

I found this quite interesting and a good insight into Venus. I think it was a combination of this and other unspoken things that broke the guys up. I would like to hear Kevin's side of things

I have to say tho, the person who asked him about this on his blog is an awesome guy for doing so and most likely would comment on this thread about how awesome he is...
...
..
It was me

Aw, poor Venus. Nobody loves you :(

Except for certain people on Deviantart, it seems...

Peter and Kevin hadn't been seeing eye to eye for quite awhile before Venus came along.

Man, we need someone to just write a tell-all-memoir already.

Venus was a terrible idea. Next Mutation might have been better received without her.

I'm indifferent to the idea of Venus. I don't see the idea of a female turtle that strange considering the series at all.

The breasts protruding from underneath her shell is the first thing that comes to mind when I recollect Next Mutation episodes. Then again I guess that's the only way you can distinguish an anthropomorphic female turtle from a male turtle other than the voice.

There tons of other ways, but breasts are the easiest (and laziest) way to do it. same goes for hair, just look at the countless female mutant turtles on deviant Art

Why would a female turtle have breasts when their reptiles that don't care for their offspring. The female turtle's plastron will make it impossible for offspring to reach it for sustenance. The enlarged breasts of a female creature only exist to feed it's offspring. So, it looks like they just put breasts on a creature that doesn't have any or needs it because of their solitary evolution.

My guess it's because the mutagen makes creatures not just humanoid, but human-like.

The turtles get teeth (and lips?), pose-able thumbs and overall a body more akin to Humans or primates, and their Carapace and Plastron seems to be more move-able then the usual Turtle species have. And the upper part is often shaped like a Male Human chest. And besides appearance the mutant turtles gets human-like emotions and the ability to comprehended languages and speak like humans, and think as we do

It wouldn't be out of the question that a female turtle could get mammary glands in that context. but the plastron would be in the way, that the shell is a part of a turtle's ribcage, Boobs would be impossible, but hey. Turtle teeth.

Shell-boobs are as useless as Chain Mail bikini, but hey it looks kewlzors!

She has fans, don't worry.

Venus was clumsily added, I admit. She could have been better received if she followed Ninjara's route in the comics.

Dude, I wanted to make the exact same thread yesterday but then I was thinking, no, I'm overthinking this. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of this.

It would certainly explain Laird's intense antagonistic feelings towards her.

Gender equality
 

Venus makes me feel this:

*If TMNT debuted today instead of 1984, with more gender gender equality, would two of them actually be female, and two male?

Well equality to me doesn't have to mean equal quantity. Just equal in character quality.

It's true, it wouldn't be a boy's cartoon if there wasn't a token girl in there somewhere.

Tmnt
 

TMNT was never the same "just for boys" as so much other. TMNT had a big girl fanbase and I hate hearing TMNT as "just for boys". I know several girls who loved the show. When a group of children played TMNT in the garden, they were April and Irma.

Also, check out Archie April when Splinter trains her.

Thank you! :tgrin:

Of course it was a little annoying that the girls could never play the turtles. Ever heard of gender blind casting? lol

Funny I thought Mona Lisa was the character that got between Eastman and Laird.Though she wasn't a mutant turtle.I really wasn't a fan of Venus either.I know it was the Saban version and they did thier own thing with TMNT but still I think it would have been better recieved with out Venus.

Spinoff
 

Instead of Venus with that stupid magic stuff, why not write a spinoff like this (similar to the Punk Frogs):

Shredder mutates 2-4 female turtles, train them wiith martial arts to face off the TMNT, but after the fight TMNT tell them Shredder is a bad guy, and they befriend eatch other. The female turtles then live in the sewers of New York City (or some other town) and have their own stories, enemies and that stuff, and sometimes team up with the TMNT.

Venus would be better if she was just an ally to the turtles....like usagi or mondo gecko or even like april. NOT as a ninja turtle.

Venus could have also been better off being the live action version of Mona Lisa maybe, and not as a turtle at all.

Pandas have opposable thumbs and their not primates, lol. I still have to strongly disagree with the idea of turtles getting breats because they don't care for young and evolved thousands of years living a solitary life. The turtles are human-like but not entirely because they have 3 fingers, 2 toes, and a shell. There are many ways to showing a creatures gender instead of just putting boobies on them. For example the berserker from Gears of War and Tigress from kung Fu Panda are female but they don't present them in a way of just sticking boobies on them; They show that they are female in clever ways or just being closer to a anatomically correct structure.

but still I know you can't expect people to realize what they can't put boobies on, lol.

Next Mutation fanfiction
 

If you check out TMNT fanfiction on the Internet written between 1997-2003, a lot of it is based on the Next Mutation.

Guess you didn't see my previous post
And Pandas do NOT have a thumb, they have five fingers and a Sesamoid bone acting as a faux-thumb.

LOL I did see your previous post but I didn't look at the username.

Let me rephrase"Pandas have a opposable [digit]" and thank you for letting me know about a Panda fact!

Where would she live?
 

But if so, where would she live?

Yeah,That's what I was thinking too.I remember reading somewhere that someone at FW came up with the idea of a female turtle but the idea was shot down by Laird and that's where they came up with the idea of Mona Lisa being a Salamander/Lizard type creature.The character to me is one of the most memorable secondary characters from that series.

Even when I was younger, I got the vibe that Saban made them shoehorn in Venus, so the Ninja Turtles could be more like the Power Rangers and have at least one female member.

I don't get why they did this, when they could have always had April O'Neil play a role in the action. Maybe have an April that knew martial arts in the Next Mutation series. As far as having a strong female character in the series, April could just as easily filled that role. She may have even come off as even stronger, since she's a normal human having to deal with this stuff instead of a mutant.

I agree. 2003 April got to the point where she could take down multiple foot ninjas without using any superpowers or weapons, but it didn't happen overnight. I tried watching The Next Mutation recently, and while I laughed at parts of it, the thing that turned me off of it is that Venus is a Mary-Sue by her first encounter. First she beats up all four of the real turtles and hangs them from the ceiling in complete darkness, then she starts hitting on Leonardo and he clumsily reworks continuity to include her, and at the end of the episode she defeats Shredder simply by looking at him and prompting Oroku Saki to fight from the inside, as though he was Anakin Skywalker; all so they can add more of their original characters.

I don't know exactly what Peter Laird's original objections were to a girl turtle, but after trying to watch The Next Mutation, I definitely share his opinion that it's even stupider than I thought. As a kid, I always felt I wouldn't ever be surprised if April suddenly started fighting the Foot clan, but a girl turtle sounded ridiculous to me even then; like it was warping the fabric of series reality, and then I found it was broken even beyond its concept. Venus seems like the sort of moronic fancharacter that an unoriginal hack on Deviantart would come up with.

Could she have been done right, to the point that she would be a good character even if she had boobs in her shell? Probably, but she'd still bear the burden of proof, because in essence, to say adding a fifth turtle (even a male one) was right is saying the traditional TMNT dynamic was wrong; that it wasn't sufficiently endearing the way it was. I think that's a big reason people hated Fast Forward, and many consider Cody the 2003 series' version of Zack from the OT. I personally think that's a bit unfair; I mean, at least Cody was smart enough to realize that becoming a ninja required extensive training, but then, at least Zack wasn't in most of the OT episodes, whereas practically every FF episode revolved around Cody.

ArchieArchie April
 

Archie April fought well after being trained by Splinter.

I have always been more of a TMNT comic guy. To me they were and will always be the best representation of the turtles. However, I still enjoyed the OT and original movie renditions of the turtles quite a bit. The original movie is still one of my top ten fav movies of all time. When the Next Mutation hit I had already been a few years out of high school. I remember the NM as being Utterly stupid. I thought the costumes looked ridiculous and the introduction of a girl turtle with magical powers made me want to vomit. The Next Mutation was one giant gimmick. I hate gimmicky stuff in the first place. The whole purpose of a gimmick is to make a quick buck and that's the feeling I got from NM, that it was produced to try and recapture whatever TMNT spark was still out there and make a quick buck doing so. Up until then that was one thing that I always loved and respected about the Ninja Trutles, they (almost) never got gimmicky (TMNT the movie III was pretty gimmicky). TMNT III and NM really tarnished the TMNT brand for me at that point. I obviously still love the turtles today, i just ignore all the rediculous stuff that i don't like.

on another note, to me, it sounds like this topic was a pretty substantial widener of the already existing rift between pete and kevin. the feeling i'm getting after reading various blogs and interviews is that kevin was willing to branch out and do some things (that he probably would have not been willing to do previously) to increase marketing and profits. Where pete, i get the feeling he cared more about the content of his beloved creation than the money.

It's interesting to imagine what the Ninja Turtles would've been like had it been conceived in 2012 as opposed to 1984. I don't think that the sheer mathematical distribution of gender is indicative of gender privileging, though. To me the Ninja Turtles are, at the heart of the story, very much rooted in male homosocial bonds - particular as it pertains to ideas of brotherhood. The Turtles themselves represent an insulated circle of relationships where brotherhood, loyalty and honor define and sustain relationships. On that level, it's a form of idealized male adolescence in which the process of identity development and ethical discovery moves one inward toward a refortified family rather than outward into an uncertain social sphere. In this case the absence of a female turtle is pretty essentially, and accounts for some of the uniqueness of the story. After all, whereas most popular depictions of teenage males finds them in constant pursuit of romantic conquests, the turtles provide a vision of masculine teenage life in which the (male) family is central to (and sufficient for) personal happiness. In that sense, the Turtle mythos was took on new and comforting dimensions for me during my own adolescence.

Still, the story can (and in most cases, does) reflect a strong interest in gender equality simply by depicting female peripheral characters in a positive light. Just as it's ridiculous to suggest that all stories should be about males, it's foolish to suggest that all stories "require" a female lead. The turtles is a stories about males, but that doesn't mean it can't portray women in a positive, empowering light. Most incarnations of April demonstrate great agency, inventiveness, intelligence and empathy and serve as incredibly empowering images of femininity. She, in most media, is the Turtles one true link to the human world and, in addition to being successful in that regard, serves as a model of all that is good and noble about our species. If that's not flattering, I don't know what is. The first cartoon April did regrettably succumb to common "damsel in distress" tropes:trolleye:, but that's less an indictment of Turtles mythology than 80's mainstream sensibilities. Other Aprils - even early depictions from the 80's - were strong, successful, empowered models of exemplary femininity and should serve to imbue what is unquestionably a "boys story" with strong traction in gender equality.

Venus was unfortunate, because her inclusion seemed less like a genuine stab at female inclusion and more like a transparent bid for female toy buying dollars. The fact that her existence was IMMEDIATELY utilized as a plot device to compel romantic pining and jealous bickering amongst the guys reflects an understanding of feminine narrative function that is more reductive than it is uplifting.

Woman
 

1987 cartoon April was actually more a carrier woman of modern time. Irma was more of a stereotype woman of old days (she usually wears skirts, dates men, avoids dangers, works as a secretary girl which historically was more associated with women than reporters, only in "Shredder Triumphant" she acts really tough). So using both characters April and Irma being friends of the TMNT was great.

And a lot of girls liked the TMNT stories, probably more than other similar action cartoons-comics of the time. (still today, a lot of TMNT fan fiction is written by girls)

Yeah, I think part of the appeal to women is the fact that - through the April/Turtles dynamic - it demonstrates women interacting with a fraternal order in a very unconventional and progressive way. The boys invite the women in and treat them as equals rather than simply objects of conquest, so the relationship between the genders is mutually empowering and supportive rather than antagonistic or predatory. It shows women entering into a circle of male intimacy without having to adopt the role of romantic interest.

Just to clarify, I wasn't suggesting that the Turtles wasn't a story for women...just that, at its heart, it's always going to be a story ABOUT guys.

Strongium 90
 

Yes, and actually, the TMNT are not the same male-Chauvinism as He-Man or Superman (super muscle powers). The TMNT are strong, but not the strongest (Bebop and Rocksteady are actually stronger). They're smart, but not the smartest (actually some of their enemies are probably smarter, especially Krang). But they combine strength, ninja skills, Donatello's science knowledge and co-operation. Several kung fu movies deipct one guy kicking down hundereds of his enemies at the same time. Tiresome after a while, and thanks to the TMNT being four guys and sometimes even assited by Splinter, Casey Jones or whatever, it's not such stories.

I love "Leonardo Cuts Loose" when the TMNT defeats the bodybuilders who use the "Strongium 90".

Has Peter ever explained why he hates the idea of a girl turtle so much?