TMNT Fred Wolf Series is 29 Years Old
 

Today marks the 29th anniversary of the Fred Wolf series, It premiered on December 14, 1987.

To think I watched this show when I was 3 years old, probably around 1988 or so. And here I still am nearly 3 decades later still interested in TMNT.

How can a fully grown adult still have the same interest in something as a 3 year old? I don't know how but it did it for many of us.

Something about TMNT brings out the kid in all of us, They are fun living and that's what made them appeal to us, I was only 14 years old when I watched it.

Should have just saved this thread for next year.

I was two years old and have no memory of a time which I was not a TMNT fan. It is all because of this cartoon.

I will update the topic once we get to the 30th anniversary.

Ironically enough the first episode I ever saw, if this is true, was "Incredible Shrinking Turtles" from Season 2. Mainly because my mother told me when we watched the first episode together it was when the Turtles "got really small and had to fight a snake" and then Splinter fought Shredder.

Not a bad first episode to see.

The most memorable episode (among the first TMNT VHS tapes that I watched as a kid), was this baby.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HCouZM4OjK0/hqdefault.jpg

I really would like to have seen the pilot episodes when it aired as a 5-day event. Too bad there's no surviving promos from local channels. I imagine commercials would have had a field day pronouncing the franchise title over and over again.

I didn't grow up with the OT, but I found out about it about almost 4 years ago when I became a new fan of tmnt through the Nick show, and I absolutely adore and love the old cartoon with all my heart!

The first episode I ever saw was "Splinter Vanishes"

am i the only one who didn't like this series when i first saw it in 1989?

somehow i gave it another chance though and glad i did.

i just wish the stuff coming out today had the sense of fun and adventure that the old stuff had. 4kids was the last group to get the formula right.

I want to find some of the WPIX promo's.

I THINK they had custom recordings from the voice actors in them.

either that, or i am mis remembering the toy commercial spots.

I specifically remember a Krang shot from '4 Turtles and a Baby' that had new dialouge for KRang.

'Defeated by 4 turtles and a baby, unbelievable..'

Yeah I know it's crazy however I don't care. I'm proud to like this cartoon. :lol:

I agree, it's a bit premature.

I like to hear stories from new fans of the FW Ninja Turtles, that's quite nice. :)

With more serialised and complex plots in cartoons today writers and animators have forgot to add 'fun' to cartoons. Saturday cartoons are also dead from what I understand. Also remember most television scripts are made by committee today rather than one writer, one voice.

28 December 1987–1 January 1988
 

Some other sources say it aired between 28 December 1987–1 January 1988.

My favorite thing about the original toon might be those awesome VHS covers. Seeing them brings back so many memories. They are striking, colorfun, and fun.

Oh good, it gets another big celebrated anniversary next year. It already seems to (somehow) get an anniversary celebration every time the Mirage comics get an anniversary every 5 years, too.

Also, no one seemingly batted an eye at 2013 being the 10th for the 4Kids show...but maybe there's hope for 2018 (the 15th).

Nope. It wasn't until after I saw the original movie in 1990 that I really warmed up to the original cartoon.

Again I completely agree. I think Nick's series should've tried to be a little more fun, and not be so serious.

What, are you sh*tting me?

I can't think of what they might do for the 30th anniversary of this show:

1. The entire show is already on DVD, and was also re-released in a Turtle Van boxset. They'll probably just sell it again like this, but I don't expect any new remastered DVDs or anything.

2. Turtles Forever came out in 2009.

3. The Nick cartoon does have 1 more crossover episode with the OT in Season 5 coming up, but it'll likely just be a one part episode.


The only alternative I can think of is IDW greenlits a mini based on the original cartoon universe. Perhaps they'll do 80's TMNT meets Adam West Batman after the Nick/B:TAS crossover ends.

It would be pretty awesome if they released a blu-ray for the original cartoon. I wonder how many it would take to fit the entire show.

Nothing says serious like Kraang butt cannons or a giant talking pizza the hutt.

No, I despised the FW show as a kid. It wasn't until my 20's when I started to watch the whole show, I grew a fondness of it.

To be fair, there's alot of serious moments in the show and they've taken some big risks such as showing rat kings corpse, tang shens on-screen death and splinter being stabbed.

True that. But I think in general, it's much more lighthearted than 4Kids.

I mean, the artwork and voice actors alone make it lighter. Looking at you, Toddler Mikey.

Not to mention that the dark moments can seem somewhat out of place between the mutant food and the "throw a bunch of assests in a blender without rhyme or reason" episodes.

Thats what the Nick show was always meant to be, the middle ground between FW and 4Kids, which is the show's biggest strength yet biggest weakness at the same time.

I guess that's fair. Although the idea that 4Kids is this dark, gritty, drab Mirage-like thing is pretty far out there. 4Kids is just as wacky and campy as FW in many ways.

4kids is just as much a toy commercial as the rest of them.

I think the dramatic stuff in the Nick show almost always knocks it out of the park and helps balance the gonzo stuff.

Felt kind of forced in 4kids, sometimes.

The 4kids series did push the bar as far as they can go with certain episodes, given they showed impalement and on-screen deaths in a few episodes.

Um, at the beginning of the series it certainly wasn't doing that. During the first season or so, the Nick show kinda didn't know what it wanted to be, and did it's own thing, introducing new characters/ideas. It wasn't 'till later it started adapting from previous versions.

This definitely!

What the Nick series has done lately, Is introduce new old characters, and I mean old characters we were familiar with, but done in a drastically different way that seemed like completely new characters, Some of them were taken right out of Fred Wolf but in name only.

Take a fan favorite character and completely change them to be a new character entirely, there only association is the name.

4Kids did have a bad habit of being overly melodramtic, don't know if its the voice acting or the direction but some of the emotional scenes felt really narmy at times.

Every series does that. 4kids and IDW do it too.

Every time a character is brought back they're reinvented and revamped.

When did they actually start working on the OT before it aired?

yeah, but only because t hey try to go SERIOUS dark.

If they mellowed it back a bit, the two might mesh together better.

but they never follow up on the seriousness, and that's why it never works in this series. 4kids did it better. well, at least until fast forward :)

If I had to take a guess, probably sometime in early 86.

Right around this time:

https://thetwistedpathgroup.files.wo...-the-devil.jpg

I remember seeing that when they announced the first PD movie.