Why was Rise cancelled?
 

I've been out of the loop, is there a reason why Nick pulled the plug on Rise?

I wonder if it's due to the toys not selling. I've seen successful shows get canned due to toys not selling, and even though this show is still airing it's final episodes, I don't even see the toys anymore.

Yeah, that right there. If it was selling it would still be on shelves.

Agree.

I can understand people who liked it wanting it back, but when they're watching it on Nick for free...why is Nick going to invest time and money into a show that isn't pulling a big enough audience and profiting enough to be worth it to keep it going.

Now, to be fair, they weren't exactly giving people that much product to buy, and the Turtle figures in particular were not that great looking and didn't translate well to real life toys. (Some of the non-Turtles were better, but too scarce?) That said, well, I guess Rise fans should have gone crazy cat lady mode and bought irrational quantities of it to support it and make them think it was popular. But that sounds a little unreasonable.

The last Rise products I saw, and beyond the end of the toy line, was some kid gift set for probably Valentine's Day (or Easter?) and they weren't exactly flying off the shelf. I still see Rise gift bags in Dollar Tree currently (at the one I visit for my job every week) and they aren't exactly selling fast either.

But hey, if any Rise fans what any remaining memorabilia, check the gift bags. And if not for a gift, well... I dunno, cut out and frame a side of it for art?

The toys were trash. Really, just awful. The articulation was easily Playmates' best, but the likenesses were God-awful. Especially for Raph & the Donnie which came packaged with a drone vehicle of sorts. Toys largely fund these cartoons, as I understand it, so their failure may be the most simple answer, sure. I saw a lot of guys who didn't like the show support the toy line, out of brand loyalty. I also saw many express that they'd have liked to, if only the toys didn't look so bad, bias against the actual episodes aside. Even 'haters' like to pepper their shelves with a new set of turtles, if only to sort of represent their evolution over time. I bought them despite my own criticisms, but largely on clearance, & out of desperation. They/we deserved better figures, for sure. At least concerning the turtles themselves, anyway. Others, like Meat Sweats & other baddies, were great!

Obviously, the series making dramatic changes in style, tone, & character turned off the majority of longtime fans (not me, I loved it, but I'm not blind to the fact). Those changes seemed to scare off the majority of companies who otherwise would have wanted to license these characters for the merch, too. Remember, 2012 had people saying Turtlemania was back. You couldn't go ANYWHERE without seeing tons of goods with CG renderings of those turtles on 'em. That's a lot of revenue to drum up, or in this case, not see. I saw Rise party favors & stickers, not much else. They made it impossible to support this iteration financially, honestly.

Nick also treated it very poorly. Odd scheduling, hiatuses, lackluster updates, shoving it into obscure time slots & ultimately the Nicktoons channel, etc.

There could be any number of reasons:

• Low toy sales (most likely)
• Low TV ratings (second most likely)
• Not enough people watching it digitally (wherever that was, if anywhere)
• Too expensive (I'm willing to bet Aussies cost more than Koreans)
• Not enough buzz on twitter (no, really, that's a thing these days)
• Another pitched show (possibly TMNT related) was projected to have better chances

There's also the possibilty that Rise was never meant to last more than two or three seasons in the first place. There are thirteen Transformers cartoons (twenty-two if you count Japanese exclusives and online ****) and hardly any of them lasted more than seventy episodes, most don't even exceed fifty-two. So it is indeed possible that TMNT cartoons from now on may not last one hundred plus episodes.

Rise always struck me as a quick, temporary experiment to keep something TMNT out there while they work on the next "real" TMNT cartoon.

Did anyone ever even see a t-shirt, at least a kid one, for this show? I saw them online, but never a single one in person.

Also, pulled out my wrestling Leo, one the few Rise figures I bought. Why did they give him a shirt that's basically wearing him? Compared to my 'in disguise' PD Leo (honestly a fav variant figure among recent incarnations), I just don't get it. Playmates clearly knows how to do a good sculpt of a Turtle in clothing, so why did they make the choice they did with the Rise figure, just putting a rubbery plastic "shirt" on over top of the figure? Was it a cheap shortcut to not bother with a new sculpt?

Tried to get a pic of these two. (Though too lazy at this hour to post it for reference.) Annoys me that the Rise figures don't even stand up well.



I keep seeing people now claiming that it's popular on Twitter... but well, where was that popularity when it mattered, and it kind of needed to be popular on television, too, not just a minority of people online after the fact. :tconfuse:

The people that it needed to be popular with the most aren't old enough to have a Twitter account yet.

True, it's a good point. They did want to go younger. Guess the little kids didn't care. (And/or like my nephew banned from shows that insanely hyper.)

Hopefully, maybe Nick is realizing that where the money is, is more-so with the people old enough to earn it, as well as have influence on what their own kids are seeing if it's good enough to pull the older fans in.

The only shirt I saw of this show was a grey one with all four turtles and the show logo on it. Saw no kid wearing one though.

But yeah, pretty much what everyone else has said. We all saw the cancellation coming but what caught us off guard was when they shortened the season from 26 to 13 episodes. That shows how much Nick really didn't see much profit nor further use for this series.

Pretty much what everyone said above. If your toys don't sell your cartoon is F'ed. Not to mention changing a lot of the characters so much that it turned off the hardcore turtle fans.

also nick went out of their way to kill it. changing the air times, moving it to nick toons, only releasing two dvds in all this time. as for the toys if they would have stopped releasing wave one constantly and given us the figures they kept hinting at it probably would have sold better. i really wanted that hidden city add on.

The toys and the time/channel changes/breaks were the shows killer. A lack of consistency of new episodes will eventually turn away children, unless they are a really big fan of the show. This leads to declining toy sales which will lead to cancellation

Probably all in response to poor ratings/receival. Attempts to right the ship.

It's also possible it was originally re-tooled from being a Michael Bay/Platinum Dunes movie tie-in cartoon. Donatello has the same goggles on his head that he wore in the movie, and Raphael is "bigger and bulkier" like the Turtles were in the movies.

After the movies bombed they probably re-tooled the show into what it is now. Remember this cartoon came out in 2018 so it was in pre-production as far back as 2016 when the second movie came out.

Yes, it is certainly posssible that it was originally meant to be a tie-in to the PD movies... But they sure changed a lot if that was the case... Like way more than you'd expect if that was the case. If it really was meant to be a tie-in (and not just loosely using some elements) then you'd expect more similarities to remain. As examples:

• Splinter being a literal lab rat
• Sacks being where they came from
• April being an adult reporter
• Vernon hanging around being a creep
• Shredder being a regular human
• Karai being a modern day member of the Foot
• Krang and Dimension X
• The Turtles being open allies to the police
• Casey being a male corrections officer
• Baxter Stockman being an adult scientist
• Bebop and Rocksteady... Having any signifigant presence

Not saying all or even most of these elements would have been kept, just that expect more than just "Raph and Donnie kinda look the same as in the movies... Sort of...".

Yes, I know it's dumb but appearently it is something companies track these days.

I tried to buy em on the basis of the show might not be for me, but at least if the toys look good... And I just couldn't. They were just too crappy looking.

While I don't mind making them look different to a degree, I particularly did not like the size difference between Raph and the others. The exaggerated skinny limbs on the other three were on their own not good for figure designs. Far too flimsy and can hardly stand up. If an adult has a hard time making them stand steadily on their feet, how frustrated are the kids going to get with that who they wanted as the audience? That just hurts the play potential. When I saw the Rise basics Five Below had, the limited articulation was better for the young kids, but I only got my nephew Raph because I really thought he might end up breaking the others with those skinny limbs. :tconfuse: And that face paint and the basic Leo looking drugged or something... ugh.


As for PD... ehhhhh... I dunno, there's clearly some inspiration there at least in the case of Raph and Donnie's designs -- and maybe utterly coincidental that Rise Leo's red marks falls almost exactly across where PD Leo's scar(s) is above/across his right brow and cheek so maybe they looked at that and it evolved into the red stripes -- but enough else is different that I doubt it was supposed to be a PD show per se. I think it's also probable they did the old "hey, here's a random idea, now what franchise will we apply it to?" lazy nonsense.

From what I understand, Nickelodeon went through a management change and the new people in charge decided to get rid of what was considered to be "Surplus material" from their predecessors, which included Rise.

The only Rise toy I have is the one of April, since that was the best looking of them all.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon...._AC_SX425_.jpg

Problem is that she has the same issues as the others: as in they don't look the way they do in the show.

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8e/f9/58/8...d783c0e6ba.jpg
Yes, a dress is a bit hard to pull off in toy form but it's what made her look.