J's Reviews is doing a season by season analysis of the 2k3 toon
 

One of my favorite youtubers is doing a weekly retrospective of the 2003 series

Here's the first part where he breaks down the first season and how it save the TMNT brand..


https://youtu.be/UPqMBZ_QWV4

He's review for season 2 goes up for the public next week, however it currently up and unlisted on youtube exclusively for his Patreon subscribers, if it's not again this site's rules, could i upload it here?

I highly recommed you check out his past retrospectives one the DC Animated Universe, and Sonic the Hedgehog series

All these years, and I don't think I ever realized (until he pointed it out) that Donatello's mask shading is all black in the intro sequence and "Things Change" but not in any other episode.

His review for season 2 is out.

These are great. Thank you for posting.

His season 3 video just went up!

I really like this guys series reviews. After watching the 1st 4Kids TMNT video I had the DCAU series playing at 1.5x speed as background noise and enjoyed it immensely. (It works because DC/WB forced him to mask the clips due to copyright, so the video is often obscured.)

You did what now? :-?

He did a CyberCubed.

He just dropped his season 4 video

Early Christmas present: the review of season five

The Season 6 review is up!

Season 7 is ready:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU3ovQR_XcU

Thanks for posting. I really enjoyed these. Makes me want to revisit the series. I share most of his opinions on the quality of the show, and he even enlightened me to a few ideas I hadn't thought about. Season 3 and 4 were the best, but also marked the beginning of the end. The final season was arguably the worst in restrospect..I've never watched through it a second time, outside of the final episode, which saved it a little.

I binge watched all 7 episodes of the review, this man offers such fantastic insight into the show, down to the smallest detail. Can't wait for his Turtles Forever review now, I'm guessing he is going to have mixed feelings on it.

I have to say, I completely missed how Splinter was aware of Shredder being an Utrom when he was travelling to Japan with the baby turtles, it kinda changes how you look at the entire show.

His Turtles Forever review is out. Honestly, it was really interesting that he got to talk to one of the staff who worked on the special, with the latter admitting that a lot of the production staff were unhappy with how the FW turtles were handles but it was outside their control (possibly due to Peter Laird).

In the production notes for Turtles Forever he put on his blog it doesn't seem Laird was as involved in this as much as he was for the first five seasons of the '03 show. I do recall him vetoing something in the script which made the 80s turtles look stupid saying something along the lines of "the Fred Wolf turtles are goofy but they weren't that goofy". So it seems if not for Laird's input the Fred Wolf turtles might have been portrayed even sillier than they were. I've said this before but 90% of examples fans give of the Fred Wolf turtles being depicted as too goofy are stuff that actually happened in the show. I doubt Laird remembers the show that well to push for their inclusion.

It's possible some people working on the special didn't like the treatment of the Fred Wolf characters but I think maybe this is a case of passing the buck. Like they didn't expect that fans would get so defensive about the Fred Wolf characters that they now saying they were against it when they were totally for it.

Definitely the latter. To ascribe human traits and emotions onto a TV show, but "4Kids TMNT HATED the FW cartoon, and wanted everyone to know that." It was clear from the beginning throughout most of the show's run. So much of the show's material was about giving the finger to the original show; even when it wasn't mean-spirited, it was still clear that "Imagine if TMNT wasn't stupid" was the show's entire mission statement. At least in the early run.

There's no doubt in my mind that the people who made 4Kids, and in turn Turtles Forever, were salivating at the chance to really dig in and twist the knife on FW TMNT. I also have no doubt that as heavy-handed as Turtles Forever was, the original script was even more mean-spirited, and that they only disowned all of that stuff after the unexpected backlash.

To be fair, it wasn't entirely their fault. Not only were those their true feelings, but at the time the 4Kids show was new the online consensus was overwhelmingly against FW. People on this forum were raving about how great it was to finally have a TMNT cartoon that wasn't "goofy crap for babies", to the point where a ton of people got Banned simply because they couldn't stop bashing the FW cartoon while talking about how the 4Kids show was "TMNT FINALLY done Right."

5 years or so later, especially after the FW cartoon had been released on DVD, by the time of Turtles Forever the opinions had softened considerably. But the makers of Turtles Forever probably had no way of really knowing that when it went into production. Not only were those their true feelings about FW - "Those guys were clowns, OUR TMNT are how it SHOULD be!" - but at the same time, they truly THOUGHT they were giving the audience what they wanted. If Turtles Forever had come out in 2005, there would have been zero backlash. People's opinions towards FW only softened after the DVDs came out. Whether that was nostalgia taking over or people genuinely finding more to appreciate upon watching it for the first time in years, it's hard to say.

As for me personally, I love Turtles Forever and admittedly a huge part of that is all the shots at FW. Like yeah, they're exaggerated, but they hit the nail in a broad-strokes sense. I've always found people to be way too defensive of all that stuff.

DC's "He-Man and the Masters of the Multiverse" poked fun at Filmation He-Man in similar fashion and I was fine with that as well. You can't take this stuff TOO personally when the material being made fun of honestly already makes fun of itself just by existing.

Laird making them look retarded isn't supported by concrete evidence, just a theory by the art designer as seen by his message in the video. I'll take his word for it that many of the production staff didn't like the portrayal, as opposed to a theory that they were for it, but now pretending to be against it due to the fan backlash.

Funnily enough, I knew 4Kids tmnt before FW tmnt. Upon watching Turtles Forever, I thought the FW turtles were actually retards who could not stop laughing in unision and giving noogies, that is until I saw the actual show itself.

Edit: I just realized that I started my sentence with the two forbidden words. Please don't hate me now if you don't already :lol:

I actually liked Turtles Forever more when I'd only seen FW of the two shows. Like Galactus points out, most of the sillier jabs are straight-up pulled from that show and the fact that they dug as far as they did for a few of them gave a "big brother shoving little brother" feel instead of "big brother pulled out his gun." I only recently watched the 2003 series and I now share some of the complaints in the video, mainly how underdone Shredder and Karai's reunion is. But TF was clearly not meant to continue the 2003 story, and it's clear now how ahead of its time it was for the medium.

I love how the video takes a spotlight to the visuals of the FW characters and setting. It was surprising at the time to see the designers of BTTS do such faithful interpretations of FW, right down to how the characters moved and how the backgrounds were rendered to look traditional. It's as if the same team from FW were given more time, more advanced technology, and a higher budget. This made 2012's interpretation pale, if we're comparing.

Magical words to make me feel old.