So this show turns ten, how did the first season held up?
 

Ah yes, that infamous first season of the 2012 series.

This episode "Turtle temper" is good showcase of what was wrong with the series in the very early days.

The layering of the animation is really bad in this scene, take for example a look at Donatello's mouth.

Well, as we know it got better, and boy did it EVER!

From "The Gauntlet" on, the series got its bearings together, the animation improved, the drama was up a few notches. (Can you guys tell that that one was my favorite season 1 episode?)

But now that we're ten years on, I wonder how the first season holds up to you guys.

I think it was a near-perfect children's TMNT cartoon. The perfect entry point for younger fans.

I enjoyed the earlier seasons, but tuned out around season 3 or 4. I'd say that the show surprised me in it's quality, even if it wasn't enough to keep me hooked. It's not easy being a Saturday morning cartoon and telling a compelling story.

I'm not sure what you mean by layering, their regular mouths are part of the 3D models. (Excluding the occasional eyes or mouth that looked like 2D add ons to create some crazy expression.)

If anything, over time they simply tweaked and improved a little in how they were animating the models and no crime in that. Esp if the show was pulling on profits that allowed more time to be given to it.



Anyway... it holds up fine so far, imo. The show isn't all that old, even if the first season is going on 10 years, and the cartoony look and feel of it is pretty forgiving, still allowing it to look like a modern 3D animated show and probably will for a long time.

For a good example of that, consider the first Toy Story movie that will be 30 in a few years. Now, on the other hand, if the industry progresses to a point that this someday looks like this era's equivalent of the 90s show "Reboot" (jarringly only a year older than Toy Story -- I guess it's all in the budget and talent!), then we may have an argument on how it held up or not.

If anything, if I was to take a guess, it's the molded plastic-looking hair on characters that may be what ages it down the road, if makers of series eventually forgo that in favor of more realistic hair, if advances in the software improve the time and cost, but at this point I don't doubt that adds more render time and price tag than companies like Nick care to spend on a cartoon.

I showed the series to a friend of mine who is a sensei in Martial arts and he praised the show for getting the movements in the fight scenes and the culture behind every single move right but he also said that he deemed the series "Too violent" to be a kids show.

The turtles chopping up Kraang bots and later foot bots was very graphic.

Well that's been a nearly lifelong complaint about them then, hasn't it, the whole violence in a kids show thing.

Then again...a lot of kids shows over the decades have always had some amount of violence, BUT it's just very often played off as comedy and shows kids that harm to characters is funny, which is actually pretty twisted when you consider that in real life sometimes people do also laugh at the misfortune and harm to others. Is art imitating life or the other way around?

Maybe the fights in various Turtles series make them more openly "violent" because it's NOT played up as a joke and those like 2012 limited the amount of comedy included in fights... but it's then also showing that it's serious business and when someone gets hurt it's not funny at all, it's bad, sad, and sometimes tragic.

Honestly i felt it was overrated, i mean i liked it and enjoyed it but it was just alright. I didn't get why people were saying it was the greatest TMNT cartoon ever made. It was a good cartoon, not the greatest TMNT one. I still prefer the first season of the 87 and 2k3. I'm not saying 2012 had a bad season, just gets praised too much

I guess mileage will vary, but I got into the Mirage comics and movies at the same time as the original cartoon, so the Nick toon seems pretty tame to me.

The Nicktoon brought me back to TMNT. And I was honestly entertained by it. I still have the whole series on my HMS, but I really wish this would get a solid blu ray release.

That's kind of an oxymoron.

Yeah the Mirage comics were DARK. But I's say that the Image series was even darker and bloodier.

All of them were AWESOME though.

I'm not sure I even saw the whole first Season. At least not in order. Donnie's whole "nice guy" stalker act towards April had me chipping my teeth pretty early on and the kiddie humor of the whole thing just really turned me off. I thought the first episode was okay but I stopped caring about it pretty quickly. There's definitely stuff to like about it and it's an alright kids' show, I guess, but it wasn't for me. For the show's entire run I'd catch a random episode in reruns, every so often, and pretty quickly it was like "Hm. Yeah, now I remember why I stopped watching this show." There were just a ton of little things that bugged me, and taken together there was just more I didn't like than stuff I did like.

I've got all the first bunch of DVDs they put out, up to a point, but I've never bothered to watch them, either. One of those "I'll get around to it one day" things.

I'm not sure why season 1 would be considered "infamous". The only problem it has compared to the rest of the series, is that the problem of the city coming across like a small ghost town where the turtles run in circles until they magically end up where they need to go is more pronounced, but it never manages to fully shake that feeling.

Season 1 probably has more good episodes relative to the other seasons, the writing is arguably stronger, fewer decisions seem as arbitrary, it didn't have as many pointless characters. Not to mention it showed more promise and had not yet resorted to cheap tactics like "killing off" Splinter several times over to raise the stakes.

Had season 1 gotten rid of "The Pulverizer", "Cockroach Terminator", "The Pulverizer Returns!", "Parasitica", baked whatever necessary information from those episodes into others and used those episode slots to introduce Casey a bit earlier, then season would be about as good as what could reasonably be expected from a low budget CGI cartoon only meant to sell toys. Or at least in terms of having as few pointless or annoying episodes as possible.

I agree with this. I found season 1 to be much more watchable than other seasons. The latter seasons had some great episodes but there were a lot of bad episodes where a lot more things were introduced that I found annoying. I found Donnie's crush amusing in the first season but after that, it seemed to be given more importance in later episodes and got worse when there was competition with Casey. The fact that there was competition made it seem like the crush was being taken seriously. I wasn't interested in Mikey and Renet either but it wasn't as bad and she wasn't in many episodes. Raph and Mona were terrible and it was just so cringey to watch them. There were a lot more cringey moments and moments that would make you groan in the later seasons. April became overpowered and I never liked Casey. They didn't do a great job with April or Casey.

I much preferred the humour in season 1 and that's probably down to the writers Sternin and Ventimilia. There were a lot of aspects in season 1 that I enjoyed like the family and brotherly dynamic as well as quirks added to their personalities. I liked this version of Splinter as well. He was fatherly, stern and had a sense of humour. It was often the scenes with just the turtles hanging out together in the lair that I enjoyed the most. However, the aspects that drew me into the show initially got overshadowed by the negative aspects that were introduced in the following seasons. Season 1 is the season that I'm more likely to return to and watch again compared to the other seasons.

Eh, the show was alright. I don't like it as much now as I used to, mainly because they never used the opportunity to resolve some plots, they made April too powerful, and they tried too much to homage the 80s and overused old TMNT comic plots instead of just being original.

Plus I hated knowing that the series ends on an ultimate downer ending, despite it being said to be ambiguously canon.

See, it's posts like this that sort of internally urge me to rewatch the series, even if only out of curiosity for how I feel about it now as opposed to originally. I like the show a lot, but I also do remember eventually into the seasons somewhere it became a show I was a lot less interested in.

I admire how the showrunners reinvented things across seasons to keep the show fresh, but the show was it's best when it was a New York City Sewer and nighttime show.

The first and second seasons were the strongest ones no doubt. And it was only sporadically that the third and fourth seasons managed to recapture that magic.

I loved those episodes which took place during the invasion, the creation of Bebop and Rocksteady and in the fourth season Leonardo working with Karai in a clandestine way, Heck there's something to be said about the "Undead Shredder arc" of the fifth season, that was the series at its best.

I think it stayed pretty strong throughout. Shame it suffers from what a lot of mid-budget CGI shows do, which is the feeling of 'empty' environments. You can tell they tried to address it more over time, but it hurt the earlier seasons a lot.

If I had a kid today, this is the version of the show I'd present to them.

\but this was always the case since season 1, that's the main reason I never loved the show and the reason casuals and boomers who grew up with the FW show liked it so much.

Baby boomers did not grow up with the Fred Wolf show, ya goof. :lol:

And the term for anyone younger than that is "Complete F*cking Moron." But they never realize that until they hit 30.