Animationstudios which worked on the OT Toon
 

Hi, I don't know if there's already such a Thread but in another Forum some friends of mine an I discussed about the "good old Cartoons".
Somehow we started discussing about eastern AnimationStudios which worked on western Cartoons and I realized that I have no clue which worked on the TMNT OT!
All I found out is that:

Toei Animation LtD worked on the first Season (5 Episodes)

And that TMS Entertainment animated some Episodes in later Seasons!

Has someone a complete List of Animations Studios which worked on the OT?

"Not I", said the fraggle.

Well thats what I gathered in the last year about the Animation Studios working on TMNT:
Toei Animation Ltd.: Season 1 (credited) and more?
A1 Production: Season 2 (credited) and more?
Fred Wolf Films Dublin
TMS Entertainment

Also I think that Enter the Fly was also produced by Toei (and some other episodes from Season 3 and 4) because it features they distinct kind of Animation Style (Animation flowes well, character-models are very similar to the ones of Season 1 and the first Opening)
But thats just my speculation...

That's what I thought, too, but according to Toei's official archive of foreign shows they produced animation for, they only did season 1:

http://web.archive.org/web/200301051.../collabo3.html

In case you can't read katakana, "Ninja Turtles" is there at the very bottom.

I do agree that there were several episodes from later seasons that seemed to have a similar stylistic appearance to Toei's work, or at least were clearly the work of Japanese studios.

The high quality animation in "Turtles on Trial" makes me want to say that was a TMS production, as their high quality and attention to detail was pretty much their trademark throughout the 80s.

Don't forget "The fifth Turtle" which also had the same style.

I also suspect TMS to be the main Studio which worked on Season 5 to 7, with a few exceptions.

About Enter the Fly: Thats strange, because it's the same Animationstyle which was used in the episodes "Turtle Tracks" and "Shredder and Splintered".

To sad that there are no informations left about the Animationstudios...

Turtles on Trial is about as fantastic as the animation ever got in the entire series. Enter the Fly was probably the best looking episode of Season 2. I really am curious to know what studios did the animation on those two if not Toei. Could it have been TMS?

And is it possible that the Toei website could have just neglected to mention every episode of TMNT they did?

The Toei archive seems mostly complete, though who can really say? The industry was very different back then and it wasn't even uncommon for a single episode to have multiple animation studios working on it. And the fact that te archive only lists episode numbers and not specific episode titles sort of leaves us in the dark.

The only glaring omission from the Toei archive is that they don't list "Pryde of the X-Men", though that was a pilot and not a series episode, so it might have been omitted on purpose.

Though Toei did a corporate shift in 1989 away from outsourcing their animation to foreign production companies, focusing more on domestic productions and licensing their homegrown shows out to foreign media producers.

So even if their archive is incomplete, I wouldn't count on them to have animated any TMNT seasons after 1990, anyway.

Just rewatched the Episode Turtlemaniac from Season 3.
Could it be that this episodes was one of the TMS episodes?

The Animationstyle looks pretty much like the one from the classic Inspector Gadget Cartoon, which they animated for DIC in the 80s and also like many of the Real Ghostbusters episodes...

I not sure if anyone remembers this or not but TMS also produced the Bionic 6 as well.Some episodes of TMNT were fairly similar in terms of animation to that series.

Remember that show! It was awesome - so sad no episodes are available on DVD...

Maybe you remember which episodes looked similar?

I don't have much point of reference for Inspector Gadget comparisons, but in my opinion "Turtlemaniac" is not one of the best looking episodes as far as animation is concerned. I don't think it looks "bad," just not up to the quality level I've come to expect from watching TMS's work on DC Animated Universe shows, Little Nemo, Akira, or even the best quality TMNT episodes like "Turtles on Trial" made around the same time period.