How dark were the Red Sky seasons compared to the movie and 2k3?
 

I’ve never send the old toon myself, so I wouldn’t know, were these episodes as dark as the 2003 series/1990 movie?

Nooo... I wouldn't call them dark, just a bit more serious. Only thing dark is the lighting.

Yeah, pretty much. The music was a bit more "serious", and the sun never came out (hence the "Red Sky" descriptor), but it really wasn't TOO much different from the regular seasons of the show.

I wouldn't say that they are really dark, just more serious if that makes sense.

If you're watching the 80s show now, you'll still get those same old lovable turtles when you reach season 8, just with a different look that may or may not be to your liking.

As dark as you want them to be.

They're definitely darker than the average episode of previous seasons but they are nowhere near as dark as 2k3 or even Batman TAS/X-Men TAS which the more mature look was to compete with those shows.

I'd say it hits the sweet spot between the earlier seasons and the 2003 cartoon, just not as fleshed out. You can tell CBS was desperate to follow the dark and edgy cartoon trends at the time, just as how Fast Forward and Back to the Sewer were in response to the light and colorful cartoon trends that were emerging. Thankfully, Raphael still has his sarcastic wit, but the lighthearted goofiness is almost absent, for better or worse depending on your tastes. Out of the three seasons, my favorite is Season 10. It had great episodes like "Mobster from Dimension X" and "The Day the Earth Disappeared." For the next cartoon, I would probably want it to be like the Red Sky seasons, just without the red sky.

Get the Season 1 DVD. Not only do you get the first five episodes, which are awesome, but it should include some of the Season 10 episodes as a bonus, at least the first run of the DVD from 2004 did.

Not very dark at all. Compared to the previous seasons maybe but not other stuff.

Youtube
 

When the Season 1 DVD was released in April 2004, many had either forgotten seasons 8–10, nor never seen them at all. Not everything was a Youtube click away back then (and wouldn't be until the Youtube was launched in May 2005).

Many cartoons in the 90s tried to emulate what Batman TAS and X-Men were doing but failed at it. You had shows like Double Dragon, Savage Dragon, WILD Cats, Skeleton Warriors, Ultraforce, etc. Where it seems like it's a dark setting but it really isn't and the average episodes are very tame.

They copied some of the art style but not the writing and I think TMNT fell in that trap as well, sure the turtles are slightly more mature but not by much. I remember a dromer once came up with the theory that after Turtles Forever they decided to be less goofy and take things more seriously hence the red sky seasons have slightly more serious turtles. Gargoyles was one of the few shows that copied the dark setting and writing well.

Haha, Skeleton Warriors.

I never watched it, but I have memories of it. Specifically, that it was never actually on, but they ran the ONE commercial for it constantly as if it was a big huge deal. And it was always the exact same commercial.

Ahhh, the 90s. Seriously, go up to someone of a certain age and dramatically cry out, "My Skeleton Warriors are VULNERABLE?!", they'll either high-five you or have you committed. No joke.

I had to go on youtube. Never watched it, but it does look vaguely familiar. So I guess you're on to something there.

No dark at all. Just less jokes. They still had cartoonish looking monsters and barely any actual action. All Raph ever did during those episodes was throw his sais around.

And you know what else was funny? How the title of season 9's debut episode was THE UNKNOWN NINJA... and yet the series became more sci-fi than ever. How ironic is that? It definitely didn't feel much like Ninja Turtles anymore. In those last 3 seasons, despite trying to portray the show as being more serious, they didn't seem to improve fight scenes at all. Season 1 and 7 had better fight scenes than seasons 8, 9 and 10 did.

They’re more boring than anything.

It was all the time. What Seasons 9-10 did was just adding more non-Dimension X outer space scenes.

I would think red sky would be meant to be as dark as the movie, after all, movie scenes were shown in the theme song.

I have watched the first episodes.

If our area hadn't switched CBS affiliates, we never would've got the Red Sky episodes. They removed TMNT for local E/I programming. Not a bad thing, but it switched a month before Season 10 started. I thought Get Shredder was the first new episode in three years. I was soon proven wrong, but I quickly understood why we never got them. It wasn't Youtube; but Vegitasan's old site where I finally got to see the episode where the Technodrome was "destroyed". Then the aneurysm encodes and finally DVDs.

The USA adapted a law that required television stations to air educational content in children's programming.

Downloading took hours in pre-broadband days (I didn't have broadband until March 2005).