Offscreen Adventures
 

That thread about alcoholic drinks got me thinking. It's been hinted in the original cartoon that the 1987/Fred Wolf Turtles have had adventures between episodes. What if those adventures happened off screen because they were deemed too inappropriate for a kid's show. This idea also stems from an episode of Community (dunno if anybody is familiar with that series but it used to stream on Netflix) where the main character dreamed that he was a member of GI Joe and there were a lot of jokes about how characters in kid shows are never seen swearing, drinking, having sex or even going to the bathroom, you know like like most grown ups do. So in that spirit, I thought it would be funny to start a thread where we come up with some PG-13 or R rated escapades that would be funny to see the TMNT get into, and it doesn't just have to be the original cartoon. Use any version you like. Oh and if you can, try to write your premise the way it would be written for TV Guide. That would add to the hilarity!

The only off screen adventures I see were the ones they randomly mentioned at that wax museum episode. 'the case of the two headed biker'. I was like 'whaa? Did I miss an episode??:

Why is there no episode 76?

https://mutantooze.org/ninjaturtles/cartoon/1990.htm

It must have been more than just numbering changes. Was it intended to be Shredder's in Love or The Case of the Two-Headed Biker? Or some other episode?

Uh, well obviously there is a 76th episode. If I had to guess, combined with the season 4 episodes moved to season 7, there were a total of 54 episodes produced for season 4, which is quite unusual. Not only is it relatively unheard of to order over 50 episodes for a single season after the magic 65 episode goal (in fact, seasons 5-6, 8-10 and season 7 proper are all pretty short). Typically a cartoon will have 26 episode seasons or 13 episode seasons. Now, Considering some episodes were moved, I think it's possible that they ordered two or three seasons after season 3. So either they ordered two 26 episode seasons or three 13 episode seasons. That way they would get 39 or 52 episodes. The official season 4 is exactly 41 episodes long and the moved episodes total in at 13.

So I think the production might be something like this:

1. The ordered season 4 was 26 episodes long.
2. The intended season 5 was the Euro side-season at 13 episodes (this brings us up to 39).
3. The intended season 6, which is now part of 4, was 13 episodes long (52 episodes so far)
4. The intended season 7, which ended up being most of season 5, was probably about 26 episodes.
5. The intended season 8, which became season 6, was originally just 13.
6. The Euro episodes were removed and saved for later.
7. The 26 season 4 episodes aired along with all episodes of the intended season 6 / actual season 4 as well as two from the intended season 7 /actual 5.
8. The actual season 5 had been reduced from 26 to 24 because of this.
9. Four episodes from season 5 were removed, leaving us with 20.
10. Three of the four removed episodes were transplaneted onto season 6, meaning it went from a typical 13 to 16.
11. The remaining episode along with the 13 euro seasons were transplanted onto season 7, which was originally 13, bringing it up to 27.

I know that's probably hard to follow but the basic idea is that the seasons from 4-7 were still produced in batches of 13 to 26. Of course this still doesn't explain seasons 8-10, unless there are two Red Sky episodes that never aired.

... Eh, this is moronic, maybe we're just dealing with an episode that got lost in the mail and nobody cared?

They also met and fought Scumbug off-screen apparently.

Don't you remember the Yoku episode where it's said Splinter took on him as a student before and even trained with the Turtles before? That's the one that bothered me the most lol

Scumbug and Anthrax in Night of the Rogues also perplexed me a bit. Made me wonder what 2 episodes I missed where those 2 faced the Turtles. Turns out they Were only in the Archie comics.

That kinda sh*t used to drive me nuts. Especially as I started getting older and actually did miss an episode here or there. Then they'd start making reference to stuff I hadn't seen and I'd swear I missed a lot more than I did. And then those "episodes" never aired and I'd be like WTF?

Yes. It's easy not to care nowadays since we live in an era where every show is available online and can be watched at anytime and anywhere. But back then, you had to actually turn on the TV at the right time. If you couldn't be home at the time you had to be lucky to have a VHS tape and a VCR and program it to record the episode. And then you'd have to BEG your mother or grandmother NOT TO accidentally plug the VCR off while vacuuming the house or by turning off the timer by pressing the wrong button on the controller. And trust me, that happened to almost everyone I knew at least once.

So yeah, offscreen adventures and making you think you missed an episode or two was very dickish of them.

Sonic SatAM was the worst when it came to stress about missing an episode, since the network kept moving it around on the schedule to the point where you never actually knew when it was on. And then they cancelled it but it was still listed in TV Guide for months and months after. So you'd end up getting up super early and clicking over to that station every half hour just to make sure you didn't miss it, and either you'd get lucky and it was still airing - just at like 9am instead of 10 or 10:30 or whatever TV Guide said - or else later on you'd realize by the time cartoons were over at noon that "Man, they must not run this show at all anymore". And that's how you found out it was cancelled. By the third or fourth week of getting Free Willy instead of Sonic in the listed timeslot you were like, "Dammit."

I loved that show and it didn't even have a ton of episodes, but thanks to the scheduling f*ckery I didn't get to even see the entire series until it came out on DVD.

I hated when TV channels shuffled schedules around. Mostly because you wouldn't know of it until it was too late. You couldn't as easily access their weekly programming grid back then as nowadays. There were a few Saturdays where I was expecting 2k3 TMNT and got Pokémon instead.

For a while during the 1988/89 season (season 2), I thought I missed an Ace Duck episode. Not because he was referenced in-show, but because all of the other released action figures at the time had appeared in the show. I thought it might be a "lost" episode that may have been banned because of Krang's semi-cannibalistic hunger for a duck brain, as stated on the figure's clip 'n collect card. No internet at the time, or I could have easily found an episode list.

I like to think of the Archie series as offscreen adventures of the OT.

I used to do that too, actually, until the two became pretty irreconcilable at a certain point.

Hey, what's not to say Mondo Gecko can't be both a random sewer lizard mutated years ago and a human teenager transformed into a lizard quite recently? Aside from basic logic and the law of non-contradiction that is, but who fucking cares about worthless nerdshit like continuity, amirite?

Which reminds me: Candy Fine was a goddamn smokeshow.

What I cannot accept is the whole HE WAS THERE ALONG ******** the FW series tried to convince us of in his episode. No he ****ing wasn't. Watch the Turtle Tracks episode and it's clear that there's no goddamn gecko in the picture.

And the ooze was purple. And the ooze came in way later, with Yoshi taking them as pets first. And there was furniture in the lair.

What's really weird thing about the Mondo Gecko episode is that it seems to be set in a side-continuity, where the details about the origin seem to match the Mirage origin better. The complete lack of Hamato Yoshi and the timing of the turtles getting flushed aligns better with what we saw in Mirage.

Another funny thing is that at the end of that episode, he moves in right next to the Turtles. Then we never see him again until one season 7 episode, then never again. Maybe he's agoraphobic.

I'm pretty sure that was the intention of Murphy/Clarrain going into TMNTA but obviously things went off the rails quickly with Leatherhead vs. Leatherhead in the cartoon.

Realistically though, how long could it have lasted in the first place? Wasn't the Fred Wolf cartoon just going to contradict Archie's depictions of Mondo Gecko, Slash, Scumbug, Wingnut, Antrax, Tattoo and Merdude sooner or later anyway?