What if Eastman and Laird had switched roles?
 

I've been thinking a lot about how different would the franchise have been if Eastman had bought out Laird's ownership back in 2000 instead, giving Eastman full say over the franchise.

In terms of comics and shows, would he have done better? Worse? Or about the same?

My kneejerk is that he'd just start saying "yes" to everything but at least we'd get some great new TMNT comics out of the deal, for sure.

Agreed. They both have their ups and downs. I wasn't a big fan of Laird's Vol. 4, it wasn't terrible, but it also wasn't good. But I respect him for being able to say no to things, unlike Eastman, and I can agree with him on a lot of his standards. He was also involved in the 2003 show which I'm grateful for.

Imagine Laird married to a pornstar...

Assuming the 2k3 show still came together as a Y7 Saturday morning demographic, the episodes almost assuredly would have been WAY WORSE, but... perhaps interesting in a different way. It would have been fascinating to watch Eastman just rubber-stamp approver EVERYTHING.

I wonder if Eastman was always that way, or that attitude developed after working with laird's more stoic nature?

I would really hate to have not gotten the 4Kids series and the 2007 TMNT movie. So I'm definitely glad that things happened the way that they did.

Well, either we'd not have gotten the 2k3 cartoon series or it would have been much closer to the FW series than it was. So I'm glad Eastman wasn't in charge back then.

As someone said before, Laird was the strict, overprotective parent while Eastman was the parent who was best friends with his kids and with which anything goes. So I'm glad things went the way they did back then.

So Eastman on a Segway and Laird driving a tank. Interesting.