How well/poorly has Rise aged?
 

You know I had to do it to em

It was poorly aged already right out of the box with this:

https://i.imgur.com/X0qtGP9.png

In all seriousess, a lot of the earlier Season 1 eps are too comedy based. Like it feels more like Spongebob than TMNT. I only watched each episode once so I may be remembering wrong, but there weren't really any real proper fight scenes till about halfway into the series, and even then most of them were short. The show did generally get better as it went on, once they started exploring the Turtles and Splinters backstory and the Demon Shredder stuff started about it improved.

And the Rise movie is genuinely great due to Leonardo's development and the Kraang. But yeah, a lot of the early episodes just don't feel like TMNT. So that's probably why people were turned off at first, besides the Turtles designs themselves being weird.

I would say, I think it can often times be a legitimately funny cartoon. That doesn’t make it an ideal TMNT cartoon though.
The show isn’t too fresh in my mind, I’d need to give it another watch through to better collect my thoughts. I remember enjoying the movie a lot.
I think the best way to describe it for me would be an interesting experiment.

Not sure I got quite that much of a Spongebob vibe from it, but I definitely felt they were hoping to recreate the type of long-term goldmine they have with the sponge. Had they done a 2D 2012 spinoff/continuation instead in that more episodic (is that the right word... or let's say less serialized) format they might have had it.

Yeah Rise at its worst is probably what we all were immediately imaging the 2012 show to be when it was announced that Nickelodeon bought TMNT in 2009.

If you can stick it out, the plot-relevant episodes do make the ride worth it. Especially paired with the movie.

Yeah I also thought the humor was good. I would just prefer it sprinkled into episode with a real plot rather than just straight up sitcoms start to finish.

Don't forget their 40th anniversary comics, which I think was the good end to Rise TMNT story.

Uh... Well this is even more premature than the 2012 thread. At least the earliest 2012 episodes are nearly 14 years old and final ones ones close to 9, Rise started closer to 8 years ago and didn't fully end until about 4 years ago, it's not exactly nearly as easy to judge as an "old" show.

I guess a problem is that some characters just kinda vanished despite initially being important, like Draxum's sidekicks and that dog thingy April had, makes it seem like they just kinda forget them. The show being abruptly cancelled likely caused some of the story telling problems later on, those final few episodes just seemed to cram in way too much.

As for anything else that's a problem, can't really think of much that's objectively wrong with it aside from the characters vanishing or cramming the ending. I think the reason so many people had such a negative reaction to it has less to do with anything that was poorly made about and more about how much unnecessary reinvention it does. I mean without looking it up, the stuff I can just pull from memory includes:

• Each Turtle is based on a different species of Turtle
• Raph takes the official leader role and Leo is instead a trickster
• The traditional weapons are lost replaced with completely different magic ones right away
• There is a huge emphasis on the magic powers of these weapons, showing almost no non-magical fights
• Practically all characters who do not have their origins in Mirage are brand new
• Baxter Stockman is child
• The character we are initially lead to believe is Casey Jones is a female Foot Ninja
• The actual Casey Jones is her time travelling son
• Splinter does not seem to care about the Turtles enough to remember their names, preferring to call them by mask color
• Hamato Yoshi left Japan to be a Bruce Lee parody
• Shredder is literally armor possessed by a ghost
• Most mutations happen due to mosquito bites

That's quite a lot and I'm sure I'd remember even more if I looked it up. I'm not going to lie here, making this many changes was way too much... But I can't say it makes for a bad show in a vacuum.

As for anything good, I don't think anyone has ever complained about the animation. It's quite impressive actually.

The controversial thing I might say here is that it's just about the only time I actually found a primarily comedic version of TMNT to be funny, I actually laughed at the jokes which I have a hard time saying about other attempts to cram a ton of jokes into TMNT. The FW show is not funny, the 90's movie trilogy isn't that funny (especially not III), the 2012 show isn't as funny as it thinks it is, the Platinum Dunes movies are straight up cringeworthy and Mutant Mayhem seems to think acknowledging that celebrities exist counts as humor. But with Rise there actually seems to be some effort put into these jokes and they're quite snappy too.

You inspired me to pull this out and give it another read. I didn’t really appreciate Rise when that book dropped.

Definitely an excellent coda. They covered a lot of ground in 8 pages. Good stuff.

Unpopular options: I would prefer if Rise TMNT is full urban fantasy setting. Rise Turtles is actually a yokai, at least that makes more sense of their magic and supernatural body. They can also transform into humans, just like other yokai in japanese mythology.