[Konchadunga]

I, for one, have a more than slight preference for the 4Kids show over the OT, but it doesn't matter. Stupid and annoying is just stupid and annoying, and extends far beyond the Fred Wolf turtles in that movie. The last three seasons of the 4Kids show removed just about any dignity it had, and TF just failed to bring much of it back. It's not just the portrayal of the Fred Wolf turtles that bothers me about the movie; almost all aspects of it feel like a bad fanfiction.

For example, contrived deux ex machinas for warping. I don't remember anything as lame as a dimensional teleporter made from a flashlight (nor Don saying science relied on guesswork and positive thinking to make such things) or a galactic Google search with a built-in retrieval beam in the OT, but even if they were, either they shouldn't have still worked in the 2003 universe, or the latter should have at least given the OT villains some sort of leg up, instead of just being used to bring back Ch'rel and humiliate them. Also, how is it that OT Don can build a working teleporter from a flashlight, but somehow the lasers he built on the Turtlevan out of parts from Stockman's lab suddenly don't hurt villains? What possible excuse is there for that?

Also, plotholes; so many I'll count them:
1) How did the OT Turtles get out of the Technodrome when it warped to the 4Kids universe?
2) How did Karai know that Ch'rel was back, underground, in a giant Christmas ornament?
3) For that matter, why was Karai still loyal to him? I thought that bit had been closed as of the end of the Teenage Mutant Naruto Turtles arc, and then proven to have stayed closed when she fought against the cyber Shredder; knowing he was Ch'rel's ordered successor.
4) Why was Ch'rel impressed by mutagen? Utroms knew about it, as well as how to make it, for a long time.
5) Where the shell is everyone in the Mirage universe?! I've been to New York, and nowhere were the streets just barren at night, but even if I could buy that in that one place, the people were just sleeping, the Technodrome rampaging would have woken them up. There wasn't even any evidence of the commotion caused by them fleeing it, and in New York, that many people could not have fled all at once without many of them being gridlocked.
6) Finally, and I get that this is meta, but what was Ch'rel's plan supposed to be? Since the only way for him to understand that one universe inspires another is by knowing it's all fiction, and he hoped to erase it all by killing the Turtles, what was stopping Eastman and Laird from just stopping him from doing it? Was he aware of them? Could he come out and kill them? Were they aware that someone was alive in their graphic novel and it was trying to rewrite itself?

Again, I know this is meta and you might argue I shouldn't be thinking about it, but I retort that the writers of the movie shouldn't have gone there for that very reason. Their whole cosmology is just dumb, and in my opinion, they didn't achieve Rule of Funny or Rule of Cool nearly enough to make that forgivable; in practice they just came off as annoying and cocky.

Turtles Forever was worth watching once for its occasional good joke and action scenes, but overall I still see it as either something I could have done a lot better, or a cool idea on paper that should have remained just that. It happened at a time when I was through giving the 4Kids show any more chances, and it had long-since lost any pretense of seriousness and Mirage-faithfulness being its justification for eschewing the OT. At the beginning of that show's run, I was overjoyed to see a take on the TMNT where they actually fought, the villains were menacing, April wasn't a worthless damsel in distress, and the whole universe was not an ever-expanding self-parody. I loved seeing DoctorDrink declare the 4Kids show to be better, despite his nostalgia. Yet by the time that movie came out, that score was settled, and the ones I wanted to see one-upped were Peter Laird and what was left of his show. I wanted someone to smack them for their hypocrisy with "Wait a minute; everything from Fred Wolf is off limits just because it's Fred Wolf, but somehow stuff from Naruto and The Jetsons and Megaman: NT Warrior is fine?! That crap wasn't in Mirage either!"

Resentiment never makes good art, in my opinion. Some people like dada, and grunge, and indie-rock, because apparently they share their purveyors' opinions that making art to spite something old and "stupid" is a good idea, but I don't. Most of the stuff that's become popular and commercialized throughout history became that way specifically because people liked it, and to rebel against popular opinion and established standards of quality is to be self-centered and self-righteous. The 4Kids series was fun not because it went out of its way to avoid becoming like the Fred Wolf series, but because it did so to become like the Mirage series. Until it didn't. Starting with Shredder being an alien, and thus falling again into the Big Bad trope the Fred Wolf show established, the show's quality slipped, and mostly kept slipping the further it went. This says to me that in the end, Laird really didn't know how to make a great original show; only to take his own ego and prior ideas as far as they'd go, and struggle to go any farther.