[neatoman]

Well this thread is quite old but I might as well say the obvious anyway:

Mirage Studios was a very small company and is clearly even smaller now, it's practically defunct. The reason they partnered with 4Kids and got funding from Playmates in the first place, is because it was unlikely Mirage alone could fund and produce animated projects. I'm sure they would have just outsourced the animation to some other foreign company but that is still costly, not to mention you might still want to hire storyboarders and editors to work on it domestically. I'm not saying it was impossible but if they tried it, then it might have lead to a very low budget project.

Not that it really matters wheter or not they could have done it, despite TMNT becoming a pop culture icon, I don't think the ambitions for Mirage Studios itself extended beyond publishing comic books.