Quote:
Originally Posted by Leo656
The problem with becoming wedded to the FW version of any Turtle is simply, that isn't the "real" version of That Turtle. All of their personalities are a bit skewed to make them more palatable to very young children. Raphael, for example, is only That Way in That One Specific Version of the story/character.
It's like people saying they prefer Chris Reeve's Superman to Henry Cavill's, because they just like the character to be eternally happy/smiley and never make any mistakes or have self-doubts, but the truth is, the "real" Superman from the comics is a deeply introspective guy who's pretty neurotic about the fact he can't save everyone and he's far from "perfect" even though he's still generally optimistic by nature. But he's a very conflicted character with a lot of existential angst. People look at Cavill's portrayal and say, "I don't like it, it's not 'happy' enough," or whatever. But that's who the character IS, the "real" version of the character. One Version chose to portray him as all-perfect and Nothing But Sunshine, and it's fine that people like it, but that's NOT actually accurate to the character, it's just taking one part of his personality - the optimism - and excluding the others entirely. I get why people lean towards it but it's actually a very one-dimensional interpretation of a very complicated character. To say, "I don't like a more introspective Superman" simply means, you don't like the "real" version of the character.
Raphael, same thing. The "angry loner" personality is the "real" version, the FW version is an outlier. And it's fine, it's not "bad", but it's very much like Chris Reeve Superman, to me: It takes One Aspect of a MUCH more complex character and focuses on it exclusively just because it's more marketable to kids that way. But you also lose a ton of character depth when you do that. A character should have more than One defining personality trait, even in a cartoon show.
I feel like the 4Kids version of Raphael did a pretty good job in sort of taking the best parts of the FW and Mirage/1990 movie versions of Raphael. He still was sarcastic, he still cracked wise at the others' expense, AND he was the "angry loner", still. He was a bit less angry than Mirage and a bit less of a quipster than in FW, but he still carried the essential traits of both those versions to some degree and I thought that was pretty cool.
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Hell. Even in the Archie comics, which were directly based on the FW TMNT, the writers went with the "angry loner Raph" persona rather than the sarcastic one. Because they know that's what Raph is about. Even The Next Mutation got that right.
As for me it's
1) Raph: this is the closest version of the character we got to the crazy bastard from the comics. His badassery knew no limits
2) Leo: another badass and the only version of the character I actually like.
3) Donny: my favorite version of the character. Introverted, intelligent but not the dork he became in later years.
3) Mikey: my least favorite turtle but I still like him despite being extremely annoying at times