5 missing old tmnt toon episodes? EXPLAINED

[gobo]

Hi. I'm the one that started this chatter. Since then, I've been told that the concept of skipped production numbers also came up in the original Transformers, and was due to reediting and such. That would be enough for me to believe otherwise if these gaps didn't also leave plot holes. To answer some questions I've read, it was supposed to be the syndicated batch. Here's the letter I posted to a newsgroup back in the March when I discovered the pattern:

While working on a project to arrange the eps of the original
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series by production number, I discovered
that there are at least five episodes that are missing. Even as a ten
year old, I thought it was strange that the Technodrome would crash
head first into a Cybertron lookalike in 'The Big Blowout' at the end
of the '89 syndicated season, and appear upright on an island complete
with a volcano floating in space in 'Plan Six From Outer Space', the
next new syndicated episode in '90.
The first thing I noticed about the list was that the bunch of
European cruise eps that USA Network had liberated three years later
actually occured between the two affore-mentioned eps. The second
thing I noticed is that the European cruise eps didn't quite fill the
gap. After 'The Big Blowout', there are three blank spaces before
'Tower Of Power' in which the turtles start their European cruise.
And, at the end of the last known European cruise ep, 'Elementary, My
Dear Turtle', there is no clear indication that they ever ended their
trip. But, skip two more unaired eps, and then we see 'Plan Six From
Outer Space'.
This brought to mind a previous attempt to create a similar episode
list from information taken from the Library of Congress's catalog of
copyrights. That time, I had found information on an unused teleplay
for an episode called 'Shredder In Love'. I'm thinking that this
could have been one of those episodes, but I am not included in those
who could say for certain. In as much as they were assigned
production numbers, I would imagine that they are at least in the form
of animatics somewhere because I don't recall ever hearing of
production numbers being assigned to unused scripts.
Anyhow, I asked Mr. Dan Berger of Mirage Studios about this in an
e-mail message. He knows little about this issue, but says that
asking the holders of the distribution rights, Artisan Entertainment,
would probably be my best option. Maybe we can convince Artisan to
release them on video/DVD someday. I'll update if I find out anything
else.

~Jo