Eastman Interview. The Franchise should lean more on its gritter roots

[Leo656]

Originally Posted by newfan

Kinda sold on checking out 2k3, happy to skip New Adventures.

I mean, New Adventures in and of itself is NOT a bad little cartoon, for what it is. I was very shocked as an adult to find out that I didn't hate it. Like any other show, SOME episodes are absolute dogsh*t but there's a lot of good ones, too. The animation is far more sophisticated than the original series, the music is good... Skeletor has a completely different personality and voice to the point where he's basically a totally different character than the Skeletor everyone knows, but he's incredibly entertaining. Like he legit saves the show all on his own. The writers were very open in admitting that since the Batman movie was a hit at the time "New Adventures" was in development, they basically made Skeletor exactly like Jack Nicholson's Joker. It works fine; it's in no way the same character anymore, but he's a fun villain.

But then, Skeletor is a microcosm for the entire series. SO different from the original that even if it's good... what's the point, exactly? Old fans won't recognize or like it, and new fans won't care about the old thing so even the name itself has no intrinsic value.

What happened - and Mattel has since admitted that this was a huge mistake - was that in developing "New Adventures", they focus-grouped and solicited the opinions specifically of kids who knew nothing about the original toys or cartoon, because they wanted a "brand new audience". And among that group of kids, the toys and cartoons tested off the charts; Mattel completely expected NA to be a huge hit, based on research data. When it actually hit the market, however, it all tanked. New kids didn't care - they were too busy watching TMNT to care about anything else at that exact moment in time - and the older fans hated everything about it.

Since then, Mattel has repeatedly admitted that throwing out the baby with the bathwater was a huge mistake, and that their fatal flaw was in guessing they didn't need the support of older fans; they assumed that they could just create a new audience out of thin air anytime they wanted to. They haven't made that mistake since. They tried hard to appeal to the kids of 2003 with that relaunch, BUT they also mostly aimed it at older fans from the '80s... which was wise, because the little kids in 2003 didn't bite.

I've often said that Nick/Viacom would do well to heed these lessons and apply them to the TMNT brand. You CAN'T just go about trying to whip up a new audience of 5-year olds every few years and "If the older fans hate it, Oh Well". Things don't work that way. It makes much more sense to start with the fans you already have in your pocket, and work backwards from there. If you make things too alien and unfamiliar, you're going to lose people who really want to care. It's inevitable. And you CAN'T just say, "Eh, we'll make even more new fans, so we can afford to lose some." That never, ever, EVER works.