Peter Laird on IDW TMNT

[Konchadunga]

Originally Posted by Plasticplayhouse

na, i do believe that pete still has love for the turtles. he's just a purist, and thats ok.

Meh; with the exception of times when an original product is arguably better than the one that bastardized it (and "arguably" means "with more to argue that the original is better than it simply being the original"), I can't think of any time that being a purist is a good thing. The original Batman comics might have been good, but they weren't the be-all-and-end-all of the series. Originally, their character Mr. Zero was a fairly one-note villain; then the Adam West show renamed him Mr. Freeze and expanded him, and finally Batman: The Animated Series gave him an immense amount of development with a sympathetic motive, and it was so good that it stuck in the comics. Harley Quinn was also so interesting (in part because she gave more dimension to the Joker) that she was added to the comics. Had the comics writers been purists, they could have blocked all of that neat stuff.

Also, there's the chance of an original work starting good and then going to crap. When I first saw the Teen Titans animated series, I thought it was kind of stupid and annoying, and it bastardized some of the stories Marv Wolfman and George Perez did pretty badly (although their wasn't the original take on Teen Titans, either, but it's the one the show is most based on), but it grew on me, and then I got a chance to see what the actual Teen Titans comics had become since the Wolfman and Perez era--long story short, they were intolerable. Annoying, emo, soap opera-ish, senselessly-macabre, and worst of all, making liberal use of the "Which Titan will we kill this month" gimmick to sell comics. At this point, I'm not even going to pretend I don't like the cartoon better.

That said, even when I dislike the direction a new edition/version takes as a whole, doesn't mean that I want to discount every single thing in it. I mentioned I hated the overall direction Teen Titans comics were going, but I loved Ms. Martian, and I'm now very glad she is in the Young Justice show. When good things are created, they should be retained for other adaptations, and when bad things are created, it's worth seeing if they can be revised and improved in other adaptations. Purists tend to be blind to all that.