Peter Laird on IDW TMNT

[Konchadunga]

Originally Posted by FearlessLeader

Considering time machines are not real and this is never going to happen, I think people need to just realize Peter is a grown man with his own opinions and all of us complaining about them on a message board is probably part of the reason he is burnt out on the fandom in the first place.

I'd like to remind you, though, that Peter didn't need a time machine to squat on the franchise for ten years and slap everything in it around with his "my way or the highway" attitude, scaring away a lot of the old fanbase in the process. Don't get me wrong; I like the 4Kids series. I even like it better than the OT. (Though rewatching the 4Kids series as an adult, I notice some problems I didn't before, while rewatching the OT I notice some virtues I didn't before.) Yet it took a while for me to give it a chance at first, because it was so different. The episode that won me over was "The King," because it was the same plot as a beloved storybook I had as a kid, made during the run of the OT. (Both were based on Mirage's Donatello miniseries, though I didn't know it at the time.) Many people, though, never had that in. For most of them, the show just didn't feel like TMNT as they knew it.

I feel the first movie was very successful partially because it was effective in bridging the gap between the OT and the comics; Laird never considered such pragmatism for the 4Kids show. Also, while I could understand why he wouldn't want to bring in any elements of the OT at first, at the time when the show was mostly an adaptation of the comics, by the time the show was abandoning any pretense of respecting the source material that attitude started to feel hypocritical. Reviving Mikey's pizza obsession would have been an easy way to extend a laurel, at the cost of being maybe just a little annoying. Writing him with a new obsession with being the Battle Nexus Champion wound up making him intensely annoying to a lot of the show's existing viewers. Adding OT characters like Rocksteady and Bebop would have probably attracted more viewers to the show; adding some original characters like Cody turned a lot of existing viewers off of it.

When you add to that, Peter's reprehensibly rude commentary to the staff of the show (in his defense, 4Kids certainly has a history of screwing up what they adapt, so maybe they did make a lot of mistakes, but if any employee ever got me to the point of saying some of the rude stuff Peter said to his; I'd just fire that employee), I start to resent Peter's time ruling the franchise. It was too authoritarian, too finicky, and ultimately, too egotistical; the legacy of a man who believed he was fighting for good ideas against bad ideas, but was often really fighting for his ideas against everyone else's.

So even if he can't really take a time machine and prevent our beloved franchise from existing, it still sounds like one more butthurt expression of "If I can't have my franchise, nobody else can either." I think it's high time Laird learn that not every change made to his series for the worse, and if he really has those objectionable opinions, he might do himself a favor by remaining silent about them.