What version did worse?

[Wesley]

Originally Posted by Bry

The beautiful, beautiful irony is that a lot of Fred Wolf fans are taking the show and its characters so seriously when its creators never did.

For the vast majority of its run, aside from the earliest and latest couple seasons (which were incidentally also the show's shortest) it wasn't intended to have much in the way of story arcs, continuity or even internal consistency. Characters would disappear with no explanation and certain plot points and status quos would change with no rhyme or reason. Designs/art styles would look noticeably different from one episode to the next. The layout of the lair would completely morph when the script called for it, and characters' behaviours would vary from episode to episode. Everything was malleable around the episode's plot and jokes, and the show even acknowledged this from time to time.

And I don't even mean any of this as a criticism! I genuinely like the show. I've got the Turtle Van boxed set on a shelf in my studio. But you can't deny that, for the majority of its run, it was very intentionally treated as a joke. That was the point of it. At its best, it had a clever, tongue-in-cheek sense of humour about itself, and it expected that the audience was in on the joke.

Both series were just doing very different things, and each fan's preference will depend on their own personal tastes. There were a lot of truly bad episodes in the '87 cartoon, especially when the seasons became bloated and the writing/animation got cheaper and lazier, but the 2003 series had some stinkers itself. I do think the 2003 series holds up a lot better overall because it was telling an actual story and treated its characters more like actual characters than two-dimensional caricatures, but... again, that comes down to my personal tastes, and those have no bearing on anyone else's preferences.

But honestly, having rewatched a bunch of the show pretty recently: you could take the '87 Turtles from Turtles Forever and drop them into a random mid-series episode and, I promise you, they'd fit right in.

(Aside from the scene where they ran into 2003 Raph's arms crying like babies - I agree that bit was weirdly out-of-place and mean-spirited. The rest, though? Pretty damn accurate.)

I agree. I rewatched some of the 1987 series recently and it wasn't as good as I remembered it as a kid. I think it was on air for too long and could've been condensed into five seasons. Half of the episodes are still fun to watch, in my opinion, but I find the turtles' catchphrases and pizza jokes irrating as an adult. I prefer the 2003 cartoon.