Fred Wolf Animation Quality

[oldmanwinters]

Originally Posted by pferreira

In comparison see Batman: TAS animation comparisons on YouTube and it for the most part all looks consistent. I don't want to say Bill Wolf was slacking off and I find it odd for Fred Wolf who was integral apparently in keeping shows like DuckTales, Wuzzles and Gummi Bears on model that he could let this happen. Season 2 wasn't even a long season and that has one episode looking radically different to another. Compare The Incredible Shrinking Turtles to Mean Machines then to Invasion of the Punk Frogs to Catwoman from Channel Six. Every episode is different and I'm not sure why the animation studios didn't lock into a consistent art style.

There are radically different animation styles on just about every Saturday morning and syndicated cartoon show from the late-80s. Tiny Toon Adventures is especially noticeable. The Real Ghostbusters had some awful looking episodes, especially among the batch that wasn't a part of their ABC Saturday morning package deals. BTAS just about always looked good, but it was rarely consistent, especially in earlier seasons. Bruce Timm remarked on a DVD commentary that the Joker was rarely "on model" in BTAS, even when the animation looked good, which was a motivating factor in the drastic redesign for The New Batman Adventures to try and simplify things for the animators. In Batman's case, even when characters were off-model, they might still have looked good, but check out some episodes like Joker's Christmas or the wonky fire attempts to animate fire in The Riddler's debut episode. In some cases, the BTAS (and later DCAU) team requested reshoots to correct problems. This occurred on other higher budget shows like Disney's Talespin and the 90s X-Men Animated Series, so there are even different cuts of episodes floating around with altered animation.

I do think that Fred Wolf TMNT became a much more consistent looking show after it made the move to CBS Saturday mornings. But for Seasons 2-4, it was trying to catering to the syndication market, and it needed to churn out episodes as fast as possible to meet the scheduling demands, so they got shopped around to various cheap studios. Then there was the Dublin group, and I think those episodes are some of the worst looking episodes of the bunch. Fred Wolf wasn't going to bother with requesting reshoots to fix mistakes or bad quality. If they did focus on quality control, it would probably be choosing not to do business with the poorer quality studios again.