Nostalgia is killing the TMNT?

[neatoman]

Yes, it's technically against the rules to "bash" that show, but the rules were written in 1999. That is to say when TMNT consisted of hard to come by comics, a toyline, more accessible (though worse) comics intended to market said toyline, one OK movie, two obviously bad movies, a nightmarishly awful live-action show, some video games and of course that cartoon. At the time, the Fred Wolf cartoon really was the majority of what TMNT was, and most of the other stuff was either a tie-in or the show was intended to market it. So at the time it might have made sense to consider "bashing" it little more than a reason to cause flame wars. Of course now it's 21 years later and the Fred Wolf cartoon and its direct tie-ins no longer make up the majority of the franchise, and given the higher quality standards the flaws of the show have become more evident. It's also a bit unclear what constitutes "bashing", but it can't be the same thing as pointing out the flaws of the show or admitting that you dislike it, such a rule would be insane and is obviously not how it's enforced. I've only ever seen one person claim that it should be enforced, and he only seems to do so because he's unable to defend the show without resorting to appeal to popularity, the subjectivity argument, what-about-isms, personal attacks, etc. Basically, the rule is defended by someone who can't argue in favor of show properly, which I take as a sign that the rule could only be enforced frequently if it was to shield a bad TV show from legitimate criticism, which is straight up silly.

Anyway, TL;DR. The rule is vaugely worded and was clearly written under circumstances that are no longer relevant, which is probably why it's not really enforced.

Anyway, with that out of the way, is nostalgia "killing" TMNT? If you mean that hinders economic success, then I don't know. The 2012 TMNT cartoon did represent a partial return to old ideas (mostly in the form of characters and some concepts) and was (allegedly) a huge success, but did overall have very little in common with nostalgic versions beyond the superficial, the success might have come from its own ideas? The second Platinum Dunes movie, although carrying over some of the bad ideas from the previous movie, did mostly try to emulate the Fred Wolf cartoon but was a total flop. And we shouldn't really forget that the 2003 cartoon was intentionally getting away from the Fred Wolf cartoon and still ended up on the air for six years. So if I had to come up with a conclusion as to wheter or not marketing TMNT with ties to the Fred Wolf cartoon works in its favour, I'd say there's a neutral effect. You could do that but it doesn't seem to have an effect. It's probably just better to try and make a good product, then let brand name recognition and word of mouth take care of it.

Creatively... Well, it does seem to stifle the creativity a bit, not gonna lie about that. If the franchise just keeps bringing back the "Krang tries to take over the earth with a Technodrome" bit along with other things simply because they're "recognisable", then we're basically just getting the same thing over and over again. And they're not even good bits. It's probably better in the long run to come up with new material or digging up (quite frankly) better parts of the old stuff. And if you're going to reuse the bad stuff just because people recognise it, then at least rework it into something legitmately good.