Older Fans on Rise Vs the '87 Toon

[IMJ]

Originally Posted by PizzaPower1985

Admittedly, I have seen very little of Rise of the TMNT, but... Do some of you older fans think you would have become a TMNT fan at all (casual, life-long etc.) if Rise (or something closer to it) had aired in 1987 when you were a kid instead the 1987 show? Granted, Rise is a very different conception than the 87 show (especially the pilot) was. And the 87 show is closer to E&L's concept.

IF in 1987 that 5-episode pilot had skewed even younger and been closer to what Rise is... would you have stuck with TMNT or been a fan at all?

Wow, interesting thing to consider.

But..... hmmm. No. I don't think I would've been a fan. Rise is clearly a marker of this generation, not of ours. And I respect that, I do. But I don't respect the markers that make it true - the self-empowerment that leads to ego inflation for fans that is present in these modern shows is completely different than the reinforcement and striving to be better that were markers of 80's culture. I'm not saying that 80's culture was purely better or without nonsense - it certainly had it's fair share of nonsense in kids programming, but the character dynamics and subtleties had a different heart to them. And so I'm not saying that as a kid I would've comprehended what I'm saying now as an adult, but I am saying that Rise would have been the odd-man out as far as content zeitgeist goes and I wouldn't have thought it was "cool".

As for the animation? Again modern animation is for the Attention Deficit Disorder crowd. It's a series of flash animation punctuated by frame-rate changes that serves digestion of quick impulses as opposed to anything fully constructed and uniform that serves digesting a narrative. And I hate that it's like that because it makes me sound like a Luddite when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

So I see Rise in a manner where the show itself is a joke on moving celluloid which I wouldn't have liked, as opposed to the FW show which was an action show full of jokes even if they were a little lame from time to time. Rise is a show for kids who will grow up with egos greater than the millenials who, as kids themselves widely got trophies even in failure and then grew up to make a show like Rise. FW TMNT was a show for kids that was widely pervasive for it's wild consumerism yet still managed to yield characters that made people want to grow outside of their framework and better themselves which is what most of our generation's cartoons did. What I've described here is the nature of modern shows (Rise) versus 80's shows (FW TMNT). One group gets told they are all already special and to challenge even their friends with their specialness while the other show was corny but handed out a framework of brotherhood to develop from. It's a subtle difference in content.