Does 'Shredder's Revenge' Retcon Turtles Forever & The 2012 Crossovers? (Spoilers)

[Konchadunga]

Originally Posted by neatoman

Regardless, I don't think either crossover really put much thought into how it would fit into the show. Remember here, it's not the show itself that people are attached to, it's their vague memories of the show. Most people who are interested in Shredder's Revenge, Turtles Forever or the 2012 crossovers because of the FW turtles probably don't care about details like how the show ended or what Krang was because they don't care to remember those details in the first place.

Well, some fans might care, but when creators want to do callbacks they have to pick and choose what those callbacks focus on. Turtles Forever and the 2012 crossovers intentionally focus on the least violent and goofiest seasons in the middle of Fred Wolf TMNT, because even if they aren't the seasons many of that show's fans prefer, they give them the biggest contrast to their own universes that they can milk for jokes and maybe even major plot points.

Calling back in a game like TMNTSR is similar in a lot of ways. Maybe the Red Sky seasons improved Fred Wolf TMNT but they also took away from what made it a distinct incarnation, and so it's understandable that when they chose to do specifically a Fred Wolf TMNT game, they mostly ignored them. I could be wrong, but the sort of fans who prefer their turtles to be less rotund, more serious and more violent are not the sort whose preferred source of that is the Fred Wold series' take on it. Maybe that was well-received at the time it was new, back when there wasn't any other gritty TMNT series, but now that there have been several of those, Red Sky seems less special.

But regarding Turtles Forever in particular, the important thing to remember is that the Fred Wolf show was not written for it to be canon so retroactively fitting it in there anywhere is a lost cause. It ends up with the Technodrome looking different, and that alone would alter continuity of the Fred Wolf series. Not that the Fred Wolf series had much continuity, but it did have the Technodrome as a concept for much of it. For Turtles Forever to be canon in any future incarnations, they would need to choose to not have stuff actually written back in the Fred Wolf era be canon; they can't have it both ways. At least not fully.

[ToTheNines]

TMNT: SMA used this game's specific design for Karai in her brief cameo. I wish they would have gotten around to telling that story to see what they were going to do as far as treating this game as canon.

Turtles Forever and their run-in with 2012 Tigerclaw were both alluded to as things that hadn't happened yet.

[ZariusTwo]

Wow, I asked this in '22. Could have sworn it was last year