Anything that you don't like about well-liked versions of the TMNT?

[The Great Saiyaman]

Yeah, I'll address the elephant in the room straight away, the 2003 series is very widely praised and in general, is regarded the best version of the series.
BUT IT DOESN'T MEAN THAT IT WAS PERFECT.

So what is it about the 2003 series that I don't like.
- The turtles behaving like college age guys, rather than teens.
- They started speaking in full sentences straight away after they mutated. In the mirage comics, Splinter said that it took them some time before they started speaking, and then only one word at a time.
- I can't be the only who found it irksome that in later seasons, the style was changed.
- In general, there's a lack of humor in the series.



Okay, that I love the 2012 series to death is well known by now. I loved that fact that the Turtles behaved like teens, had very authentic brotherly interactions with each other, and I loved how much effort was put in to put in so much true martial arts and Japanese culture.
BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN I LOVED EVERYTHING.

- There were several cop-outs during the storyline. Characters who were set up for something great and subsequently written out of the series.
- Timothy/Mutagen man. There was so much potential here, the guy never got a redemption arc and he deserved one.
- The Rat King. This was the only version of that Character with a fully fleshed out story, name and terrifyingly strong psychic powers. And he appeared in only four episodes.
- Monster of the week syndrome, yeah that's another thing the 2012 show was guilty of, there were so many characters introduced that they didn't know what to do with afterward.

[ticktack]

TMNT 2003
Pros it had positive female representation especially for a boy-centered, superhero genre. It also bypassed gender conformism or biological essentialism when it had muscular large women or short haired women with no make-up, and females who could overpower male characters and not be labeled as a mere shallow evil in need of defeating but being more complex and dimensional, females learned martial arts. And an older woman who created a nano-bot, blind woman, spunky young girl, generally women with varied interests.
At the same time other shows of that genre would simply -brush off female representation or -make a shameful and shallow representation of them or -simply didn't bother with female characters. Instead of fixing their incompetency at writing or representing them well in a varied manner, they named their approach as a "meant for boys' shows" or some trashy bs excuse.

Cons
It generated fan zoomer-boomers. Where now they feel entitled to tell every single other iteration how characters should be done and think they know better how* tmnt and their characters should work. Could simply go back and watch your own correct series then.
I thought people-characters had too much color. An unnatural hair color. Where April can have an unnatural red hair, because she's a woman, Casey was a vigilante masculine guy who wouldn't dye his hair blue.
((edit: *fans can have opinions; I probably have a problem with the popularity of toxic masculinity or toxic traits that they think is a neat defiant characteristic for a protagonist or some bs like that. Rather than letting some things simply slide away and not become repetitive and predictable for every iteration. It's not appropriate when you need characters appear and to be a jerk every time they are on screen, and that's the only reason fans like and want them to be on-screen. (And did you see their merit? In 2012's version. Like, dropping off of school, which says nothing else than that guy would need fixing at best. A lazy rowdy type should have at least sounded like a no-go for us.) Maybe if we had a more gentle, shy or a humble character, it would have been unpopular or have no demand over the aggressive type with destructive tendencies. Why is that? Which is strange. Generally, I had issues around certain demands and popularity and know-it-all approach which weren't appropriate.))



TMNT 2012 really thought they can pull a W.I.T.C.H. where every single major male character is a love interest for a female protagonist, which could feel a little annoying* (regardless of my gender). Except the males were relatively stable and consistent characters. Non-sexualized by design (literally and metaphorically).
*suppose the assumption that their relevancy comes from only being smb's crush.

[neatoman]

Oh boy, let's see here.

Mirage:

1. It has the typical hallmarks of a comic book series without editors, it's the sorta thing that probably made sense to the people who made it but something important got lost from their brains to putting it on paper. Without someone to point that out, you risk creating a story that lacks crucial information, which is why I think I often need to re-read the last few pages to make sure I didn't miss anything.
2. The fact that a lot of it is dedicated to non-canon guest stories is really obnoxious.

With the FW cartoon it's almost easier to list the few things I do like, but my biggest gripes with the show are these:

1. The production values (animation, sound mixing, scripting, editing, etc) are just plain awful, any serious production would demand that these errors ought to be fixed.
2. It is marketed as a comedy but it's rarely ever actually funny and it pains me that people insist that it is.
3. Bebop, Rocksteady, Krang and the Channel Six crew are insufferable characters and appear way more than they should.

There are a bunch of other things I could say and in more detail but that would eat up the character limit. I seriously doubt it would "well liked" if it wasn't babby's first Turtles and the franchise had more older fans when it was airing.

Archie:

1. It's incredibly preachy, I don't the world polluted either but I'm not reading a comic about mutant turtles to hear that pollution is bad a million times over. That I'm not sure telling such stories with characters who owe their existence to a chemical spill is a such a great idea.
2. The artwork is more often than not really bad.
3. The plot is technically serialised but it honestly comes across like it's a bunch of standalone stories awkwardly strung together.
4. I don't find most of the characters all that compelling. I think the reason the Mighty Mutanimals ended up being a thing in other iterations had more to do with the concept of a secondary group of mutants being cool, rather than any of those characters being interesting.
5. It's rooted in the world building of the FW show, which meant it inherited some aspects I didn't like from that show.

The 1990 movie:

1. The turtles kind of blend together in that one and it seems to me that too much of their dialogue is making bad jokes.
2. The "twist" that Shredder is Saki isn't a very good one, maybe it's a leftover from the script where Saki wasn't combined with Nagi and you were meant to think he was one brother but turned out to be the other, but as it stands it's bad.
3. I'm not too sold on the whole idea of the Foot Clan being a bunch of teenage thieves.
4. Shredder's outfit looks kinda silly, like he has an oversized head. I know real samurai helmets are big but it's not like anything else he wears is realistic.
5. I don't like that they went with reporter April, it's barely relevant to the plot and the stuff about her getting involved with the Turtles might as well just have been due to a mugging.
6. Danny kinda sucks.

The 2003 show:

1. There are some problems like why the Shredder clones are kept in despite changing the Shredder himself to be an utrom. The otherwise does a good job of balancing new material with adaptation and even fixes some of the "no editors" problems I mentioned already, but when these problems appear they really stick out.
2. I get that season 5 had to be a new story because there isn't much of an ending to work with from the comics, but to end the story with magic powers, dragon transformations and a convoluted sense of destiny was just bizarre.
3. The last two seasons are just really generic kids' show stuff.

IDW:

1. I really liked until the Mutant Town thing, that killed my interest so hard that I can't bring myself to start reading the post-Campbell stuff seriously, even if I know most of that garbage has been scrubbed.
2. The artwork is often inconsistent between the artists, I brought up once that it's hard to believe the same character drawn by two different people is really meant to be the same character.

The 2012 show:

1. The overarching story is bad and it's very obvious that they were mostly just making it up as they went along.
2. The Dontallo/April thing is awkward as all hell and I don't understand why it was perpetuated until the end of the show.
3. The budget was clearly not there, between the "matte paintings" and random reuse of assets, I can tell Nick probably thought they were funding another Jimmy Neutron type comedy rather than an action show.
4. The writing seems to prioritise "wouldn't it be cool if they said/did this?" over whether or not it makes sense, Kirby being cured by a drop when "only having one canister" was a big deal or Bishop claiming Salamandrians are not allowed on earth but it not really amounting to anything are examples of this nonsense.
5. The story has a tendency to go in weird circles, like what's the point of writing Kirby out several times over?
6. It has the "different for the sake of being different" syndrome, the Fugitoid having the literal brain of Honeycutt inside of him rather than just his memories doesn't exactly hurt the show... But I don't know why it helps either.
7. I find the Kraang to be really annoying and I wish they had just gone with the standard Utroms from the start.

And these two seem generally disliked here but I don't think they are in general, so I might as well add them here just in case.

Rise:

1. While it's not necessarily worse than previous cartoons, the obsession with being different is taken to an extreme here and turns the franchise into something I can't recognise.
2. the show just kinda forgot somethings, that cat-thing just sort of vanished for no reason along with a few other things.
3. Despite different for the sake of it, the show didn't seem to care too much with any explanation of anything and just kinda started in such a way that the audience were just expected to get it.

Mutant Mayhem:

1. The Turtles are little more than pop culture reference vomiters and that gets old really quickly.
2. The mutant characters are all really shallow and I wish they had stuck to the storyboards and just had them all de-mutated so we wouldn't have to deal with them in a sequel.
3. Super-Fly's plan just silly.
4. I don't like the implication that the Utroms will just be straight up evil.
5. Splinter literally just being a rat who watched martial arts movies and generally being depicted as a decrepit old man is just the saddest attempt to re-invent this character. No Hamato Yoshi, no reincarnation, no lab experiments, just a pest with some Bruce Lee DVDs.
6. I cannot stand the idea of the Turtles just being accepted into society, it just completely throws the concept into the toilet.

Originally Posted by The Great Saiyaman

So what is it about the 2003 series that I don't like.
- They started speaking in full sentences straight away after they mutated. In the mirage comics, Splinter said that it took them some time before they started speaking, and then only one word at a time.

I'm not sure where you got that one from, Splinter never says how much time passed between the mutation and them first speaking. And I'm not sure "Pizza, Dude!" is much of a full sentence, which is the only instance of them stringing words together.

[Mad Dog McMutt]

One thing that I don't like about the 1987 cartoon is that there are so many good characters that only show up once only to never be seen again. I would have loved to have seen Muckman or Ray Fillet some more.

The thing that bothers me the most about the 2003 cartoon is the lack of pupils on the turtles. It just makes them look kinda souless in my opinion. I didn't mind the lack of pupils on the action figures, but it kinda bothers me when watching the cartoon.

The only flaw that I can think of in the 2012 cartoon was how annoying Casey Jones was. I didn't like his character at all.

The 2007 movie had a problem where almost the whole movie Raph and Leo are butting heads. It takes up way too much screen time in my opinion and really brings the movie down.

[IMJ]

As much as I loved the 2012 show for it's story-content and humor, I really hated quite a bit of the art direction. Deeply, deeply disliked that most of the mutants were weird "monsters" instead of "mutant people". It's a real fine-line observation, but the show ran with "monsters" more than "mutant-people" and I never really liked that about the show.

Between that and the art direction of characters with disproportioned design (a lot of bobble heads or pin heads) and the art direction at large left me disappointed.

[FredWolfLeonardo]

Regarding FW tmnt, my favourite version, one thing I didn't like was most of the side villains.

Rat King and Leatherhead were great, Dregg and Baxter were okay, but I didn't care about the rest.

I could do without all the mobsters, mad scientists, toy makers, random aliens and gym bros.

[sdp]

Originally Posted by FredWolfLeonardo

Baxter were okay,

Baxter was great, how could you not love him, I love how he keeps changing in every appearance, becoming less and less aware of what's going on as time passes.
I dislike that he's white but I just assume he has vitiligo and is actually black.

I could do without all the mobsters, mad scientists, toy makers, random aliens and gym bros.

toy makers are there really more than one?

I think they just felt they needed some villain to give Shredder/Krang a break. What I don't understand is why they didn't use some of the other recurring villains more often, some of them only have like 1 or 2 appearances in 100+ episodes. surely they could've used some of those more often, heck most dont' show up until late in the show.

[Andrew NDB]

Well-liked? Like, by everybody? Then we're really only talking about Fred Wolf, TMNTA for most of its run, the 1990 movie, 2k3 and 2012. And IDW for a few years, but only by "modern" comic audience readership standards. That's it.

And for me it'd be easier/faster to answer what DO like about the "well-liked" versions than what I don't.

[ToTheNines]

Originally Posted by The Great Saiyaman

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...0hY1S_KKf8Mw&s
Yeah, I'll address the elephant in the room straight away, the 2003 series is very widely praised and in general, is regarded the best version of the series.
BUT IT DOESN'T MEAN THAT IT WAS PERFECT.

Yeah I lurk the TMNT subreddit and people dick-ride this show big time. It's decent and I do love it nostalgically, but those weirdos act like it's The Sopranos or something.

- There were several cop-outs during the storyline. Characters who were set up for something great and subsequently written out of the series.

Yeah that was 2003's big strength over 2012.

A LOT happened in 4kids. Each season has like 2-4 huge episodes that could have easily been a season finale, but 2012 mostly just meanders bewteen finales and season openers. Some exceptions of course.

Originally Posted by neatoman

Oh boy, let's see here.

Mirage:

1. The fact that a lot of it is dedicated to non-canon guest stories is really obnoxious.

This doesn't bother me but I can not imagine being a TMNT fan in the 80's and having to wait month after month for a "real" comic while they're putting out Hedden and McWeeney garbage.

With the FW cartoon it's almost easier to list the few things I do like, but my biggest gripes with the show are these:

1. Bebop, Rocksteady, Krang and the Channel Six crew are insufferable characters and appear way more than they should.

Nah, Krang ruled.

Archie:

1. It's incredibly preachy, I don't the world polluted either but I'm not reading a comic about mutant turtles to hear that pollution is bad a million times over. That I'm not sure telling such stories with characters who owe their existence to a chemical spill is a such a great idea.

Leo's constant anti-gun **** drove me up the wall.

The 2003 show:

1. There are some problems like why the Shredder clones are kept in despite changing the Shredder himself to be an utrom. The otherwise does a good job of balancing new material with adaptation and even fixes some of the "no editors" problems I mentioned already, but when these problems appear they really stick out.

So they were called Shredder clones in their design sheets and toy cards because that's what they were based on. But even in the show, Donnie's exact words are "MY GUESS is genetic clones of The Shredder".

So that's just a name. They're probably just Notes from the Underground rejects that they slapped Shredder armor on for whatever reason.

Mutant Mayhem:

1. Splinter literally just being a rat who watched martial arts movies and generally being depicted as a decrepit old man is just the saddest attempt to re-invent this character. No Hamato Yoshi, no reincarnation, no lab experiments, just a pest with some Bruce Lee DVDs.

YIKES!

[CyberCubed]

The original cartoon definitely should of featured more mutants/characters from the toyline who never got episodes like Wyrm, Pizzaface, etc. then generic mad scientist #2345. All those Playmates characters should of appeared in Season 5.

[neatoman]

Originally Posted by ToTheNines

YIKES!

You didn't know that's how he's depicted in the movie?

[ToTheNines]

Forgot to do mine. I'll try to keep it to one major point per iteration.

Mirage:

Splinter is just not very well written or characterized. This just occurred to me last year after reading some old issues. We never get the scoop as to why he refused to join the guys in killing Shredder, even though training them to do the deed was his life's work. Never really see his reaction to their success. And when he sees the resurrected Clone in #10... what should be this big moment of him seeing all of his blood, sweat and tears completely undone and threating his and son's lives, his big reaction amounts to:

Then in #11 when April is doing a character profile on the entire cast, she skips Splinter! His only contribution to that issue is towards the end when he tells the turtles "life goes on and life is good". WHAT? Your mission of vengeance amounted to literally nothing and a crazed gang of ninja assassins is running wild in a city right down the interstate hoping to someday kill you and your entire family and you're on some Live Laugh Love sh*t?

He gets his own arc in CaW but has nothing to do with the main plot. Then he's in like 1 issue of volume 2.

Yet another reason I'm such a big fan of the Image run. Splinter was frequently relevant to the plot and had plenty of great moments. I particularly love the scene of him taking Raphael to task over his involvement with the Foot.

Fred Wolf:

As others have said, they had this (literal) toy chest of super fun characters that they barely got any mileage out of. Casey Jones has 4 episodes? Metalhead has like 2 and a cameo? The list goes on and on.

And it would have been LESS effort to re-use these character models, while also promoting their precious action figures, than it did to create all those completely forgettable one-off silly villains.

90's trilogy:

Hate that the 1990 flick never got a true sequel. Would have been great if they kept Barron on and let the series grow up with the audience over time.

The big Shredder plot hole of SotO drives me nuts too. You mean to tell me 40-ish people witnessed a man fall into a parked garbage truck and another man pulled the compactor lever 2 minutes before the police showed up and they didn't recover the dead body? They didn't impound it as evidence? The driver just showed up the next morning and dropped what he believed to be a rotting corpse off at the city dump? Silly.

4kids:

They bungled almost every chance at having a big emotional moment. Nothing hits. Every time there's a death or near death/fake out it's just narmy dialogue and a general vibe of borderline indifference.

Anytime characters are reunited after a prolonged absence, or surviving a tense situation, they just like... give handshakes and move on with their day. Splinter would get fired up sometimes, but "get away from my sons!" got kind of played out.

There's a couple exceptions. Splinter getting his little "memory orb" or whatever with Yoshi inside was always very sweet.

2012:

Mostly everything I have to say about this one feels nitpicky. I love this show and just wish it had been able to adapt a few major Mirage stories that they missed, for whatever reason. Main examples being Donatello #1, Michealangelo #1, and Dreams of Stone.

IDW:

It's gone on too long. Euthanize it compassionately and get a new puppy.

[ToTheNines]

Originally Posted by neatoman

You didn't know that's how he's depicted in the movie?

I saw it once and haven't dwelled upon it.

So I knew, but you reminded me and I thought it deserved emphasis.

[Zog The Magnificent]

There are various minor things and nitpicks, so I'll pick my top from each:

Mirage:
The fact that After Volume 1, not a single one of any of the long term stories EVER have a satisfying payoff.

Archie:
The various bits of preachy political activism that Murphy liked to add.

IDW:
The Campbell run. I don't think I need to explain that.

1990:
Shredder's ridiculous oversized helmet and clothes made out of shiny fabric. Also the fact that his grand plan is to run a gang for some reason.

Ooze:
The fact that Super Shredder kills himself in less than two minutes.

1987:
I could talk about the various bits of poor animation and bad writing, but since that's a feature of 80s cartoons, I'll go with the fact that rather than having ONE recurring Mob boss and ONE recurring Mad scientist, the 87 show decides that it needs 10 of each, many of whom appear only once or twice, and all of whom are completely interchangable.

2003:
Besides the 7th season, the fact that the dialogue much of the time is very insincere and expositiony, and incredibly on the nose. I love the intricate plot, and I truly appreciate how everything comes together, but the dialogue is easily the weakest part of the part of the 2003 show that's good.

2012:
My favorite of the shows, but not without flaws. And while "super-retromutagen" was pretty bad, I'm gonna have to go with the Mad Max episodes. They suck and I don't like them.

Rise:
Its general sense of irreverence to sticking to any part of the previous source material.

Mutant Mayhem:
No.

[neatoman]

Come to think of it, saying that the overarching plot of the 2012 being bad might not be harsh enough criticism of the show's storytelling, I rewatched a few episodes recently for some fact checking and there is something... Off... About the structure in individual episodes.

There seems to be a lot of scenes that seem to be there just because the writers thought it would be cool or amusing, but don't seem to contribute much to the actual plot or even gives us any insights. In particular hallucination scenes come to mind.

[ToTheNines]

Originally Posted by Zog The Magnificent

1990:Also the fact that his grand plan is to run a gang for some reason.

Yeah I just made a thread about this. I like to believe there’s a lot more going on that we don’t know about. How did the Foot react when Saki killed Yoshi? Why are 90 percent of his ninjas American? He must have superiors if he got sent to America to basically start from scratch, or at least got ran out of Japan for some reason. Even the handful of Japanese soldiers he does have, none of them seem like trained killers except for Tatsu.

Tatsu tells him that his “empire flourishes”, but is stealing and fencing stuff their only goal? Maybe he just wanted to get rich… like, stupid rich (haha).

Rise:
Its general sense of irreverence to sticking to any part of the previous source material

I didn’t care that they approached as “let’s flip everything on its head”, especially since they actively avoided almost all Fred Wolf-isms as well, surprisingly.

I made a thread about this too, but what really drove me crazy was that they made Karai Shredder’s daughter AGAIN despite purposefully avoiding franchise tropes pretty much every chance they got. That aspect of Karai is just a pet peeve of mine anyway, but seeing Rise retread that ground made me roll my eyes.

[neatoman]

Eh, maybe Shredder thought he'd get Nocturnal's blessing.

Originally Posted by ToTheNines

I didn’t care that they approached as “let’s flip everything on its head”, especially since they actively avoided almost all Fred Wolf-isms as well, surprisingly.

Sure, it was amusing that Bebop and Rocksteady only "appeared" so the writers could troll anyone who actually wanted to see them, and it was nice that there were very few instances of them just directly copying the FW show. That was refreshing.

But instead they were making up a billion new characters and concepts, while needlessly going overboard with reinventing the few old ones. I'd probably be far more annoyed with what's essentially just more FW, but it's not like it's one or the other, there is always room for Mirage characters who weren't in the FW show. Hell, I'm still holding out for Radical to show up in one of these shows one day.

[cammy85]

Originally Posted by ToTheNines

Yeah I just made a thread about this. I like to believe there’s a lot more going on that we don’t know about. How did the Foot react when Saki killed Yoshi? Why are 90 percent of his ninjas American? He must have superiors if he got sent to America to basically start from scratch, or at least got ran out of Japan for some reason. Even the handful of Japanese soldiers he does have, none of them seem like trained killers except for Tatsu. of mine anyway, but seeing Rise retread that ground made me roll my eyes.

There will always be delinquent teenagers and young adults. Shredder knew he could easily scoop them up to be in his army of crime and they would for the most part be so eaher to be bad that they would be the fastest learners of the art of ninja. We only see a brief example of the results via flashback in the first episode of the OT and then Return of the Shredder with the Crooked Ninja Turtle Gang. Bebop and Rocksteady's gang that appeared in two wpisodes later on don't count.

[ZariusTwo]

Fred Wolf:

The Technodrome only ever demonstrated it's potential to be a ruthless war machine at the close of the third season, and it really should have been the last we saw of it after that. The idea to separate Shredder and Krang from it in the final seasons was a great one, but way too late.

April becoming a little more jaded in the red sky era, wanting to distance herself from the Turtles for the sake of what remained of her career, and even turning on them despite all of their previous history and worse times they'd been framed and she believed them. Sometimes I headcanon that she was coping with a depression from losing Channel 6 and needed to see a therapist.

90s Movie Trilogy

Shredder is defeated three times in a matter of minutes across two movies...once by 'oops', second by a sound amplifier, the other was death by pier. Tough choice.

TMNT 23K

We didn't need Fast Forward, we didn't need Back to the Sewer, and I don't even think we needed seasons four and five after the Ch'rell arc was over with. Karai becoming Shredder was such a stale idea and it didn't lead anywhere interesting for the characters. Ninja Tribunal season is a decent enough redemption arc for her, but then came Turtles Forever

I wasn't all that into Casey with this one either. Much prefer the bimbo psychotic from Fred Wolf. Casey was far too domesticated in this series, he's also much better in the 90s movie.


Archie

It confused the crap out of me as a kid after it pivoted from adapting the show, and included characters that never showed up in the FW cartoon. Also didn't like that it got rid of Krang, Rocksteady and Bebop and only used them sparingly. Interestingly, I liked that Shredder was saved for bigger, and more important stories.

[CyberCubed]

Rat King should of returned in Season 5 of 2k3 at least once. He should of gotten the ep instead of that planned third Garbageman ep they cut. That way Season 5 would still be 13 episodes and Rat King would have gotten a second ep.