Talk:Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/@comment-26423071-20171207174946/@comment-995426-20171207195200

Another thing I should probably mention. The argument "few people want" adult TMNT means very, very little in a TMNT fan debate if the aforementioned "most" are people who primarily view or like TMNT through a kid's cartoon or childhood nostalgia lens. It's not always about what is most profitable, or appeals to the lowest common denominator. The 2014 film was one of the best (and worst) examples of how something insanely profitable could also be really awful. I as a TMNT fan don't want TMNT focus-grouped for what today's 7-year-olds like. I could care less about what today's 7-year-olds like. But there are things I do care about&mdash;I am the kind of TMNT fan I am not because what I like doesn't exist, but because it has already existed for a long time and I am still reading it.

The notion of taking that kind of TMNT appeal and adapting it to some kind of television series format cannot be considered absurd when such a niche audience has already been cultivated. Sure, such a hypothetical production may never have an enormous budget (and may never actually air on a television channel or on Netflix), but its very existence would be an important step in treating that cultivated audience seriously. I would be all right with it being all black and white and made out of someone's kitchen on a two-figure budget, so long as it gets made and has some good writing, etc.

And that's really part of the charm anyway&mdash;some of the best TMNT works have the low-budget artsy feel of independent comics made by impassioned people in their spare time for little or no money, including Mirage itself at various times&mdash;first in 1984 when they literally were working out of their kitchens, and again later in Mirage's more recent "ramp-down" era of issues appearing first as downloadable images on someone's social media blog and then maybe printed in low-number publication runs. If someone could make a more mature animated series with good literary appeal, I might consider it a success even if it only got a few dozen viewers and its creator never becomes wealthy and keeps subsisting on instant ramen. As long as it's a TMNT work with real artistic integrity.