Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20151111163045/@comment-995426-20160315014656

Please, I stated my opinion on a particular work of fiction. You don't need to make personal attacks out of it.

And no, I don't consider TMNT to have been a benefit to TMNT. I consider it to have been a hindrance to Mirage TMNT, which I consider the TMNT, and to other versions done in the spirit of Mirage. That Archie TMNT, IDW TMNT and others lifted specific elements from the 1987 TV series is inconsequential to the style and substance of those works&mdash;those different characters could have been designed with different names or even different species and it wouldn't have made much of a difference. In general, I think TMNT of the past three decades has worked best when Mirage's creative minds have been involved in writing and design&mdash;not just Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, but also Ryan Brown, Dan Berger, Jim Lawson, Stan Sakai, Eric Talbot, and so forth. Tom Waltz at IDW and Tigerfog have also gained my respect.

If there's one quote that best sums up these kinds of TMNT, it's "Life at best is bitter sweet." It's about tender family life, and realistically forged bonds, and life's trials that often result in failure, and especially the depth of characters who deal with these struggles. The 1987 TV series is the opposite of all those things, where they were portrayed extremely weak or nonexistent. That show even avoided all real elements of family, and it's not hard to understand why, what with most parents of children in the 1980s still disapproving of single-parent families and interracial families. (A majority of Americans didn't even approve of interracial marriage until 1991.) The 1987 TV series also didn't portray much depth, or serious gut-wrenching life struggles, and it didn't often end with the protagonists facing a painful failure&mdash;instead, it was all harmless villains, highly-visible ninjas, fun, games, catchphrases and one-dimensional characters.

The 1987 TV series wasn't TMNT. It was the anti-TMNT. Even Mirage's team hated it and considered it very damaging to the franchise, but they allowed Murakami-Wolf-Swenson to make it because they needed the money. (Independent adult comics creators weren't exactly the most well-off profession, especially considering "Mirage" Studios was so-named because at first their production studio was a mirage&mdash;they worked off kitchen counters and such.) And MWS and Playmates cut Eastman and Laird out of all of the show's development from very early on.