Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20160227224555/@comment-26062541-20160330223155

Gilgameshkun wrote: Like I said, I mainly appreciate TMNT comedy series that make fun of a companion main series without actually affecting its canon. I'm not really all that much of a Batman fan&mdash;I just use it as an analogy when discussing TMNT. All the friends I have who do like Batman, have nothing but disdain for the Adam West version and all the fruits thereof, and believe Batman storylines must necessarily remain dark. What TMNT and Batman do have in common is that their common theme of darkness, in multiple senses&mdash;noir characters, grittiness of setting, and stealth in the shadows. If primary TMNT stories can't maintain a dark and/or bittersweet drama narrative, they're just not TMNT. It's because the 1987 series eschews this entirely that makes it an anti-TMNT.

Also, Chris Allan has been a good TMNT artist too. He illustrated for both Archie and Mirage. What's interesting about his style is that it adapted the 1987 series, and darkened and matured it for Archie Comics so that adult comics readers could take it seriously reworked as an alternate universe&mdash;the 1987 series itself having been such adult-repellent to practically everyone who wasn't a fan of it as a child.

See, one area that I'm willing to give the 1987 series credit, was that its very first art style in the first two episodes or so wasn't that terrible, even if the story and characters weren't that good. It was done by anime studio Toei Animation (the same studio that made Dragon Ball Z), and some of the character art had decent lines even though Murakami-Wolf-Swenson only ordered low frame counts, which made the animations themselves look limited, repetitive and choppy. MWS would eventually go through a revolving door of cheap lowest-bidder animation studios, but Toei was good at what they did. I really debate that the 87 series is an anti-TMNT because its not as dark, as while goofy its still a revenge story between the Hamato clan and the Foot(even though censors wouldn't let them call them a family, forcing the writers to sneak words like "Our big brothers will get you!" in during the filler episodes).

But see, maybe having a defined version of a metaseries ends up working against it rather than helping it. What I like about Batman and TMNT, is that there are a million ways to work with these characters and world, and as long as we keep the bare-bones to their origins and characters they can good series. The real problem with the 87 series is not that its a silly version of a serious story, but that the powers that be didn't advertise that there was a darker source material, like how in Japan they would make softer versions of their more violent series and advertise "HEY-there's a comic version that's TEN times more hardcore!" The problem was that they only marketed to one facet of the fan-base, rather than the whole. This is also why Young Justice got cancelled, because they refused to market to the girl audience...or boy audience, as the toy sales were non-existent due to lack of marketing.

Yup, when Toei puts the time in they can make something good...wish they took the time with the original DBZ animation because sholy SHELL was it bad. It was so bad at times, even worse than Turtlemation! They ACTUALLY made a cleaned up version of it with Dragon Ball Z Kai years later.