Talk:Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/@comment-26423071-20171207174946/@comment-995426-20171208082011

Easol1:

But perhaps the perennial adult TMNT comics reader complaint is that the kids' versions completely overshadow the adult versions in mainstream pop culture such that the entire franchise has a kiddie reputation&mdash;something not true of Batman, which has plenty of more high-profile older-audience incarnations. This is also a very old complaint:



It's not merely enough to have something like a TMNT movie that is PG-13 but appeals mainly to younger children and adult TMNT cartoon fans' childhood nostalgias.



For the multi-faceted Batman comparison to hold true, there would have to be a greater visibility for TMNT film and television that appeals first and foremost to the adult TMNT fan who reads it for adult reasons. As it is, there have been complaints about having TMNT characters included in Injustice 2 because people see them as "too kiddie" for their "grownup" superhero video game, which proves people making such a complaint have never seen a TMNT comic. And this is the problem&mdash;TMNT adult comics fans have for decades felt forced into permanent obscurity or buried by overwhelming numbers of TMNT cartoon fans with which we have almost nothing in common and struggle to find common ground.

Batman was eventually allowed to have more high-profile mainstream mature incarnations, and now Batman as the Dark Knight is well-accepted. The same cannot easily be said of TMNT, especially now under Viacom's control. For the Batman comparison to hold at the same level, Warner Bros. would have to routinely treat the cartoon properties as the biggest priority. Stuff that happens in Batman works for older people would regularly have to face the veto of a standards and practices department that is concerned first and foremost with how such things reflect on Batman children's cartoons, as now happens with the IDW TMNT comic and Nickelodeon and didn't previously happen with Mirage TMNT and its corresponding contemporary cartoons. But that isn't necessary for Batman because the public already understands that there is a different Batman for older audiences and a different Batman for younger audiences. And that was made possible because someone actually invested in making mainstream Batman works for adults, some of which (like the 1989 film, and Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight) had an appreciable literary depth and glowing critical reception that even I, who am not a Batman fan, can recognize and respect. TMNT had a half-decent 1990 film...that was still mostly for kids. Its sequels went the same route. The 2007 film was...okay, but not stellar. And then there are the dreaded 2014 and 2016 films, which were panned by critics and pandered heavily to childhood nostalgia at the expense of being painfully unwatchable to most adult TMNT comics fans.

If you are correct that there are enough different incarnations of both TMNT and Batman to appeal to different audiences, TMNT still suffers from a deficit of public recognition for its good quality adult audience works. But for that reputation to improve, there needs to be more high-profile well-produced adult installments, like in films and television, to make an impact. Even the 1989 Batman film was a genuine shock to many mainstream audiences who mainly remembered the campy 1960s Adam West TV series that had been rerun on television well into the 1980s. But without films like those, the mainstream public might have never hard of the "Dark Knight" or associated the Batman franchise with such a mature tone.