Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-4746086-20131112182225/@comment-995426-20160604145543

All right. Thank you for your apology. :)

I've been a TMNT fan for a long time. But I also know that there are plenty of TMNT fans who don't like the same things I do, so I take no real offense when they don't like it.

It's been suggested that Mirage originally made some rather poor licensing decisions when they struck such deals with the likes of Murakami-Wolf-Swenson that gave them such carte-blanche creative control which MWS quickly used to completely shut Mirage out of the creative process. The decisions may have been enormously profitable, but MWS was in it first and foremost to make easy money, and both literary quality and faithfulness to the source material were readily sacrificed to make that happen. Lots of children grew up with the product of that decision, and it's no surprise they have fond memories of it. But for fans who were primarily into the comics, the success of that TV show became a nightmare. Now that we're all adults, we can find a way to live with those differences. But for better or for worse, those differences are still here to stay.

Actually, the 2014 film is a good comparison to the way fans reacted to the 1987 TV series. The 2014 film was designed from the ground up purely to make money, and Michael Bay is good at making lots of money. What Michael Bay isn't good at&mdash;and doesn't pretend to be good at&mdash;is making good films. They attract ticket sales from the lowest common denominator (which is very profitable), but the critical reaction has been overwhelmingly negative&mdash;an abysmal 22% score at Rotten Tomatoes, and Megan Fox won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actress. And it's not like they didn't know this would happen&mdash;ultimately, good critical reaction was simply never a priority, and it shows. Hell, Michael Bay's reputation for terrible film-making was acknowledged in the TMNT comics five years in advance:



It would have been much funnier had it been published five years later, but then I wonder if Viacom would ever have authorized such a critical statement in a licensed TMNT comic, considering they have even been known to repeatedly veto Kevin Eastman's own ideas when he writes TMNT comics today at IDW Publishing.

Still, all that said, it's easy to understand how some people who watched the 2014 film when they were very young will grow up remembering it fondly in the future, even as it was simply repulsive to the vast majority of existing TMNT fans. It's quite the similar sort of thing that contemporary TMNT fans experienced back in 1987.

And I know you won't necessarily agree with the assessment. I just thought it might be helpful and constructive to this discussion if you understood where we're coming from. And now we come full circle, and plenty of fans today have walked in similar shoes as the fans of three decades ago. :) Michael Bay is just another more modern Murakami-Wolf-Swenson&mdash;profitable as ever, divisive as ever.