Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20160227224555/@comment-995426-20160330065558

Zakor1138:

No, I don't like Adam West's Batman. Batman, like TMNT, should be a dark serious character-driven action-drama.

But TMNT itself should also be family-oriented (not to be confused with family-friendly) with deep emotional attachments between family members and a close circle of family-like friends, where plenty of slice-of-life moments are thrown in. But if characters can't take enough things seriously and it's like they're always partying, then that's not family life, that's spring break that never ends. Good life drama should have a mixture of fascinating and mundane, and a mixture of serious, occasionally humorous, often gritty, occasionally uncomfortable, and even the occasional surgical use of the boring just to keep it feeling more real and relatable.

And I don't mean just lounging around someone's home/lair. They were ninja, after all, and that involved daily intensive training both in their home and on rooftops. And sometimes a whole lot of "nothing" happened, but there was actually a lot of character-building going on in the spaces between the "nothing." There often wasn't a conspicuously convenient shiny villain or bizarre characters to interrupt these noir moments, either. Sometimes life seemed to slow down to a crawl, and they had to actually live their lives for a little while. And Mikey didn't always have something funny to say or goofy to do, either, which made his actual silly moments a little more charming, I think.

The 1987 series downplayed all elements of family and wasn't even allowed to mention they were a family, and it ultimately came across as a mostly fake and unserious college dorm environment with Splinter as dorm mother. One of my biggest complaints about the 2012 series is that it started out having a much better family narrative, but it gradually came to more resemble the fake 1987 environment, apparently by popular demand of fans primarily familiar with the 1987 series, and it's the exact opposite of what I like in a TMNT story. It went from being good TMNT to being just another anti-TMNT like 1987 had been.

I think one of the best examples of a good TMNT story is City at War. Not the 2003 TV series version which lasted all of two or three episodes. I mean the R-rated Mirage version, which was 13 issues long and lasted over a year. That has tons of decent slice-of-life moments, along with some crucibles that pushed characters' boundaries and made them develop more.