Talk:Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/@comment-26423071-20171207174946/@comment-995426-20171207183059

I don't have any TMNT fan friends who are fans of that many different kinds of TMNT. Virtually all of them are fans first and foremost of comics for adults (primarily Mirage, Palladium, Archie (at least later on), Image, IDW and MNT Gaiden), and sometimes the 2003 TV series because it was more willing to overlap with that kind of adult TMNT fan appeal. None of my fan friends are fans of the 1987 TV series, and while they by and large gave the 2012 TV series a chance, it ended up being far too vapid and bubble gum for them to take seriously, including me about halfway through season 3. I personally know more TMNT fans whose interests in TMNT are very limited and conditional, than those who actually seem to like it all. Until I met The S, I'd never actually met such a fan.

TMNT is a coming of age story initially about turbulent teenage years, and family (both immediate and extended, both genetic and adopted), and spirit, and ninjutsu, and slice-of-life, and surviving a difficult that at best averages out bittersweet, and gradually growing up and becoming an adult with all the responsibilities involved, and dealing with your cumulative baggage, and making complicated morally grey choices and living with them anyway, and then maybe growing old enough to help raise the next generation. For me, turtles became far more interesting characters when they aged into their 20s and 30s, than in other versions that keep them artificially teenaged forever. A character can't exactly come of age if the writers stuff them into some kind of neverland where they're not allowed to grow up.

Young children may be interested in what the big kids are into, but if a version of TMNT makes it so that the young children are the primary target audience, then it's a mockery of so many of the very reasons we love TMNT. And if one takes the attitude that TMNT is always primarily for children, then it undermines the credit of the entire TMNT franchise, and only makes it seem more so like Mirage made a huge mistake granting a cartoon license in the first place. Now, you're going to find some people who are indeed fans of both the adult drama approach the kid's cartoon approach. But it may be entirely futile to try to sell the merits of a kid's cartoon approach to people who have read mainly adult TMNT comics for decades.

That said, even some of my friends are willing to give the new series a chance. Maybe watch some, and see if it's any good. There's a chance it...actually could be good. I guess we'll just have to see. But we've been to this rodeo before. What could go right, could still go very, very, horribly wrong, as we've seen happen before multiple times. So we're all cautious and not terribly optimistic about Viacom's handling of (or respect for) the TMNT property.