"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" Classic Series Talkback (Spoilers)

UGh. Wingnut and Screwloose were just horrible in the cartoon series. They were a total joke of a cliched "alien brainwashing" episode. I always felt the Archie comics were a clear step ahead of the cartoons as well, introducing the characters, but giving them motives, and personalities... and depth.

Take Leatherhead, for example. In the original Mirage Comic and 2k3 series, he was mutated allongside the Turtles, but the Utroms actually took care of him. He has a bitter resentment towards humans. In the Archie Comics, he was a theif, sick of his own poverty in the Lousiana Swamps, stole a Turn Stone from a Swamp witch, and was turned into Leatherhead as a punnishment. He then was used as a pawn of Shredder, until he found out the truth, and ended with events of him being a beloved Intergalactic Wrestler. In the cartoon show he was just mutated and he was just evil. That's basically it.
 
Heh, one gag like that sticks in my mind still. I'm paraphrasing but Krang was telling Shredder about some evil plan that involved him going to Portugal or something. So, he breaks out this map of sorts but Shredder interrupts Krang, insisting that "I know where Portugal is!" To which Krang tells him to be quiet, informing him that "this is the educational part of our show!"

Aaah, cheese.
 
This show along with Garfield and Friends were the ones I remembered breaking the fourth wall extremely well in the 1980's, which was refreshing from all the other corny crap we got. The writers were well aware of the cliches and jabbed them harshly.
 
I think it was somewhere in S5 that I started missing episodes for some reason or another, I forget what shows were on opposite of TMNT at the time (I remember being into Wishkid during into it's initial run, then regretting it when seeing it again years later), so many S5-S10 eps are going to be all new to me.
 
The show broke the fourth wall in every couple of episodes.

My favorite is in the Season 6 set, when Leo says, "I bet Shredder and Krang are behind this!" and then Don says, "Knock it off, Leonardo, they're not even in this episode!"

Oh man, the old toon was great because it made fun of itself and didn't take itself too seriously. That's why it was awesome.
 
I wonder what brought about the decision to give a massive amount of screentime to the Channel 6 employees. They seemed to get a lot more focus than a lot of background characters on shows back then.
 
Nope, the Fugitoid never appeared.

And the Triceratons really appeared in an episode? I thought the only 87' series-related thing that had a Triceraton was the cover to the third NES game.
 
They appeared in the Season 7 premiere 'Night of the Dark Turtle', which was probably one of the darkest pre-Red Sky episodes of the series.
 
I thought the season was so-so. For every good episode (Shreeka's Revenge) there was a rather lame one (Polly Wanna Pizza).

But I did enjoy the episode spoofing Freddy Krueger. If they could have gotten an actual Freddy impersonator, that episode would have rocked.
 
I remember one episode when Shredder was turn into a sissy little fly crying for the rest of the episode Bebop and Rocksteady should have kept him that way forever for crying like a little baby when know he a badass ninja he should not let baxter turn him to a fly in the place. And true badass would ever let that happened.
 
I recently watched some classic TMNT, I decided to watch season 6 because I purchased the DVD set sometime earlier in the year and I have yet to sit down and watch the whole thing, I figured it was time to give it my full attention. I try to revisit some classic animation on DVD every now and again, it's getting harder and harder with the ammount of anime I have backlogged that I need to get to, but I do enjoy finding time to watch some old school 'toons, especially stuff like TMNT which was amazing back in the day. Season 6 was pretty good, I wouldn't say it was as strong as the first 2 or 3 years of the show but it definately had it's moments, but like with most shows the series became somewhat stale later on.
 
Yeah, that's what always bugged me about most 80's shows. The animation studios hired for them (Transformers for example had Toei Akom and TMS, along with a Filipino animation studio *TFWiki thinks that it's Burbank Animation* ) were never credited and yet TMNT 1987 had many (Toei, A-1, Morning Sun, Dai Won, Fred Wolf Dublin and supposedly Wang, not sure who else) involved. I always wonder that.

Is it because it's to make the animation studio that was at first credited (In both cases Toei) responsible? But since A-1 and those other companies was involved with TMNT. It's kinda interesting they'd avoid giving credit to the ones responsible for the animation.
 
Agreed. They shoehorned these characters into every episode even when the shows didn't call for it. Was it a licensing/merchandise stipulation that April appear in every episode? Yet there were tons over underused secondary villains and heroes that were only used once or twice and then never used again. And then there's all the characters that appeared in the toy line but never appeared on the show. But that's ok, as long as Vernon, Bern and Irma showed up all the time, right?
 
outside of all four turtles, bebop and rocksteady there was a mutating splinter-back to a human form... and i think there might have been a shedder that turns into the super shredder too.
 
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