Between two separate comic companies and the cartoon there were already a number of different iterations of the “heroes in a half-shell”. Throw in the live-action movies and series, the latter of which may or may not share the movie continuity, the “Coming Out Of Their Shells” musical Turtles, and what they were doing in Japan with manga and anime and somehow the original concept was getting lost. The first movie relatively faithful to the comics within the limits of a kids movie, but it did keep angry Raphael, the origin of the characters (though Oroku Saki and Oroku Nagi were merged into the same character without the dying part), and Casey shows up far earlier but maintains the same personality. They still managed to use enough of the regular show iconography to be recognized by fans who didn’t know about the comics, even as the later movies started doing their own thing, so even then the cartoons were the influence and kids were the target.
2003 brought a new incarnation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, airing on the Fox Box and brought to life by Dong Woo Animation while being produced by the bane of anime purists, 4Kids Entertainment! 4Kids, as I’ve gone over numerous times, were not a dubbing studio. They produced kids shows for kids in the United States, and that’s how they approached their shows. Complain all you want about jelly donuts but how many kids were introduced to Japanese animation and shows that could bridge the gap between kids and adults, what we used to call “all-ages”, outside of the DCAU at that time in TV history? My favorites of theirs were the American-produced ones like this show, Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, and WMAC Masters. In fact my calling this period “the best” of Ninja Turtles is admittedly me showing all the bias because this is my favorite version of the Ninja Turtles. The first episode starts with a re-enactment of the “trash-strewn alley” that started the first comic. Then the intro begins.
While the original series theme song focused on the individual Turtles, the new theme is more of an overview of their training and evil-fighting exploits, and I’m okay with that. The visuals give us cues as to their individual personalities even if it isn’t telling you who the leader is and who the machine guy is. It’s all action and all really cool. I wasn’t surprised to read on Turtlepedia that fans of the original series initially didn’t like this new take but that they found it weaker than the original kind of surprised me. Individually both have their strengths and weaknesses, with the original focused on the individual and the new focusing on the team. I don’t think one is better than the other. I just prefer the new one. I’ll defend the old show against later versions (including this one) acting like the goofier campy versions aren’t real ninjas or real martial artists but this does feel more like what I’d want to see in a show about ninja turtle people.
However, if you’d rather focus on the individual Turtles you’d have to wait for the changes in the intro, necessary to reflect major changes of the show.
I don’t know why it was so hard to get this one clean and embeddable. Now I wait to see how long it takes until Nickelodeon screws me on this! Also, I remember the first intro redone only with the “We shredded Shredder!” part but I can’t find evidence of that. I’m taking the victories I can. This represented huge changes to the show. There were secret government organizations, Shredder was out of the game and Hun took the Purple Dragon gang, originally part of the Foot’s criminal network, into their own enemy, Baxter was…a mess, and Shredder was thought to be taken down. He wasn’t but that’s because of a very long story and this is the intro reviews. That’s why I posted the overview from The Blockbuster Buster yesterday. There is one final change I can confirm before the show went in a new direction, which we’ll get to next time…and this time I’m right about the minor change.
Shredder’s back, but now a girl because Karai took over her “father’s” legacy. This was during a season that aired not on Fox but the CW 4 Kids block. Again, I’ll go over that tomorrow. I can appreciate wanting to show off the new truck, which has the benefit of disguise which you’d think would be a given for ninjas rather than the obvious turtle-themes truck or van, and to show that April was now as good a fighter as Splinter and Casey, deciding to learn martial arts from Splinter. The Archie comics and first Nickelodeon cartoon both saw that as a good thing and it allows her character to grow from “damsel in distress” and “hey guys, this is important news”. April and Casey are also the normal humans (well, the verdict is out on Casey, but don’t tell him I said that. 😀 ) who can get into places the Turtles can’t, but giving April the ability to defend herself, if not outright help in the fights, can only be beneficial. Plus we have a new version of Shredder so that has to be acknowledged.
I can also appreciate that they took the time to show off each individual Turtle this round and what makes them unique as characters. I still just find it jarring, as there’s a benefit to just doing one on the whole team but using the visuals to highlight the individual members. A grater emphases on the Turtles as individual characters is fine, but you lose that team dynamic of the original intro and the emphasis on the Ninja Turtle part, rather than the Teenage Mutants that seems to be all Nickelodeon cares about. I’d rather have seen a hybrid of the two ideas but that’s not what happened prior to the major show change.
What show change? Again, I point you to yesterday’s retrospective. Come back for the next installment because we’re going forward, and then back again on part two of the 4Kids examination.
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