For whatever reason, Fox asked 4Kids Entertainment to shelve the completed fifth season of the show and take the show in a new direction. Fox’s hope might have been to renew interest in the show, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fast Forward is not as popular among fans of the 2003 4Kids run…so that backfired.
At some point 4Kids and Fox parted ways but 4Kids was already running Kids WB’s Saturday morning line-up, CW 4Kids. This is not surprising given 4Kids history with Kids WB, who had already taken Pokémon from syndication and started airing the Yu-Gi-Oh series. If anything I’m not sure why it was Fox that gave 4Kids control of their lineup. This would give us one more shot at the series, but according to the Ninja Turtles Fandom wiki, other ideas were thought up:
Several pitches were given to Mirage Studios and Playmates Toys before settling on Back to the Sewer. The first pitch, TMNT: Super World, involved a card game of some sort. TMNT: Overload was to have a glitch in the time travel process cause the Turtles to bring their younger selves with them to the present. The third idea, Ultimate TMNT attempted to combine the universe of the movies with the 2003 cartoon as well as introduce characters from the 1987 cartoon and TMNT Adventure comic book from Archie Comics. Ultimately, they decided to take the start with the more realistic and less humorous aspects of TMNT: Overload and use that as a starting point for Back to the Sewer.
I’m not sure altering the universe or teaming the Turtles with their younger selves would have been good ideas, either. I do like the idea of new versions of some of the Archie and classic toon characters, some of whom would show up in the first Nickelodeon series I hear. Instead we got Fast Forward, so of course a new art style and intro.
I think that went a little TOO “fast forward”. The visuals are fine but it goes by so fast that none of the moments really have a time to be interesting. Take the image of Darius Dunn, the overweight guy laughing in large size over the Turtles fighting their evil clones. It goes by so quickly that you don’t get any weight (no pun intended) out of it. It’s like watching an anime opening on double speed. In fact, out of curiosity, I played it back at .75 speed in the YouTube player and despite the audio sounding a bit odd at parts it mostly worked better than at normal speed. .50 was too slow but my point is you need to slow it a bit to really enjoy the images on screen and see how they connect to the stories of the series.
The show is not always looked upon fondly because it changed so much, one of the things I think hurt Spider-Man Unlimited coming off of the previous Spider-Man a year earlier. The art style is lighter and so is the tone of the writing, but it does have some interesting villains, had both Bishop and Baxter Stockman reform, and I do like the new high-tech versions of their weapons. I kind of wish they had kept them, but the idea that they needed devices to help live in the future world was just an excuse to change their look and I’m kind of neutral on it overall.
We finally got the actual final season of Ninja Turtles, the “Tribunal arc”, during the move to CW but it does make sense that Fast Forward, which replaced it but is seen by fans as having happened afterwards, didn’t use any of the gifts they got during that arc. We would also get our last series in this continuity with TMNT: Back To The Sewers, going back to form because of the animated theatrical film I rather enjoyed as its own continuity but technically they weren’t related.
It was decided that a more stylized art style would be used in order to bring down the cost per episode. Also, pupils were added to the Turtles in order to look more similar to the character designs used in TMNT.
The odd thing is that there was another video with a supposed “alternate intro”. The changes are so slight, involving the virtual “Cyber Shredder” because someone wanted to play Tron with the Turtles for some reason, and some new villain I can’t even recall at this point that I don’t even remember there being two intros and it feels unnecessary. If you recall from the Blockbuster Buster’s retrospective, that was the original plan for the whole season, the Turtles going into the internet to reclaim bits of Splinter, but they changed it and just made it a recurring plot. Not sure if we were better off, but let’s see that alternate intro.
Admittedly the second one’s minor tweaks are improvements in the flow. This intro handles the same energy of Fast Forward much better, taking advantage of the frantic speed rather than being weakened by it. Compare the gloating Dunn moment with the arrival of Hun in the Back To The Sewers intro. It works better because the visuals play along with the music rather than being forced to move faster to go along.
This would be the last season of this incarnation of the Turtles, and it ends on a high notes, with everyone attending April and Casey’s wedding, only to fall into the usual comic trope of the wedding leading to a fight with a bunch of villains. So it knew what genre it was in. From here the franchise would leave TV for a while before Eastman and Laird decided to get out of the Ninja Turtle scene altogether, selling the whole franchise rights to Nickelodeon. That means we’re closing in on the end of this series with the shows I just couldn’t get into. I’ll start explaining next time as the Turtles go CG for the second time.
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