I’d been aware that 2023 marked the twentieth anniversary of the 2003-2009 4Kids/Lloyd Goldfine-produced TMNT series—hard not to, given how everyone refers to it by its debut year—but it wasn’t until today yesterday that I realized that today is yesterday was actually the twentieth anniversary of its debut. And so, it’s time for some spontaneous, unpolished thoughts about a series that remains deeply important to me.
I still love this version of TMNT. I see it now with a much more critical eye, but none of the show’s flaws can erase what the show meant to me, or the things that actually work about it. It was, back then, my favorite American animated show, and it is still, in many ways, unmatched.
The big thing about this second TMNT is that it was meant to be more faithful to the Mirage series than any adaptation had been until then (plus or minus, arguably, the original film). Consequently, it would intentionally avoid many of the elements that for many had defined the turtles—Bebop and Rocksteady, Krang, April the reporter, the Technodrome, many of the iconic videogame baddies—because they’d been created for the original cartoon or its spinoffs. Back then, though, I didn’t know what that meant—my experience with the turtles had been mainly through the original cartoon, the videogames, and assorted issues of the Archie comic.
While I had been following the news about the cartoon, I actually missed the first episode when it aired, as well as the second one when it first aired. I only began watching on the third week, which, because 4Kids had been airing the previous week’s episode before the new one, meant that my first episode was “A Better Mousetrap”. Already, I’d missed a lot. The Mousers, familiar entities from the videogames, were already a known factor, and the turtles had already lost a lair. Still, it was all easy enough to follow, and so I did. It wasn’t until “The Way of Invisibility”, though, that the show really caught my attention. Suddenly, Baxter Stockman was back, missing an eye. Hun got to show that he was more than just muscle. A dark-skinned man of unknown origin and faction suddenly appeared and began discussing the plot with three other unidentified people. Things were getting interesting, and for the longest time, they kept on getting interesting.
Which isn’t to say the series was uniformly a work of staggering genius. One of the ways the second cartoon feels faithful to the original Mirage Comics is its production values, which twenty years later cannot compare to what came later (or even what came at the time) and can often be most generally described as competent, but unpolished. The voice actors for the core cast are fantastic, but the more one steps outside that, the more the limits of relying on the NY non-union voice actor pool become apparent. It remains quite disappointing that actors quite often don’t match their character races, adding a lot of cringe factor whenever an actor has to do an accent. The story boards, for all their fancy tricks, lack the character that would come in subsequent TMNT series. The dialogue could often be cringeworthy, even to my 18-year-old ears, and couldn’t often felt incapable of dealing with the restrictions the network placed on it. “The Shredder Strikes Back, Part 1” is a damn good episode, but it’s not hard to see how it could be a million times better, and actually sell the idea that the Leo segments were supposed to be silent beyond just not having dialogue.
And yet, the series had an ace up its sleeve. The writers not only had a grasp of the fundamentals of storytelling, they were also allowed to take their time and progress the story at their own pace, allowing for what remains one of the most pleasing narrative arcs on TV. Season one, in particular, builds up in an extremely satisfying way, every subsequent step feeling logical and additive, increasing tension and stakes and excitement until “Return to New York” Part 3, whose ending so completely walloped me—Leo decapitated the Shredder, y’all, and he got back up—that upon finishing the episode I immediately had to go to every message board I frequented to talk about it. And the series then continued doing that—adding to itself logically, without losing sight of itself and while being smarter and more subtle than probably even the writers intended it to be.
While it initially had a difficult time replicating the tone and content of the Mirage series—the Utrom Shredder exists largely because it allowed them to replicate the Shredder’s comic book death in a family-friendly way—the show eventually found ways to become quite sophisticated, for a Saturday morning cartoon. Not violent, necessarily (although it eventually became that, too, showing as much as its inability to depict blood would allow), just smarter. Like, consider the character of Agent Bishop, whose origin story is largely told within the show’s teasers, and is thus sparse while telling us what we need. Consider how the Ultimate Ninja wanting to make a name for himself is both figurative and literal. Consider that the turtles are allowed to actually redress their grievance against the Shredder via REVENGE and aren’t made bad guys into doing so, while also arguing that the same sort of thing wouldn’t be good for Casey. For a show that often felt kind of dumb, it often felt surprisingly smart.
Some time after beginning TMNT, I began watching Gargoyles, and it was impossible not to connect the two series–not just because of their conceptual similarities, but because their tones and executions were so alike. In the end, though, while Gargoyles was probably the better-produced and more ambitious series, I feel TMNT was ultimately the more successful one, in large part because of the turtles themselves. While both series feature a lot of plot and world-building, TMNT (in part because it had a lot more episodes to play with) has a lot more moments of the turtles just being themselves, which helped develop them as individuals and strengthen their dynamics, strengthened their interpersonal dynamics, and just made the series a lot more fun in general. It also allowed the turtles to carry some of the more sub-par stories.
Because of course, the good times didn’t last. The final three seasons are unquestionably lesser, due to different reasons. Season 5 went for epic, but ran too long for something that really didn’t have much substance or even a real tie into the series’ themes or characters—although god know the writers tried. Season 6, Fast Forward had potential, and it would be far from the first time a turtles series had focused on the future, but it feels too divorced from everything that had happened before, too light in character work, and Cody never quite manages to escape feeling like the annoying kid brother—it’s all quite underbaked. Finally, season 7, despite its attempts to bring things back to what works, feels like the writers going through the motions. Even if the reused animation in the first few episodes didn’t by itself prove that they didn’t have enough time to finish the season by the time it aired, a lot of it feels like it needed a few additional drafts. It’s not offensively bad, but it’s also nowhere near the series’ best. Fortunately, it was not the series’ last—that’d be Turtles Forever, a love letter to not just the turtles, but also the ending the series deserved.
The 2003-2009 TMNT was meant to hearken back to the original Mirage comics, it doesn’t feel coincidental that by the time it ended, the property would no longer belong to its original creators. Since then, subsequent takes on the turtles have either taken a holistic approach to the turtles, adapting elements from all the various versions, or going almost entirely their own way, which is somewhat bittersweet. While I don’t believe the Mirage books represent an untouchable, sole valid take on the turtles—mutability has always been one of the concepts’ greatest strengths—I appreciated the 2003 series for making that its compass point, and remain somewhat disappointed it couldn’t adapt some of the cooler concepts (Shadow, Shadow, Shadow). Also bittersweet is the way this series has become…not invisible, but easy to ignore. Even with all of its strengths, it was never as popular as the original—and at the time, inescapable—Fred wolf series, and that remains the case. It’s by no means completely forgotten—Hun and Bishop, villains created for this series, have made it into comics and TV series, and elements like the Shredder as a demonic, mystical entity have appeared most recently in Rise of the TMNT—but I can’t imagine someone making a Turtles Forever movie starring them, or even appearing as optional skins in a videogame. Season 7 never even made it in DVD here in the states. Still, this is in many ways secondary. Despite everything, in the end we got a series that lasted more than a 100 episodes and ended well. Everything else is gravy.
Monsters of New York 