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TMNT Season 4

Christopher

Christopher

Writer
Admiral
Figured it was time to start a new thread for the new season, which is doing a "Turtles in Space" storyline, like the second season of the '03 series.

As I expected, they wasted little time undoing the cataclysmic finale of last season by doing a time jump, but in a way that now gives them a 6-month deadline to undo the destruction of the Earth. I guess that's an effective way to keep it from being too dark while still keeping the stakes high.

The Turtles, April, and Casey get new space gear for the new season, and it took me a while to realize that April's new look, a yellow jumpsuit, is an homage to the character design from the '80s cartoon. I think the new villain, Lord Dregg, is from the later seasons of that cartoon as well.

Their first port of call was your standard Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy, and no doubt they started out with a multispecies setting so that they could justify building a bunch of new alien character models that they'll probably reuse throughout the season. Still, I can't help but feel the Turtles didn't make a very good showing of themselves. They basically committed a bunch of acts of vandalism, theft, and assault as a result of their clumsiness and ignorance, and they were basically the bad guys here. Also, it was kind of disturbing that they were so cavalier about killing Dregg's hench-insects before establishing whether they were sentient or not.

Cool to have David Tennant in what's apparently going to be a regular role as the Fugitoid. It's impressive to have an actor of his caliber in the cast. That's the cool thing about British actors -- they don't get picky or elitist about what kinds of acting jobs they take, but treat one job as equally valid to any other, whether film or TV or stage or animation or radio/audio.
 
Christopher said:
Cool to have David Tennant in what's apparently going to be a regular role as the Fugitoid. It's impressive to have an actor of his caliber in the cast. That's the cool thing about British actors -- they don't get picky or elitist about what kinds of acting jobs they take, but treat one job as equally valid to any other, whether film or TV or stage or animation or radio/audio.
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I think that's a bit of a generalization.


There are bound to be some actors that will not do a voice acting role because they might think it beneath them.

I can't name one off the top of my head at the moment
 
^Yeah, of course there are going to be variations in any category, but as a class, English actors tend to do more crossover between film, stage, TV, radio, and the like than US actors, who tend to specialize more in a single medium. It's a difference in the overall acting culture. That's why a lot of prestigious English actors have done animation over the decades -- Patrick Stewart, David Warner, John Rhys-Davies, you name it.
 
Christopher said:
I think the new villain, Lord Dregg, is from the later seasons of that cartoon as well.

Also, it was kind of disturbing that they were so cavalier about killing Dregg's hench-insects before establishing whether they were sentient or not.
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he is, though his appearance is radically redesigned.

i guess the attitude is that they're 'just bugs'? i was kinda surprised when April shot a hole clear through one of the bodyguards.
 
Saga said:
i guess the attitude is that they're 'just bugs'?
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I think we have occasionally seen Kraang get killed, even though they usually just run away once their robot bodies are trashed. Cartoon/kidvid censorship often has bizarre double standards about the killing of humans vs. sentient aliens/monsters. For instance, in Power Rangers, the monsters get killed all the time, but the human-looking villains generally end up redeemed at the end.

Still, that strikes me as morally problematical -- the idea that it's only wrong to kill intelligent life forms that look human. I mean, the heroes of the show are "just reptiles," but they're clearly people. What kind of a message does it send to children if you suggest they should only care about the lives of beings who look like themselves?
 
Samurai8472 said:
The 2D animated special Half-Shell Heroes: Blast to the Past
is up on the nick's website
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It is going to air on TV, right? My computer isn't handling streaming video very well at the moment.


Today's episode wasn't bad. It introduced a new version of Mona Lisa, who apparently was a love interest for Raphael on the '87 series; here she's a member of the Salamandarians, your stereotypical "honorable warrior" alien race. That part was kind of underwhelming, but it was great to hear Keith David's voice as the commander. And it was interesting to see Raph become the peacemaker for once.
 
Today's episode was pretty lame. The old three-wishes gag? Seriously? With an uglier version of Mr. Mxyzptlk?

It had a few decent bits, though. I liked it that the hypercube actually was animated as a hypercube, aka tesseract, as projected into 3 dimensions. And Casey as Dr. Manhattan was a cute touch.

And I guess they're picking up old TV signals from Earth, to continue the trend of old-cartoon parodies. This year it's a knockoff of the obscure Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos, with Chris Bradford (aka Dogpound/Rahzar) as the star. I'm puzzled how Bradford could've had a cartoon in the '80s. How old is he?


According to the promo they showed, the Half-Shell Heroes thing will air on TV two weeks from today, on November 22nd (an appropriate date for a time-travel story, since it's the date Doctor Who premiered in 1963). I'm probably not the target audience for it, but it's kind of refreshing to see the Turtles animated in 2D again.
 
Half-Shell Heroes Blast to The Past

A bit of power puff girls mixed with teen titans go


[YT]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n09ryi5u6JY[/YT]


I thought it was funny when Mikey did the transformers robot noise.
 
i recognized Wyrm because i had the old action figure. i don't remember anything about him being able to grant wishes though. either way, it was a fun episode. the Chris Bradford toon reminds me of stuff like the Mr T or Hulk Hogan cartoons.
 
I thought Blast to the Past was a lot of fun. It definitely skews younger, but as a one-off, I didn't mind.

Mulgrew is fantastic though. Is Turtles the new Gargoyles?
 
They seem to have created a temporal paradox. If they prevent the destruction of earth, then there's no reason to travel back in time. But if they don't travel back in time, their actions to prevent earth from being destroyed will never have happened.
 
Stephen! said:
They seem to have created a temporal paradox. If they prevent the destruction of earth, then there's no reason to travel back in time. But if they don't travel back in time, their actions to prevent earth from being destroyed will never have happened.
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You could say the same about a thousand other time travel stories over the decades. But most such stories routinely assume that the time travelers themselves are not "reset" along with the universe but remember the events of the previous timeline. (E.g. Marty McFly remembers how different his original life in 1985 was from his life in the altered 1985 at the end of Back to the Future.) No doubt this will do the same as all those others, because of course it's the only approach that works dramatically. And it makes sense, too, because the time travellers' worldlines have followed a different path than everyone else's, essentially crossing from one timeline to another.


This week's episode was a little unfocused. It introduces a new villain, Armaggon (Ron Perlman) -- based on a character formerly exclusive the Archie Comics TMNT series -- but uses him merely as a catalyst for the confrontation with another villain, Overmind. I guess the most worthwhile part was the backstory and character building for the Fugitoid/Honeycutt, although the resolution of the story was made pretty obvious by the setup (focusing on April's psychic powers and Honeycutt's fear of losing his humanity). Although I liked the echo of that old Tenth Doctor intensity in Tennant's voice when the Fugitoid fought back against Overmind.
 
Okay, they showed the Half-Shell Heroes special today. It was okay, I guess -- basically doing the current characters in the style of Glen Murakami's Teen Titans, and even having Murakami himself on board as supervising producer. (Which is an interesting coincidence, because one of the producers of the original '87 TMNT series was Teruaki "Jimmy" Murakami. I can't find any indication that they're related, though.) It pretty clearly wasn't in continuity with the main show -- the Turtles know the Triceratons already but the Earth is still intact, and Rocksteady is rather dumber than Steranko is on the main show. So it's weird that they used the same voices and versions of the characters, right down to Ice Cream Kitty.

And I really, really miss the days when nobody would think of incorporating scatological "humor" into a show for children. These days, the younger the target audience, the more gross-out gags you'll inevitably get.
 
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