Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but nobody here seems to have been talking about Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles since February. Anyway, it looks like this season, and the series, has finally come to an end. The season has consisted of multiple self-contained story arcs ranging from 1 to 4 episodes -- similar to Star Trek: Enterprise's fourth season, but with less continuity between arcs, so they could be shown in any order. Nickelodeon just showed a movie-length (3-part) storyline this past weekend, another crossover with the '87 cartoon characters, and apparently that's the last of the new episodes to debut. Two other storylines were previously shown on Nicktoons instead of Nickelodeon, so I missed them at the time, but I caught up via On Demand cable. One was a 4-part time-travel story involving classic monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, mummy, werewolves -- with Dracula played by Chris Sarandon, who was the vampire in Fright Night and Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas), and the other -- the final trio of episodes in production order -- was a post-apocalyptic Mad Max homage. I think the reason they weren't shown on Nickelodeon is because they were rather more violent than the usual stuff, not shying away from death like kids' cartoons in the US normally do. They were quite a contrast to the goofy '87 crossover. That was the interesting thing about the Tales season -- the semi-anthology format let it experiment with a variety of tones and styles. A while back, they did a 3-part Usagi Yojimbo crossover that was done in the style of a samurai movie and was really effective, especially in the first part, which had an amazingly well-animated horse chase sequence with much more dynamic camera work than usual for the show. I think this was like Enterprise season 4 in another way -- the producers presumably knew this was their last season, so they felt free to cut loose and do whatever they wanted.
I'm not sure what to think about the series ending (in production order) with a post-apocalyptic storyline about the aged Turtles in a devastated wasteland, with no time-travel reset at the end. Is this the canonical ending for the series? Or is it just an imaginary story or a possible future? I think it's probably the latter, since the existence of Renet in the future seems to indicate that humanity still has a future. But it's kind of daring of them not to answer that question, just to leave this as the final word (although maybe that's why this one wasn't aired last, so as to avoid giving that impression).
Anyway, I'm going to miss this incarnation of TMNT. I think it's the best one there's been, and it'll be hard for the next show (already in development) to match or surpass it. I also really liked the main title sequence of the Tales season, which had a great jazzy arrangement of the theme song (the first animated TMNT series title music this century that I haven't loathed) and really beautifully done, stylized visuals with a similarly retro flavor to them.
