![]() So, with all that out of the way, let’s get started. And if you read some of those notes and emails that Laird has published, you can see that it was often an uphill battle to prevent them from making a terrible cartoon. 4Kids was a company that made nothing but s-t… EXCEPT THIS ONE TIME. I just wanted to reassure anyone reflexively gagging at the sound of “4Kids” that TMNT is the jewel in their otherwise turdly collection. ![]() Laird has posted much of his notes to the writers on his TMNT blog, and while his candor can only charitably be described as “brutal”, it’s clear that he was fiercely dedicated to making a show that didn’t suck, challenging 4Kids every step of the way.Īnyhow, this intro’s long enough. He WANTED it to be good as a matter of pride and professional integrity he wasn’t going to passively glance from the back seat like he did with the 1987 cartoon. Laird was SERIOUSLY invested in this show, not just financially, but creatively. Yes, the co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles himself. The animation in this TMNT cartoon is the polar opposite of what we saw in the ‘80s: Good and consistent from episode-to-episode.įinally, the last ingredient that worked to make this incarnation of the TMNT awesome in spite of the production company heading it up: Peter Freakin’ Laird. Dong Woo was the first South Korean studio to buck that reputation by offering competent, consistent and QUALITY animation, doing shows like Men in Black, the 2002 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Jackie Chan Adventures. If you go back and watch an ‘80s cartoon where the animation studios would bounce back and forth between Japan and Korea, you could always tell which episode was done by a Korean studio because it would have the unmistakable thumbprint of looking like utter trash (I’m looking at you, AKOM). ![]() It used to be that South Korean animation was guaranteed to be lousy. Then you have the animation, done in South Korea by one of my favorite studios: Dong Woo. You hire good writers and see what happens? She often goes toe-to-toe with Andrea Romano as the best voice director in the American animation industry and her work includes series like Beast Wars, Men in Black and… the 1987 TMNT cartoon! So even though this is the same cast responsible for that first awful dub of One Piece, it’s amazing what a talented director can squeeze out of them.Īnd then you’ve got writers! The first season features scripts from pros like Marty Isenberg, who wrote for Batman: The Animated Series and story edited Transformers Animated, and Eric Luke, who co-plotted the opening miniseries of Disney’s Gargoyles. And they actually bused in some top shelf talent that typically kept their distance from “The guys who took Yu-Gi-Oh and made it WORSE somehow”.Īlthough all the voice acting is strictly non-union, and the same people known for dubbing anime and dubbing it poorly, the voice direction was headed by none other than Susan Blu. When I sit back and ruminate on the “how” aspect, I try to look at the actual people involved in making the 4Kids TMNT cartoon and not just the production company logo. Listen to the latest episode of the AIPT Television podcast!
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