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Comment by lelandfe | Hacker News Reader

For a lot of great behind the scenes artwork: https://characterdesignreferences.com/art-of-animation-8/art...

I used to have an artist roommate obsessed with the art style of the show. If anyone hasn't yet watched the rebooted season from 2017, I highly recommend it.

Edit: one great clip from S5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFDkcvrSaYU

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I was going to post this link, too :)

Balance is important!

I wasn't much a fan of the rebooted series, I thought the inclusion of the new character took too much focus. Almost felt to me more like a fan fiction ending with someone's OC

I watched the whole series because of some clips from the new season.

The new stuff felt more mature to me and the old stuff more like a kids show.

Overall I liked both, but I get it, the new stuff felt a bit off.

I suspect this is because the target audience is the original audience, which is now 12 years older; probably the same for all the other reboots.

It's worth noting that the original four seasons were on Cartoon Network prime time, while the revival season explicitly aired on Adult Swim. So yes, the target audience was older (or, more likely, the target audience was the group of kids who watched the original series that aged into adults while the show was off the air).

You always got the sense from the original that SJ was held back by the censors (Jack has cartoon Wolverine syndrome--he's got a legendary cutting edge, but is only allowed to use it on doors and robots). But I agree, after four seasons of borderline pacifist Jack, suddenly flipping to "Oh, I guess Jack kills people now" hand-waived away by a flashback of his father using lethal force when necessary, was a bit jarring and tonally inconsistent.

You refer to it as Wolverine syndrome, but I also remember it with TMNT and Leonardo. With the cartoon version, they made all the foot clan robots to get around it. It's also quite the shock to read the original comics and find out the turtles love beer, and Leonardo stabs and kills the shredder (permanently) in something like the first issue.

12 years on you can get the original creator back to storyboard everything, hire back the old VO team, and still have people complaining the show is too different :P

Most of the old VO team

Makoto Iwamatsu (Aku) died in 2006 :(

I liked the fifth season because they needed to do something different with the story. I feel like they had hit the point of diminishing returns by end of the previous four seasons.

I think they could have honestly done the same thing but no new character, have jack retrace his steps to see old characters and that he actually had been making a difference the whole time before finding a time portal and beating aku.

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