In case you missed it, there's a new Ninja Turtles cartoon on Paramount+. This series follows the continuity from Mutant Mayhem, and has most of the same cast back.

Just to get it out of the way, I think this series was really good! It's definitely an interesting change of pace from previous Ninja Turtles shows... for one thing, the setup change is pretty stark. In case you don't remember, at the end of Mutant Mayhem the Turtles (and all the mutants) are revealed to the public after saving the city, and now the Turtles themselves are going to a normal high school and all the mutants are celebrities who get instantly recognized in public. The series even starts with the turtles trying to get to a costume party, and instead of previous incarnations where going to a costume event is just an excuse to have them go out in public with nobody freaking out, instead they just dress up in costumes they want to wear and there are actually other people at the party dressed as Ninja Turtles.

The other way the show differentiates itself is by not being nearly as episodic as other series' have been. Most Ninja Turtles media is created with syndication in mind... sure, there's ongoing stories and continuity, but there will also be plenty of standalone episodes that you could, say, watch in reruns without knowing the rest of the plot and still more or less follow what's happening. But Tales really embraces the streaming format... these episodes aren't intended for TV, and work as more of a binge watch. The 12 episode season is split up into two major stories at 6 episodes each... it honestly feels like, if you just cut out the opening theme and the credits, you could easily recut this as two standalone movies.

However, there are some oddities about the series that stand out. For one, as I mentioned they got most of the cast from the movie back, but it's very obvious that they couldn't get Jackie Chan back to voice Splinter. I can understand that... Jackie Chan is a huge global celebrity... even if he had the time to show up for a voice recording, they might not have had it in the budget for him. But weirdly, instead of just hiring a soundalike, they just came up with weird, in-universe explanations for why he's not speaking in his normal voice. During the first story, he exclusively speaks in "Vermin", supposedly for Scumbug's sake, since they're dating now and Scumbug only speaks Vermin. It's not too distracting since he's kind of out of the picture throughout the first 6 episodes, but the latter half of the series is presented as a story that Splinter is telling, so the vermin angle clearly isn't going to work. The way they get around it is to say that Splinter originally told the story in Vermin, and Raphael is simply dubbing over him to make the story cohesive, and also to punch it up and make it more dramatic. So any time Splinter speaks, it's Raphael VA Brady Noon just speaking in an over-dramatic deep voice that the others just refer to as "talking like Batman".

That's the other weird thing about this series... both major stories are presented 100% as "Tales", and there's even dialogue that implies none of this actually happened. The first story arc is introduced by Leonardo, who says that their lives are actually quite mundane now, and states overtly that the story he's about to tell is made up for a comic book he's drawing in a notebook. Similarly, the supposed reason Raphael needs to dub over Splinter is because the actual story he was telling was long, boring, and nothing happened... so was the entire thing made up? I guess it's kind of a moot point since it's a cartoon and, y'know... the entire thing is made up. But this feels like a safety net just in case the sequel to Mutant Mayhem contradicts something in this series.