Nickelodeon’s short-lived Rise of the Teenage Mutant Turtles could have caught flack when it first debuted, nevertheless it quickly discovered itself an viewers that’s been very joyful to sing the present’s praises for years. Now that the latest iteration of the Turtles have landed their very own film on Netflix, which additionally holds the entire first season, it’s been the right time to speak about what the longer term might’ve held (and presumably nonetheless does?) in retailer for this new tackle Leo, Raph, Mikey, and Donnie.

On Saturday, Rise fan Colin Stein held a Twitch stream of the movie that featured a number of members of the present’s manufacturing crew, together with govt producer Ant Ward, character designer Bryce Collins, storyboard artist Laura Gille, and sequence director JJ Conway. Beyond listening to the crew talk about what needed to be reduce from the movie for size or neat concepts—there’s a model of this film the place April might’ve piloted a mech version of Raph that Donnie made, and the prologue initially featured the present’s most important solid as older, battle-tested heroes within the Krang-controlled way forward for New York—there was some dialogue on issues the crew needed to do with the present earlier than they discovered it was ending before anticipated.

The present’s second season had noticeably a shorter episode rely than the primary, and there was a lot left on the reducing room ground, together with an episode that might’ve been a parody of the Star Wars Holiday Special, of all issues. One plotline that needed to be reduce fully was the Turtles having different siblings who Splinter failed to avoid wasting when he escaped from the Hidden City of New York. One of those siblings would’ve wound up in Baron Draxum’s possession, and the opposite would’ve been raised by the Hidden City’s spider crime boss, Big Mama.

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Another casualty of the truncated season was Karai, reimagined in Rise as an ancestor to the Turtles. The character was close to being cut from entire season entirely on the basis of not being able to give her any real character with a small handful of episodes. Even after Ward convinced the crew to keep Karai around, having her die to save the Turtles understandably didn’t feel great to much of the staff. So the writers chose to have her live on by transferring her soul into April. Before her death, though, she would’ve had more time to spend with the Turtles on an individual basis.

Had Rise made it to season three, the Krang would’ve become the primary villains of that particular season, followed by the Rat King in a hypothetical season four. Following the movie, the show’s tone would gradually switch from goofy slapstick (said to be mandated by Nickeldeon) to a darker tone, a space that the the Rise movie occupies for most of its runtime via the Krang. Unlike previous incarnations, the Krang in Rise aren’t played for laughs, and the crew wanted to get as far into body horror as they were allowed. Presumably, the surviving Krang taken into custody would’ve served as that big bad.

The entire stream contains other interesting nuggets of information for fans to pore over, such as what the Rise crew hoped to do with the Hidden City and the ideas they had for the show’s version of Casey Jones. Maybe in a not-too-distant future, we’ll see this iteration of the Turtles—sorry, the Mad Dogs—get a second chance at life, as other animated superheroes have before. By all accounts, it sounds like this show had more than enough gas left in the tank.

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie is out now on Netflix, and the show can be watched on Netflix or Paramount+.

[H/T Rise of the TMNT Daily Clips]

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