The Original 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Series Heads To YouTube And Nicktoons

 

It's time for an update! Last week, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman announced at the San Diego Comic-Con panel for the upcoming Mutant Mayhem film that, fourteen years after Paramount purchased the franchise, that they had finally secured the rights to air the original animated series which originally aired 193 episodes from 1987-1996 on CBS. It would be debuting digitally on Nickelodeon later this month in the United States meaning Nickelodeon-owned and operated channels such as YouTube, Pluto TV and O&O linear channels. And YouTube has gotten it first.

On Saturday morning, July 29 at 10:30 AM, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles channel not only premiered the first episode, but the entire original five episode miniseries that would ultimately form the series’s first season. Not as separate videos, but as one whole video. After all, they’re kind of all the rage right now. In-depth retrospectives and comic and movie review compilations that run several hours, people like letting it run like that. The channel itself is used to smaller compilations of scenes running a theme, like “31 Minutes of Splinter Being a Total Dad” or “20 Minutes of the Turtles Being Bros”, so about 106 minutes isn’t as daunting as the aforementioned retrospectives. It remains to be seen what the full rollout will be like, but it’s easy to imagine all 193 episodes will be released individually on the channel.

According to TV schedule websites like TVPassport, the series will first make its linear home on Nicktoons. It starts on Monday, July 31 at midnight, so it’s technically into August 1, where two episodes will air every night in that midnight hour including weekends. However, Friday nights (into Saturdays) the series will air all night until 6 AM, which currently leads into the channel’s block of 2012 series episodes. According to Nickandmore, the arrival makes it one of the oldest series to air on the network, as its original premiere predates the original Nicktoons. It is therefore in a class that features Charlie Brown, Tiny Toon Adventures, and through a certain point of view, Dragon Ball Z Kai. 

In all, the show’s presence gives a bit of age to a lineup that has skewed toward SpongeBob, The Loud House and their respective spinoffs, and other shows that are still rather recent, like Big Nate, and the oldest show before the 1987 TMNT series arrival is… the aforementioned 2012 iteration’s weekend morning blocks. When NickRewind existed under its several names for over a decade on TeenNick, it seemingly alleviated the need for Nicktoons to air some of those classic Nicktoons on an equally regular basis. The few they were when The '90s Are All That launched on the even later end of the late night slots were dropped within a month. This makes it really the first time since then that they’ve had a late night nostalgia block of sorts.

There's been no specific indication of when the series will arrive on Pluto TV, whether on the main Nickelodeon channel or Totally Turtles, but they're the most sensible destinations. A Paramount+ arrival has still not been made clear.

Sources: TVPassport, Nickandmore on Twitter, HyperSchedules on Twitter