End of Year Update
7 months ago
– Mon, Dec 29, 2025 at 05:46:45 PM
Hey there. Hope this finds everyone well over the holidays, assuming you're taking some.
I've been putting this update off in the hopes that something we were told was heading our way had gotten here, but it has not yet arrived, so I'm going to post anyway and spoil a surprise. By the way, it will also be a surprise to us, and I'll explain that in a moment.
Here is the update:
The Book. I have cut the book down to a much more manageable size. This has been a huge task, extremely fraught, and I've wrestled with an overwhelming number of different versions over the past year, but I've in the past few months gotten it down to a word count that won't result in a ridiculously oversized block of book that poorly balances images and text. And we have some great photos, so I want them to really shine.
For any who might be concerned about the importance and interest of what I cut, suffice to say that I went after redundancies, and there were a lot of them. What I came to realize even after all my previous edits was that there were simply too many repeated facts that really weren't adding anything new. Many of the people we interviewed made reference to the same information we got from Pete and Kevin and I was working so hard to leave it in. However, when you're editing by chapter, even though each chapter feels satisfying, after you read it all in one go, which I started doing, all the redundancies began to rankle me. How many times was it said that Mikey was a party dude? Too many. How many times did somebody say that the turtles were rad? Too many. Once I was really thinking "big picture," I saw so many things that could be streamlined and once I did, I was amazed by how many such similar beats I'd left in on previous edits. To that end, we now have an awesome new version and I wonder if people would like to see an .epub version of this text copy of the book in advance? If enough people were interested for the pure love of reading, I don't see any harm in getting that out some time soon. I realize the fun of the book will be the photos, for most people... Anyway, I'm out to Isaac for photo selections and Mark to lay out and then it will come back to me for one more read and I will not do a ton more editing! I swear! I'm not sure how long this layout will last, but then we go to the printer and once we have that figured out, I'll let you know.
The Movie(s). This is where our big surprise(s) happened. We've had a basic cut of the feature version of the doc for years, along with a decent cut of four episodes that amount to the fan version of the doc for hardcores (as per the Kickstarter rewards). All that was left for us to do was add the critical B roll, which was a stopper because we had a few things we always expected to get "soon". And soon was being pushed further back by annoying logistics.
One of those areas we needed to supplement was our time with Steve Varner. It was a struggle to arrange that, but this past summer Isaac got a bunch more footage with him, which is great. As well, during that same production swing, Isaac was hoping to spend some time with Mark Taylor's wife Rebecca because Isaac was certain that she had some treasures from Turtle history in her garage. Most people know that Mark had a big impact on the Turtles, but it's possible people don't know exactly how big an impact it was. And now they will know, because Isaac and Rebecca discovered what I think will be completely unknown TMNT design material.
We'd long HOPED that there would be development sketches that would reveal the worth of Mark's contributions to that first TMNT toy line and indeed, there were thirty-some images and they were gold. Clearly, Mark had taken John Handy's initial design work and really strengthened it. It became clear that Mark really leaned on the comics, got to the heart of what Peter wanted to see in those first toys, and it was much of his work that went out for sculpting.
Here's one of those sketches before, and I think this one's been seen before (unlike some of the others, which I will share down the road when we're getting them into the book).
And then, after finding these with Rebecca, Isaac went back into the editing bins... Both he and I seemed to remember talking to Mark about Turtles, but could never figure out if we'd done it on camera. The footage wasn't there, or so we thought, until Isaac sent this text one day: "Unmmmmm so here’s an exciting thing. I COMPLETELY forgot that we did an ENTIRE interview with mark taylor about TMNT…….."
Indeed, during an interview about He-Man and Conan, Mark started talking about working on the Turtles. Was that interview on the He-Man hard drive instead of the TMNT hard drive? I don't know, but I do know that Isaac found it and it started more rebuilding even after the Steve Varner rebuild. Did Isaac like the interview he found? Well, look what this text:
That re-cut pushed everything back again, which is good. Maybe better than good. Isaac dived back into the edit with the new information and the new material and got everything to a good new place, a little bit richer, a little bit longer and then, one night, we got another Isaac text:
We called to find out that Kevin Eastman had texted Isaac the three photos you see above, and what you see in those shots is something we've talked to Kevin about for years. And it's wild.
Both Kevin and Peter have mentioned Mirage videotapes with unknown contents. Yes, we had been given a bunch of such tapes from Pete back in the day and some of the footage on them has been seen but there was an enduring mystery. What happened to Kevin's tapes? Did he keep them? Did they have anything new on them? Kevin didn't know for sure, nor did he hadve time to dig around and find them in his archives, which are both impressive and overwhelming.
Then, a few weeks ago, he found some tapes. Are they amazing? We don't know. Did Kevin say we could use some of the footage in this doc? YES. He said exactly that. Has he shipped any of these tapes to us? We don't know yet. Kevin is very busy and it's the holidays and Kev's got a ton on his plate, so we're not sure what's coming or not coming as of yet, however, we now have to face the idea that there may be some changes to our current cut AND the B roll used throughout the existing cut.
Or maybe these are dubs of Pete's tapes that we've already seen. Some are commercial releases of the movies. Others are eps of the animated series for sign offs. Others will be promos. But we won't know until we get them, digitize them and check them out. Isaac is foaming at the mouth and eager to see what might be on these so, as soon as we get them, we'll let you know here. If it's a big change, it might be worth it indeed. Fingers crossed!
Action Figures. This continues to be the biggest time and money sink and is fraught with technical issues as we strive to solve problems and arrive at the best figures in the best way.
I won't pretend to understand ANY of it, because it's truly Isaac's baby, but suffice to say that he has been challenged in every imaginable way and that includes in terms of technology, materials, mechanics, computationally, geopolitically, macro AND micro-economically and more. These are probably the main reason why we're behind, in spite of the enormity of writing the book and trying to collate all the incoming and changing material for the movie. These figures need to be cool and he is going crazy trying to get them to his standards. I'm going to get him to put together another video from the shop a place I am scared to go, so I stay in my basement and write a Turtle book, for the most part and I hope to get that out soon.
Other Stuff. Therea few other bits and pieces to be collected and created, but these three key factors above are eating all of our time, money and energy, as you can no doubt imagine.
In ending, I want to thank you all for your patience and understanding. We've bitten off SO much here and we're getting through it a bit at a time, but we'll get there. We hope you had/are having an amazing holiday time and wish you the best for 2026. We'll get through it together!
rl