23 October 2009
Josh

Nickelodeon buys Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise for $60 million

Nickelodeon has bought the TMNT franchise for a cool $60 million, the kids television network has announced.

The previous rights to the franchise were held by it’s original creators at The Mirage Group (who is the producer of the currently running animated TMNT Saturday morning cartoon show) as well as by 4Kids Entertainment.

Nickelodeon is not only already in the works with a new CG animated TMNT series (set for 2012) and are also working on a new film (hopefully it’ll be live action . . .), but they also get all TMNT merchandising rights in continued partnership with Playmates (who still creates the toys, as they did in the 80s).

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shares a comedic sensibility with the Nickelodeon DNA, with added layers of action and fantasy that have kept this property an evergreen favorite with multiple generations of audiences. We are extremely happy to have the opportunity to be able to focus on this property and creatively re-introduce it to a new generation of kids.”

It looks like big things are in store for the classic franchises for the forseable future. It’ll be interesting to see if Nickelodean will be able to stage a revival of sorts, beyond the popularity that the series currently holds and more approaching the peak of popularity it had in the early 90s/late 80s.

There is no talk of the Turtles videogames, but I imagine that this won’t effect them too much.

Pretty interesting acquisition, I don’t think anyone saw Disney buying Marvel for $4 billion acquisition coming, and now this. It makes me wonder if this isn’t in someway part of Nickelodeon’s strategy to compete against the Disney powerhouse. Could more similar acquasitions, possibly of other 80 properties, be coming?

Personally I miss Nick’s heyday. Although I loved the network as a kid while watching shows like Rugrats, Hey Dude, Doug and the like, I really loved the channel during my preteens/teens with live-action sketch comedy shows like Kenan and Kel and All That, and Nicktoons like Hey Arnold, Ahhh Real Monsters, CatDog and The Angry Beavers.

I stopped watching around the time they introduced Rocket Power and haven’t gone back. Course I’m now 25. Heh.