For the most part, I've very much enjoyed all the incarnations of the turtles with the exception of that dumb live action show with the girl turtle and that stupid fucking christmas singalong special. I was introduced to them through the old 80's cartoon and then proceeded by reading the original comic books, because my uncle was awesome and bought the entire series for me. The entire concept for the turtles came about when Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird noticed that the most popular things in comics at the time were Mutants and Ninjas, thus they had the brilliant idea to parody the these trends and Mutant Ninjas were born. Eastman and Laird only worked the first 10 or so comics and then I think the last 15, so the rest of series was essentially glorified filler stories (My favorite was the one with time traveling little girl). The turtles themselves were a bit more violent, more obsessed with beer than pizza and acted tad bit more like actual ninjas, in my opinion. Needless to say, I'm a die hard fan and I feel Nickelodeon has done alright by me with the new series.
I also hold TMNT as one of the primary contributing factors for developing my tickle fetish. More accurately, I blame April O'neil, Zach and Kate, and Burne and Vernon. I also always secretly hoped that Erma and the neutrinoes would get it too:lol! I don't honestly think it would be harmful if tickling once again made an appearance in the series. I think it's a fairly tame method for when the plot calls for "forcefully extracting information" and kids won't get freaked out over it like they would over other methods of torture. It's only porn to our eyes because it is the subject matter of our fetish. I can't speak for anyone here, but I, for one, am fully capable of distinguishing the difference between a kid show that coincidentally contains something I happen to have a fetish for and porn specifically tailored to my tastes.