Headscratchers / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987)

• Why isn't April more successful? She gets all the good stories.
  • April isn't respected by her employer (the boss calls her his "third-best reporter" in the pilot)
  • Because like most TV Execs, Burne Thompson isn't interested in good news reporting. He's interested in ratings. Plus, he may have a grudge against April since her factual reporting about the Crooked Ninja Turtle Gang ("Return of the Shredder") caused his girlfriend to call him a "turtle-lover" and dump him.
• How did Michelangelo get to talk so different than the other turtles, since they don't talk with anyone else?
  • The Watsonian explanation is that Michelangelo is usually the turtle most obsessed with TV and Pop Culture, so it makes sense he'd pick up a lot of the 80s Lingo. The Doyleist Explanation is that it was the creator's way of making Michelangelo stand out from the other turtles.
• Going by the logic of the turtles' mutation, shouldn't Splinter be a rat-sized human?
  • Either individuals or species react to the mutagen differently.
• Why does April keep having trouble getting a date? She's attractive and she's on TV.
  • It's been awhile since I've watched the series, but I don't recall April ever being interested in finding a date. She was Married to the Job.
  • Irma’s the one who’s obsessed with getting a date, not April.
• Nostalgia Critic made a good point. Why a rat? From what I've gathered from the show, the turtles were the last thing he touched and it's not like he made any contact with rodents
  • I believe the sequence of events is something like: 1) Touches rats offscreen, 2) Notices ooze and 3) steps on it in order to get to the turtles, activating the mutation.
  • Other possibilities are the "most recently" was a goof and it was supposed to be "most often" or Yoshi had been around rats long enough that he had some shed fur on himself or his clothes.
  • He was constantly around both rats and turtles and probably had fresh exposure to both species' DNA. Maybe it was random chance which species' DNA hitched a ride on the mutagen into his cells.
  • He says himself he just got back from "feeding the rats", so they had to be the last thing he touched.
• In the episode "The Missing Map", we learn that Splinter apparently has documented evidence of Shredder's treachery within the Foot Clan. It's implied that if these documents were released, Shredder would be exiled and Splinter would be reinstated, allowing him to reform the ninja clan to its former glory. So... Why has he not done precisely that?? If Splinter is concerned no one would take a giant talking rat seriously, he could just as easily hand the documents off to April. Instead, these documents are hidden away and are never mentioned again...
  • It might be two-fold. He doesn't think they would follow a giant rat and the evidence needs to be presented by someone who is part of the clan. Given the back story across all the other Turtle stories my guess is he came across proof of what actually happened between him and Shredder all those years ago.
  • Is there even anyone left to tell? Shredder replaced most, if not all of the clan with robots, and if theres even any branch of the Foot left in Japan they clearly don't matter anymore.
• Exactly why did the Turtles not let Baxter Stockman change back to his human form at the end of his last episode, "Revenge of the Fly"? Baxter gets his hands on Shredder's Retromutagen Ray gun, but then the Turtles tackle him through the dimensional portal and they all land in the dimensional limbo. Shredder starts closing the portal, so the Turtles grab the ray gun and get out of there, apparently leaving poor Baxter trapped in his mutant form. I know they were in a hurry, but is there really a good reason why the Turtles didn't zap Baxter with the ray before leaving? If they had returned to Baxter to normal right there, the Turtles would have one less villain to have to deal with, since he'd no longer have reason to get revenge on them (that, and he'd still be trapped in the dimensional limbo considering the hurry they were in). Did the writers expect they were going to do at least one more episode with Baxter after "Revenge of the Fly"? I ask that because the fact that they destroyed his computer buddy in this episode kinda suggested they weren't intending for that.
  • Well, I heard that the Red Sky episodes were announced abruptly. You can tell by some other Season 7 episodes that they had different plans for some other minor characters. And plus, Baxter is HEAVILY implied to be unstable mentally and probably would still be evil even as a human again.
  • Or rot in jail or spend the rest of his life in the asylum he was seen in at the start of season 2.
• Why would a disintegrator chamber merge Baxter with a fly? Shouldn't it have...I don't know...disintegrated them? And why bother with disintegration in the first place, why not just have a mook kill him?
  • That's not Krang's style.
  • The Fly, which had just come out only a year earlier, was big big bigbigBIG!
  • I also seem to remember Krang saying that there had been a malfunction. The disintegrator unit didn't work like it was supposed to.
• Who or what did that voice belong to when the show came back from commercials. You know: "we now return to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? It sounded like a grizzled creature of some sort, but nobody specific. The closest thing I can think of would be Krang, but it didn't have that certain Miss Piggy-esque sound to it.
  • Maybe a character that got written out pre-production?
• Kind of a more real-world one, but Mikey had to give up nunchucks for a grappling hook because they were deemed 'too violent' by parents. Question: How are a couple of sticks held together by chains MORE violent than freackin KATANAS?! How does that make sense?!
  • As stated elsewhere, probably because nunchucks can be easily made in the home.
• The turtles and Shredder are ninjas, right? Why are they running around in plain view, in broad daylight? In some episodes, Shredder appears on tv, announcing his evil plans. The 2003 Shredder was more secretive. Only his alter ego, Saki, was well known.
  • Ninjas in fiction is often just short hand for martial artist. The Ninja Turtles are far from the only franchise of ninja who run around in broad day light, sometimes wearing bright orange uniforms.
• What the hell does "heroes in a half shell" even mean? They all have full shells. If they had half shells, they'd probably die.
  • They only have shells covering their backs, rather than their fronts and backs, unlike real turtles.
  • They do have a shell in front; it's a kind of chest plate that goes down to their crotches. They do seem to have green skin on the sides, which makes it look like the shell doesn't go all the way around, but there is at least one scene showing that they can retract at least their heads, so there may be more to the shell than meets the eye. That line should therefore not be taken literally. Two possible explanations could be: 1) It is a metaphor for their half-human, half-turtle nature. 2) It is an ironic nod to Shredder's suggestion that he will eat them ("tonight I dine on turtle soup"). E.g. lobster can be served "on the half shell", and there was a time when even turtle soup / stew was sometimes served inside (half a) turtle's shell.
• So what did Krang do to get banished to earth in the first place?
  • If I recall correctly, the early episodes said he was waging war for control over Dimension X. mind you, who he's waring against is a whole other question.
  • He was banished to that dimension's Earth by Kraang Subprime due to his incompetence.
• Why does Shredder wear cloaks and disguises in public? The new yorkers don't know Shredder's true identity. The turtles and Splinter know, but it's not like they can walk into a police station and tell the cops. If the humans don't know, then why doesn't Shredder take his costume off and go up to the surface as Saki?
  • As a criminal, he probably still wants to hide his identity. Beyond that, he's pretty much thrown himself completely into the Shredder persona. In the original miniseries, he gets annoyed with Krang and demands that he not refer to him as Oraku Saki, only The Shredder. Still, there are obvious advantages of him going places incognito as Saki; perhaps a case of That Man Is Dead?
• The whole Foot Clan thing is not made clear. Are there still human foot clan members in Japan? Did Shredder replace them all with robots? After watching "Missing Map", why does it matter to Shredder if he gets exiled? He has robots, an alien warlord, high tech weapons, and evil mutants at his disposal. He can go to Japan, crush them, and conquer it.
• On a related note, what happened to Shredder's (human) ninja minions? The first episode shows evidence that that ninjas are stealing high-tech equipment, but the only people we see working for Shredder are robots and street punks. When Shredder came back without his Foot Soldiers, there were no ninjas to help him. And what was with the ninja district in New York? That wasn't really followed up on, but the implication seemed to be that so many Japanese-American ninjas were in Shredder's employ that the whole neighborhood had become ninja-oriented. This makes the disappearance/nonappearance of Shredder's ninjas even more puzzling.
  • Shredder's whole plan in the original miniseries was a garbled mess. What was he stealing that technology for? The Technodrome? Krang's body? We know his ultimate goal was conquering the world, but what were the intermediate steps? At this point the Technodrome was fully functional. Why wasn't he using this insanely powerful mobile war machine for anything other than drilling holes and staking out hideouts? What was he waiting for?
  • The miniseries also doesn't provide an explanation for why Shredder constantly wears a mask. In the comic it was to hide his disfigurement, but he looks fine in the cartoon. If it's to conceal his true identity, why? What would his enemies gain by knowing he's Oroku Saki?
    • Apart from concealing his true identity for the usual reasons criminals do, it seems likely he's fulling embracing his Shredder persona/identity. There's a scene during the original miniseries where he angrily tells Krang not to call him Saki, and instead refer to him as only (The) Shredder. There are obviously still moments where it's silly that he's wearing the mask because he could easily go about his business unnoticed (like a ninja, one might say) if he wasn't wearing it, but it's probably a case of him losing himself in his villainous persona. It's not explicitly said, but that line with Krang kind of implies it, so always wearing his mask (even underneath additional disguises) is probably a big part of that.
    • The Shredder was not disfigured in the original comics, he posed as a businessman and the mask was probably to hide his identity as a major crime boss. The disfigured face was created for the 1990 film.
• Where did the Technodrome come from? If it was from Dimension X, how did it get to Earth? We know Krang was banished to Earth as punishment for war crimes, and the Technodrome was designed by one of his old associates who resurfaced in one of the later seasons. But who would let a deposed dictator take a massive weapon of conquest with him into exile? The other possibility is that it was built on Earth using blueprints Krang somehow brought over. That raises the questions of who built it, where the materials came from, and how the project was kept a secret. It looks like it was designed to be manned by a crew of hundreds. If Shredder and/or Krang got someone to build it on Earth, why wasn't it redesigned for a small crew?
• Why did Krang need Shredder to make him a body? Shredder's not exactly an engineer. He seems to create it using materials and tools already in the Technodrome, so why didn't Krang just do it himself? He doesn't have hands, but we see him use his tentacles to operate equipment pretty often. The bubble walker doesn't do anything to augment his tentacles.
  • Because even if he created his own body, he still needed Shredder's help to put him in the body and get it activated. Sure, a Foot Soldier or a Rock Soldier could have done it just as easily, but Shredder would be a better choice in case something went wrong.
• Shredder, Rocksteady, and Bebop can casually walk around the city. Why isn't anyone calling the police? These villains have been featured on the news dozens of times.
  • My best guess: Due to their strength and technology, they are something akin to Super-Villains, making it necessary for the Protagonists to be the ones to stop them.
  • The people of New York in this show teeter somewhere between apathetic and stupid, depending on the episode. Ruleof Funny is the order of the day, at least until the retool.
• The episode The Gang's All Here has cookies that Shredder made with a mutegen that will turn the Turtles into human beings. Donetello discovers this in his research and throws them away, as Splinter tells them that if they become human, they will lose their ninja skills and powers (which is the likely explanation as why no one thought of giving one to Splinter, so that he could become human again). The problem with this is that their ninja skills were the result of years of intense ninja training. How could suddenly being human make them lose their skills acquired in training?
  • A lot of their ninja training took into account the hefty weight of the shells on their backs. IF they became human, they would have to relearn from the basics how to fight while compensating for the shift in balance, which is a pretty big deal in a acrobatics/dexterity style martial art like ninjutsu.

• Krang was apparently banished from Dimension X, yet goes there quite a lot.
  • Theres no one to catch him and make him pay for this crimes. Which makes you wonder who did it the first time...
• Shredder sure does know a lot about USA Culture (and even acts like he's American) for somebody who supposedly lived most of his life in Japan.
  • Shredder is smart. He adapts quickly.
• In "Cowabunga, Shredhead!" how come Shredder, who thinks he’s Michelangelo, never finds it odd that there's apparently another Mikey around?
  • Watch the episode: conveniently, he and Mikey are never together at the same time when Shredder is in "Mike Mode".