Trivia / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987)

• Acting for Two: Most of the show's regular voice actors acted for two — or in some cases, for three or four — at various times.
  • Cam Clarke voices both Leonardo and Rocksteady as well as numerous side characters.
  • Barry Gordon voices Donatello and Bebop.
  • Pat Fraley voices Krang, Burne Thompson, Casey Jones and Baxter Stockman in addition to several one-off characters.
  • Townsend Coleman had voiced nearly every male character on the show at one point, most notably Shredder for much of Season 7 and Michaelangelo.
  • In the Latin American dub, both Krang and Shredder are voiced by the late dub actor Herman López.
• Channel Hop: From syndication to CBS in 1990. (Somewhat ironically, the firm that distributed the show in syndication and internationally- Group W/Westinghouse- would merge with CBS in 1995.)
• Creator's Apathy: This appears to be Peter Laird's attitude towards the series as a whole. While he has never expressed any dislike for the series, aside from Bebop & Rocksteady, he was unsatisfied with Executive Meddling giving the cartoon a lighter and softer tone that caused it to deviate far from his and Eastman's vision for the Turtles & the subsequent adaptation displacement that followed; with most of his suggestions to correct his concerns mostly going ignored by executives. In fact, earlier he seemed to have similar apathy towards Bebop and Rocksteady as well. That said, he also included various references to the show in the 2003 series. This is in direct contrast to Kevin Eastman who has given nothing but support for the original series, even naming Bebop and Rocksteady as his favorite characters.
• Creator's Pest: Peter Laird has a documented dislike of Bebop and Rocksteady, (although he earlier stated he didn't outright dislike the duo) outright being relieved on one occasion when the duo were not included in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash Up.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Vernon's nephew Foster Fenwick was voiced by the late Dana Hill.
• Disowned Adaptation: Peter Laird, on his blog, when asked about the "Red Sky" seasons, said he never saw them because he stopped watching the series in the early seasons because he thought it was just "repetitive silliness", and disliked that his and co-creator Eastman's advice was ignored. The aforementioned Kevin Eastman, however, actually seemed rather fond of the whole experience, and Bebop and Rocksteady (characters that Peter Laird has admitted to disliking) are among his favorite TMNT characters.
• Dueling Dubs: This show had three different Japanese dubs: the NHK dub, the TV Tokyo dub, and the Towa Video dub. None of them covered the entire series and all of them ended at different points.
• Dueling Works: In 1991, this show shared the same time slot as Wish Kid did on NBC. This is evidenced by the prologue to "Gross Encounters", wherein Macaulay Culkin asks the audience if they're as tired of Ninja Turtles as he is. Ninja Turtles won this duel, as it lasted a total of 193 episodes over the course of ten seasons, making it the longest-running animated series until The Simpsons took its place with "Dumbbell Idemntity" in 1998, whereas Wish Kid only lasted thirteen episodes over the course of one season. Not helping Wish Kid's case was that it aired on the lowest-rated Saturday Morning cartoon block at the time, which NBC abandoned in September of 1992 thanks to the combined failures of it, ProStars, Space Cats, and Yo Yogi!.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Mona Lisa was originally going to be a female turtle, but Eastman and Laird rejected it, so she was reimagined into some kind of lizard, which is why her head and feet look like the TMNT's. Supposedly they still didn't like her even after these changes, and ordered the makers of the show not to use her again. According to that other wiki, Mona Lisa would've came back anyway, some time after the 8th season but the story scrapped in favor of the Lord Dregg and Carter story arc instead.
  • Network meddling was also responsible for Shredder and Krang being Put on a Bus and replaced by Dregg during the ninth season. They also forced the show's creators to introduce a "hip" new character, eventually resulting in Carter, who was pretty much an African-American Expy of Keno from the second TMNT movie. After these changes weren't liked by the fans, rather than admit they might have been slightly misguided in these demands, the executives fired head writer David Wise and replaced him with Jeffrey Scott, who had never even watched the series before^note (and actually ended up persuading Wise to come back as an uncredited co-writer after being unable to get to grips with the characters- and this was while Wise was also writing for Disney's equivalent show Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series over on ABC), speeding TMNT '87 to its demise.
• Follow the Leader: The art style in the "Red Sky" era bore more than a little resemblance to the then hugely popular Batman: The Animated Series.
• He Also Did: Chuck Lorre wrote and performed the spoken lyrics for the famous theme tune, before going onto being a successful sitcom writer/producer/creator, including creating sitcom mega-hits Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory.
• International Coproduction: Though the show was produced by Fred Wolf Films, the early episodes were animated by Toei Animation in Japan.
• Kids' Meal Toy: Burger King had three different Kids' Meal tie-ins based on the series;
  • In 1990, a set of six badges were released.
  • Also in 1990, a set of four VHS tapes were released, each one featuring one episode from the show. These consisted of "Sky Turtles", April Foolish", "Invasion of the Turtle Snatchers", and "The Great Boldini".
  • In 1993, a set of five bike accessories were released. These consisted of spoke sliders, a bike pouch, the ninja sipper, a bike horn, and a license plate.
• Long-Runners: With nine years, ten seasons, and almost two hundred episodes to its name, this was the Gunsmoke of Saturday morning cartoons. It was the longest running cartoon until The Simpsons came along.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: While Eastmand and Laird expressed differing opinions on which TMNT show they preferred^note the 2003 cartoon for Laird, the 2012 cartoon for Eastman, neither of them mentioned this one. While it's not uncommon to see fans say they prefer one of the other cartoons, this one remains the most famous among casual and non-fans, and as of this writing, it's the longest lasting one.
• The Other Darrin: Several voice actors would occasionally have replacements during particular episodes:
  • The Shredder was the biggest example, due to James Avery's other work; he was substituted by Dorian Harewood for a lot of the later Season 3 episodes, and then Jim Cummings on and off for the next few seasons (Cummings also tended to sub for him during the notoriously-bad first season of Iron Man: The Animated Series, and Harewood replaced him after that). He finally bailed out the show for good after the first five episodes of Season 7; Townsend Coleman (the voice of Mikey and the Rat King) voiced Shredder for the rest of that season, and William E. Martin took over the role permanently in Seasons 8-10.
  • Raphael also had a few different voice actors over the course of the show; Thom Pinto voiced him for a few Season 3 episodes, Hal Rayle filled in for the "Vacation in Europe" episodes, and Michael J. Gough replaced Rob Paulsen for the final season.
  • Donatello and Bebop, who were both usually voiced by Barry Gordon, were also replaced for part of Season 3 (seeing a pattern here?) by Greg Berg.
  • Vernon Fenwick was voiced by Pat Fraley in Season 1, but changed to being voiced by Peter Renaday in Season 2 to balance out the workload of the actors (Fraley did Vernon, Krang and Baxter Stockman in Season 1, while Renaday only did Splinter). Townsend Coleman provided Vernon's voice in one episode when Peter Renaday was unavailable.
  • Leatherhead was originally voiced by Jim Cummings, but Peter Renaday voiced him for his final appearance in "Night of the Rogues".
  • For "Donatello's Badd Time" and "Michelangelo Meets Bugman Again", Townsend Coleman is the voice of Splinter rather than Peter Renaday.
  • The French dub is also well documented for having replaced the entire cast: Seasons 1 through 4 were dubbed at the SOFI studio, then seasons 5 and 6 were dubbed at H2 Productions, then seasons 7 through 10 were dubbed at the Prodac studio. While Mark Lesser (the second voice of Leonardo) and Laurence Crouzet (the first voice of April O'Neil) were replaced at H2, both reprised their roles at Prodac.
  • The Latin Spanish dub also had a few replacement voices, most of which were for a few episodes. For example, Donatello was voiced by Ismael Castro in season 1, Jaime Vega in seasons 2 through 3, and by César Arias for the rest of the series.
• Out of Order:
  • Episodes 3 and 4 were shown the other way around on VHS, so kids who didn't see them when they first aired on TV (stations didn't re-air the earliest episodes often) would often wind up confused about who this Baxter Stockman fellow was.
  • Also, a lot of the episodes on DVD are out of order too.
  • More than that, several episodes, (especially in Season 4 and the vacation arc) don't make sense in their original airing order, and even have some continuity errors. "Tower of Power", the premier of the vacation arc, shows the Turtles leaving for Europe, and foiling one of Shredder's plans in Paris, but its the *next* episode "Rust Never Sleeps" that shows Shredder actually learning of the Turtles trip to Europe. In another example, "The Dimension X Story" which aired 3/4ths of the way through Season 4, has the characters surprised that Shredder has found a way to return to Earth, even though its been happening all season. It also shows the turtles' dimensional portal blowing up, an event that was mentioned specifically in the episode that aired *before* it.
  • The episode "Leonardo is Missing" which aired 3/4ths of the way through Season 6, is obviously a displaced Season 5 episode, as the technodrome is still stuck in the arctic, rather than being at the bottom of the sea.
  • The VHS of "Cowabunga Shredhead" (a Season 3 episode) includes "New York's Shiniest" (a Season 2 episode).
• Real-Life Relative: Michael Reaves and Brynne Stephens, who were married at the time of the show's production, wrote the season 2 episodes "Enter: The Fly" and "Splinter No More", as well as the season 3 episode "April Fool".
• Recursive Adaptation:
  • Before the Archie-published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures established its own continuity, it was pretty much an adaptation of this cartoon, which was itself based loosely on the original Mirage comic book.
  • A character example happened with Tokka and Rahzar; they were partially based on Bebop and Rocksteady, made for the second film when the filmmakers were prevented from putting the famous duo into the film. Later on, Tokka and Rahzar themselves appeared in a few episodes of the show.
• Short Run in Peru: The "Vacation in Europe" episodes aired in Ireland in 1990, three years before the U.S.
• Spinoff Cookbook: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Pizza Cookbook by Peggy Paul Casella was published in 2017.
• Star-Making Role:
  • For Rob Paulsen. It was his success as the voice of Raphael that really got his voice acting career off the ground.
  • In the Latin American Spanish dub, it was also this for the turtles' voice actors Luis Alfonso Mendoza (Leonardo), César Arias (Donatello), Jorge Santos (Raphael) and Jorge Roig (Michaelangelo) and also Shredder and Krang's voice actor (Herman López) along with Splinter's one as well (Carlos Magaña)
• Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy: Too many examples to list here, but here's one anyway. Mona Lisa's action figure had a slightly different design than her cartoon version: neck-length black hair instead of shoulder-length brown hair, feet with three toes instead of two, and fins on her arms and legs.
• Tie-In Cereal: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cereal came out in 1989 and was released by Ralston Purina, with pizza-shaped marshmallows coming out later on. Prizes included Ralston Purina comic books and collectible cards that tied into the 1990 live-action film.
• Trend Killer:
  • The success of this franchise contributed to the decline of Transformers, which would eventually take the whole "transforming vehicle toyline" trend with it.^note Another big factor was Transformers' lack of a concurrently airing cartoon to help sell the characters and thus the toys.Transformers would make comebacks thanks to Beast Wars and the Michael Bay films, but "transforming vehicles" as a whole haven't been so widespread since.
  • Thanks to the runaway success of the animated series, it was followed by Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars! (1991), Toxic Crusaders (1991), Wild West COW Boys Of Moo Mesa (1992), Biker Mice from Mars (1993), Street Sharks (1994), and Extreme Dinosaurs (1997) all starring a team of mutants or Funny Animal heroes and accompanying toylines. The original TMNT cartoon was such a successful Long Runner (lasting till 1996!) that after its cancellation, the concept of a Funny Animal or Uplifted Animal hero team mostly went with it.
• Unfinished Episode: There was originally going to be an episode called "Shredder in Love", but it never got past the script stage. Renae Jacobs even recorded lines for it. Little is known about the plot, but rumours state that the love potions from "Green with Jealousy" might have been reused.
• Voices in One Room: The main cast did the recordings together throughout the show's run, allowing for better character byplay and ad-libs.
• Wag the Director: According to Renae Jacobs (April), the voice actors frequently undermined the efforts of the show's creators to make the show grittier and more serious, instead embracing silliness and jokes for both children and adults.
• What Could Have Been: Some ideas, per Comics Scene, in the five episode first season was that Baxter Stockman would have become an ally to the Turtles, piloting the Technodrome which the Turtles and their allies would have moved into after the events of the pilot season, along with Shredder and Krang merging into one being. Both ideas were nixed by Eastman and Laird, the former for making no sense and rendering Donatello's role on the team redundant, with the latter being seen as taking away too much from both Krang and Shredder as villains.
• Write Who You Know: Zach (the "fifth turtle") was allegedly based on one of the writers' kids.

---