Acting for Two: "Trans-Dimensional Turtles" has Rob Paulsen as both The 1987 Raphael and the 2012 Donatello.
Acting in the Dark: At 46:00 in this interview, Christian Lanz mentioned that he recorded 6-7 episodes before he found out about the fate of his character Xever, namely that he would mutate into Fishface. He only found out a year later when doing ADR for the fight scenes.
All-Star Cast: Aside from some legends in the voice acting community (Rob Paulsen in particular makes his return to the TMNT franchise after twenty years), the show also has legitimate movie stars (Jason Biggs, Sean Astin, Kelly Hu, Seth Green) slumming it to play cartoon turtles. Mae Whitman as April, Greg Cipes as Mikey, and round out the cast with lower key TV and movie stars. Then again when Andrea Romano is working with the voices, this should be no surprise.
Approval of God: Stan Sakai approved of Yuki Matsuzaki's performance as Miyamoto Usagi.
Ascended Fanon: Both Leo X Karai and April X Donnie were popular but completely Crack Pairings. This show is the first to put explicit Ship Tease between them.
Channel Hop: "Raphael: Mutant Apocalypse" and "Monsters vs. Mutants" were televised exclusively on Nicktoons, before the series' finale, "Wanted: Bebop and Rocksteady", premiered simultaneously on both Nickelodeon and Nicktoons.
Character bios were leaked a year before the series started; while most of it seemed to be based on an earlier period of development and was thus scrapped in the series itself, Splinter and Shredder's bios helped people to figure out Karai was really Miwa, Splinter's daughter, long before Season 1 had ended.
Near the end of Season 2, renders of new incarnations of Bebop and Rocksteady leaked on the internet. Certain design aspects helped clue people in on the characters having already appeared in the series.
Creator's Pest: Writers Russ Carney and Ron Corcillo both admitted to being a bit ambivalent toward Leonardo, with the former considering Leo "irreparably one-note", and the latter feeling all the writing team had to work with was "he's the leader". This experience ultimately played a part in the personality overhaul for Leonardo in Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to try and move away from his Standardized Leader characterization.
Creator-Preferred Adaptation: According to executive producer Brandon Auman, franchise co-creator Kevin Eastman considers this series to be the best incarnation of the TMMT.
Dawson Casting: The youngest Turtle voice actors are Greg Cipes (31) as Michelangelo, followed by Jason Biggs (35) as Leonardo, Sean Astin (42) as Raphael, but the winner is Rob Paulsen voicing Donatello at age 57. Jason's follow-ups as Leo (Dominic Catrambone and Seth Green, who are 42 and 40 respectively) also count. Mae Whitman comes closest to her character April's age at 25. note If she was playing a traditional adult-aged April she'd be just right.
Diagnosis of God: The creators confirmed that their version of Michelangelo has ADHD-PI (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder predominantly inattentive).
Executive Meddling: Ciro Nieli says that he really wanted to use The Flaming Carrot, but Nickelodeon told him that "nobody wants to see a guy with a carrot for a head".
Nickelodeon aired "Raphael: Mutant Apocalypse" in the middle of the fifth season, even though it was originally intended to be the series finale, before declaring it an alternate dimension. The 1987 crossover arc aired on Nickelodeon as the series’ final episodes instead.
Splinter was supposed to die very early on, but Nickelodeon vetoed it due to how dark it sounded.
Fake Brit: When Doctor Rockwell gains his intelligence back and can speak, we have American actor Tom Kenny giving him a British accent.
Late Export for You: The show originally aired in Japan on TX Network in mid-2014, but it failed to gain traction there initially, and only the first season's dub was completed before the show was temporarily shelved. However, in September 2015, the show was added onto Amazon Prime in Japan, and the show's dub was completed there. The dub eventually started airing on TV again on Disney XD from May 2017 to September 2019, with the series finale having already been aired in the United States by the time Season 2's first few episodes had aired on TV in Japan.
Before Slash's debut, his voice actor claimed that Slash would be an ally to the Turtles, and the perfect companion to Raph, a description that would come to fit better Casey Jones. And then "Newtralized" happened where Slash did make a Heel–Face Turn and become an ally.
Some months before "The Wrath Of Tiger Claw" aired, some scenes from a storyboard were leaked on tumblr where Splinter tells Karai that she is his daughter and later it is seen her confronting Shredder about this. When people asked Ciro Nieli if these scenes were real, he said no. Comes the episode with this same exact scene and now people is left wondering, specially because the other leaked scene was a kiss between April and Donatello that also turned out to be a real scene come in “A Foot Too Big”.
At Comic-Con 2013, Ciro Nieli claimed Irma would be Mikey's love interest. Unless there's a real Irma out there, there's no chance of that.
Orphaned Reference: At one point, "Stockman Industries" shows up as a Freeze-Frame Bonus in the second season, but so far no mention has been made of Stockman actually owning his own company.
Dominic Catrambone voices Leonardo in the season two episodes produced after "The Wrath of Tiger Claw" instead of Jason Biggs (due to his wife's pregnancy), just as he voiced him in the show's first tie-in video game. After that, from season three onwards, Seth Green takes over the role, where it is explained in-universe that Leo received throat damage in his fight with Shredder (in addition to Biggs's wife's pregnancy, Biggs also made jokes about the two missing Malaysia Airlines flights in 2014 plus sex abuse jokes about The Pope and mocking the death of a Bachelorette contestant, comments that cost him the role of Leonardo and led to Leo superfan Green replacing him).
Professor Rockwell's actor went from Frank Welker to Tom Kenny in season three, though this is more because Rockwell has finally regained his intellect and can talk again.
Kraang Prime is played by Roseanne Barr in the first two seasons, but by Rachel Butera in the third season.
Joan Grody has gone through three different voice actors in the Hebrew dub.
Even considering James Avery's passing in 2013, the 1987 Shredder is played by Kevin Michael Richardson in the fifth season's three-part crossover, making him the seventh actor after Dorian Harewood, Jim Cummings, Townsend Coleman, William E. Martin, and Load Williams, to have portrayed that incarnation of the character.
Nolan North as The Kraang. While Nolan is no stranger to voicing Mook characters, he doesn't typically do it for what is implied to be a species with a singular mind and comical quirks.
He goes even more against type as Mutagen Man, the mutated Pulverizer who primarily speaks rather simply, is all about brute force, and is almost completely insane.
Roseanne Barr as alien overlord Kraang Prime.
Corey Feldman as Slash, the mutated Spike.
Post-Script Season: The fifth season, which even has its own unique title: "Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". Brandon Auman confirms that "Owari," the season four finale, is the true series finale of the show and all of season five is just side stories.
Season 3 has Renee Jacobs, the actress who voiced April in the original series, voicing April's mother.
Minae Noji, who played Karai in the 2014 film plays Tang Shen, Master Yoshi's wife who in this version is also Karai's mother.
Also a downplayed example with this series' Mondo Gecko (Mikey's similarly Totally Radical mutant friend) voiced by 1990s movie Michelangelo's actor Robbie Rist. More directly invoked in that prior to meeting, the 2012 turtles only used the catchphrase "Booyakasha." It's Robbie's Mondo that introduces them to the iconic "Cowabunga" which they all use interchangeably with Booyakasha after.
Seth Green, who voices Leo starting from the third season, is a professed fan of the character.
Yuki Matsuzaki had read Usagi Yojimbo while growing up in the United States and was anxious to portray the protagonist of the comics. Stan Sakai even said that he perfectly nailed Miyamato Usagi.
Recursive Adaptation: As with all the previous entries being based upon the comics but having comics of their own, this show has a comic book adaptation as well.
Refitted for Sequel: Due to coming after Season 4, Tales of the TMNT integrates one of Ciro Nieli's earliest ideas for the series, which was to kill off Splinter, leaving the Turtles to face the world alone.
Role Reprise: The crossovers with the 1987 series bring back most of the characters' original actors to reprise their roles.
The 1987 Turtles' appearance at the end of "The Manhattan Project" has Cam Clarke, Barry Gordon, Rob Paulsen, and Townsend Coleman reprise their respective roles as Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo.
The same goes in the Latin American Spanish dub, except all the characters, Shredder and Krang included, retain their voices. The only replacement here was Rocksteady, since he was replaced from Israel Magaña to Diego Estrada instead, as the former moved to Cuernavaca.
"Trans-Dimensional Turtles" once again features the 1987 Turtles played by their original voice actors, with Pat Fraley joining the fun by reprising his role as Krang.
The three-part episode Grand Finale features the original voice actors back as the 1987 versions of the Turtles and Krang, only this time Barry Gordon and Cam Clarke also get to reprise their roles as the 1987 versions of Bebop and Rocksteady.
In the Swedish dub, Leo Hallerstam voices Raphael from season 2 onward after previously voicing the character in the 2007 movie.
This series is pretty bad about this. Release dates of the episodes have a somewhat bad tendency to jump around to another date or be several weeks or even months after the most recent episode, and the show has a really bad tendency to almost always go on at least a month-long hiatus after airing three to four episodes. Particularly noticeable with "Parasitica", which had been announced to be a week after "Pulverizer Returns!", but then got delayed to June 1st, and finally aired on July 20th. The episode was, however, aired in other countries, but went through similar problems.
It happened again with "Turtles in Time" which, after a month long hiatus, was announced to air on June 28th, 2015. When the episode airdate came, "The Deadly Venom" was rerun instead, and the wiki relisted "Turtles in Time"'s airdate back to "To Be Announced." It finally aired on August 2nd, 2015.
The fourth season had a serious problem with Schedule Slip, with the "City at War" arc starting about 6 months after "Earth's Last Stand", and having a major break during the fall. After three wham episodes, another lengthy hiatus began. The fourth season has had the longest airtime of all the seasons thus far, having started in fall 2015 and ended in February 2017, and was upped from a 20-episode slate to the previous seasons' 26. However, the final four episodes of the season had aired in South Korea in December, weeks before they were aired in the United States in February 2017. This case of Schedule Slip mixed with those airings led to spoilers regarding the end of the fourth season surfacing on a few sites such as Tumblr, which infuriated showrunner Brandon Auman, who wrote those episodes.
Screwed by the Network: In an odd example, episodes 115 to 121 aired on Nicktoons rather than Nickelodeon. Otherwise averted for the rest of the show, as it remains one of the rare shows in the 2010s to (mostly) stay on Nickelodeon throughout the entire run.
Self-Adaptation: Stan Sakai, the creator of Usagi Yojimbo, wrote the first episode of the three-parter in the fifth season that dealt with that series' world and characters.
Short Run in Peru: The final episodes of Season 4 aired in December of 2016 in South Korea, a fact that irritated Brandon Auman, the writer of those episodes, due to the fact that it resulted in numerous key events being spoiled on the internet.
They made the Turtles non-identical for the first time to reflect the show appearance. Also worth noting is a line of zipline playsets coinciding with the second season, which used more ziplines and even put them in the OP.
Also in the OP and several eps is Mikey's skateboard, which has the same colors as the Sewer Spinnin' Skateboard toy... at 1/8scale.
For some strange reason Kirby's figure of mutant form is named "Kirby Bat" even though Mikey named it "Wing Nut" in the series itself, much to Donnie's displeasure. What makes it so odd is that this means they chose to use a Late-Arrival Spoiler over keeping the preexisting characters name, see the Mythology Gag spoilers. However, Mikey does use the "Kirby Bat" name in "The Lonely Mutation of Baxter Stockman".
Spoiled by the Merchandise: Bebop and Rocksteady being in the series was leaked during the second season, which allowed people to put together who was going to become the iconic duo due to sharing numerous design similarities with two human characters: Anton Zeck and Ivan Steranko.
During auditions, voice actors were given concept art of their characters with the scripts to help them visualize what they were saying. While auditioning for Xever/Fishface, Christian Lanz accidentally grabbed the art for Snakeweed (in his human form) and ended up giving "Fishface" a Antonio Banderas-esque Spanish accent. The crew found this choice unexpected and bizarre, but loved it. It wasn't until months later for ADR recording that Christian learned what Fishface really looked like and explained what happened to the crew.
Tie-In Cereal: The 2012 series had its own cereal◊, though it was nothing more than a Trix knockoff, the kernels shaped like the turtle's faces.
Torch the Franchise and Run: Ciro Nieli admits the "Raphael: Mutant Apocalypse" three-parter, which features the Turtles failing to stop a Mutagen bomb in a flashback and the heavily implied deaths of almost all of the supporting cast, was done so that nobody could continue this series after it was finished. However, other crewmembers and Nickelodeon themselves seem to disagree with that assessment, with the last outright calling the story an alternate universe, rendering the arc non-canon. The next series in the franchise would be a new continuity anyway, rendering the attempt a moot effort.
Typecasting: Rob Paulsenhimself has gone on record saying that if you have to do a TMNT revival, then you also have to have Greg Cipes as Michelangelo. Even before that, Michelangelo holds the same role in the Turtles that Beast Boy (Also played by Cipes) held in Teen Titans (2003).
in this interview, Christian Lanz mentioned that he recorded 6-7 episodes before he found out about the fate of his character Xever, namely that he would mutate into Fishface. He only found out a year later when doing ADR for the fight scenes.
