Friday, November 11, 2011

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles In Japan

Y'know, for a long time, I kind of forgot that the original TMNT cartoon was extremely comedic. (I was a kid [and often missed a lot of subtle things when I was a kid], I didn't get to watch a lot of episodes for various reasons, and my clearest memories of watching the show on TV involved the "red skies" seasons, which had less sunlight than Batman: The Animated Series and mostly took themselves more seriously.)



Of course, in Japan, they made "Mutant Turtles" (no "teenage" or "ninja," so far as I know) even sillier. (I've mentioned it before; if you hit the "tmnt" tag, you should find it pretty quickly.)



(Hilariously, in the second episode of this OVA, when Darth Vader Shredder and the turtles travel to Japan and encounter ninjas, they freak out-because in this version, neither group had anything to do with "actual" ninjas.)

And of course, in the UK they dropped all references to ninjas as well, calling them "hero" turtles. They also took away Michaelangelo's nunchucks in later seasons and replaced them with a rope, supposedly because 'chucks were too violent for the kiddies (like a kid is more likely to copy violence involving a relatively rare weapon than violence involving a rope?).

-Signing off.

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