The First Reboot (2003)

After its debut in 1987, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the most popular cartoon on television for the better part of a decade. Although all good things come to an end, profitable things often get to come back. That’s why the Ninja Turtles got their first reboot in 2003—it was a chance to reconnect with old fans and create a generation of new ones while moving merchandise by the metric ton. And it was largely successful at all three of those things. It was proof positive that the Turtles were not an outdated relic best left in the ‘90s, but a powerhouse franchise that could be rebooted and re-shaped to sell toys and T-shirts to a new age. Reboot it just right, and the property could print money in perpetuity!

Of course, the first and most obvious difference everyone notices in the 2003 series is the art. This show adopts a style much closer to the original comic book. The Turtles are each different shades of green, and they have the blank white eyes behind their masks that prove to be surprisingly expressive. The rest of the characters and the world they live in have a bold and blocky minimalist style, with lots of thick lines reminiscent of the black and white pages that birthed the franchise. Their movement looks pretty cheap in the first season, but the animation becomes smoother and more fluid with each year that passes. The color scheme reflects the much darker thematic tone set by this series.

Its theme song is absolute garbage. Doesn’t matter which one. This show committed three crimes in musical form. They represent the worst of the high-pitched pop-punk/hip-hop fusion that was already annoying back in 2001. I’m pretty sure no classrooms full of fourth graders were singing it at their teachers. That the show succeeded with critics and fans despite replacing one of the most iconic theme songs of all time with increasingly worse versions is a testament to how well the rest of the production is executed. This show also tries to avoid catchphrases until the sixth season introduces the lackluster declaration “It’s ninja time!” There are no celebrations of Turtle Power or Pizza Time. I think Mikey says “Cowabunga” once in the whole series, and Raph slaps him on the back of the head and tells him to stop being a dork. 

I know it sounds ridiculous to say this about a show that primarily features mutant amphibians performing martial arts, but the 2003 revival is a much more grounded story. It’s still the kind of Saturday morning cartoon where even the bad guys try not to hurt anyone, but this version of TMNT played it (mostly) straight. The hordes of Foot Clan henchmen the Turtles fight are human beings rather than robots, and there are very few other mutants—not even the classic duo of Bebop and Rocksteady make an appearance. Where the original cartoon was a slapstick comedy with some action in it, this series is a martial arts action show with some humor in it. The titular teenagers take fighting crime very seriously, and while they still crack jokes and make pop culture references, they never turn to camera and address the audience directly. Battles don’t end when someone slips on a banana peel or crashes into a pile of boxes. Sometimes the Turtles even lose, suffer lasting injuries, and grapple with their PTSD while trying to recover physically. 

So let’s talk about the real heart of the series, the Ninja Turtles themselves. The brotherly bond between the four is much more developed and centered in the show. It’s just as much fun to watch them hanging out eating pizza as kicking ninja butt. Like all teenage boys they can’t help starting stupid fights on occasion, but at the end of the day it’s always clear how much they love each other. Oftentimes it feels like Leonardo is the only one legitimately interested in being a hero, and his brothers just tag along to watch his back. Which also makes it more interesting when Michelangelo or Donatello suddenly care about standing up for something that puts them at odds with the rest of their weird little family. All of the Turtles get to develop a little more individual personality as well. We learn that Leo is a history buff and a fan of old war movies. We see that Mikey is an artist who can’t resist drawing stick figures and silly symbols on everything he owns. And we watch as Raphael discovers that he’s a gearhead who loves working on engines and driving way too fast. 

For the most part, the actors playing Leonardo, Donatello and Michelangelo sound like they’re doing their best impression of their predecessors. Which is fine—you wouldn’t want to make too many changes to a formula that works. Mikey is still the chill party dude, and Donny is the awkward high school nerd. But they made Raphael sound like a grumpy cab driver from Brooklyn, and it totally works for him. You know exactly what kind of angry asshole he is as soon as he starts talking. And it also made me wonder: how is Raph the only one with a New York accent? 

Splinter’s voice is uniquely terrible, as it is painfully obvious that a white person is imitating an Asian accent. Just… so bad. Can’t believe that shit happened in 2003, and continued for the entire run of the show. It sounds like a placeholder somebody in the office recorded and forgot to switch it out with real audio. This version of April O’Neil never becomes a reporter or dons a yellow jumpsuit. At the beginning of the series she seems to be on the path to becoming a scientist, working in a lab under future villain Baxter Stockman, until four mutant turtles being chased by a horde of robots she helped create wrecked her workplace. After that, she becomes the second member of the Turtles’ IT department, which is useful when Donny is unavailable, or if he needs another nerd to help him with the science. Thankfully, she doesn’t get the damsel treatment as frequently as her predecessor. Casey Jones gets to be more than a one-note joke as a classic New York knucklehead with a heart of gold who can’t say no to an honest fight. And Usagi Yojimbo, the honorable samurai rabbit from another universe, is as awesome as he is underutilized. 

While the Turtles have plenty of great friends, it is the villains that always steal the show. We’ll save the obvious one for last. This version of Baxter Stockman is closer to his comic counterpart in personality even though his story has a very different arc. Stockman is a truly brilliant man continuously humbled by his own hubris, so assured of his own genius that he overlooks tiny details with big consequences. It seriously never occurred to him that serving as tech support to an evil ninja clan was a bad idea that would lead to disastrous results. Instead of accidentally mutating himself into a fly, this Baxter suffers a far worse fate. Every time he fails, the Shredder punishes him by removing a body part and replacing it with a cybernetic implement, until he is no more than a brain in a jar begging to die. 

This show also created several new villains that became fan-favorites and staples of the canon going forward. Hun, the leader of the Purple Dragons street gang, both worships and seeks to usurp the Shredder as the lord of the Foot Clan. He loves his master so much he starts to hate him, and that conflict makes him more interesting than the average goon. We were also introduced to Agent Bishop, the hyper-competent paranoid xenophobic secret government operative with an infinite budget and zero oversight. He originally mistakes the Turtles for alien invaders and declares war on them. Even after they help him save the world from a real alien invasion, Bishop doesn’t take them off his capture/kill list. Which makes his centuries-long redemption arc all the more impressive.

Obviously, the biggest bad is the Shredder. This show has four of them! One of the more interesting concepts this series introduced was that the Shredder was not one singular bad guy, but a mantle worn by several different villains. The original was a man named Oroku Saki, a ninja lord in feudal Japan who was as notorious for his mercilessness as he was his skill. When the Emperor sent him to slay a legendary tengu, Saki cut a deal instead, letting the demon into his soul in exchange for unimaginable power. He raised an army of monsters and plunged Japan into an age of darkness that he planned to spread to the entire world. The Ninja Tribunal, an assembly of the greatest living warriors, was finally able to defeat and capture the Shredder, but they could not destroy him. So the demonic ninja lord was sealed inside a casket, separated from his magic helmet and gauntlet. The pieces were kept far apart to ensure the Shredder never rose again, but of course he did eventually. 

The second Shredder, although he’s the first one introduced in the show, is an impostor. Under all that pointy armor, he’s actually Ch’rell, a dangerous fugitive from the alien race known as the Utroms—Krang’s people, if you only remember the original cartoon. This murderous pink blob wound up stranded on Earth in the 15th century when his escape attempt went sideways. But Ch’rell isn’t going to let that impede his plans for conquest and domination. To that end, he builds an exosuit that looks like the fabled tengu Shredder and assumes his identity so he can take control of the Foot Clan. In an odd way, this character combines Shredder and Krang into one villain. Using his stolen army of ninjas, the pretender built a criminal empire that expanded far beyond the shores of Japan. The Utroms live for centuries, so Ch’rell gathered his power while he waited for the day Earth’s technology finally advanced enough to repair his spaceship. Then he will return to his homeworld and take revenge on those that banished him. 

Ironically, the second Shredder raised the third. Karai was an orphan girl taken in by the impostor and trained to be his right hand. As she grew up, Karai became increasingly aware that her adoptive father was not a nice man. Despite discovering his true nature and evil plans, and generally not approving of either of those things, she still feels honor-bound to serve the father figure that saved her from a short life of suffering in squalor and transformed her into one of the most dangerous women alive. But Karai cannot escape her father’s shadow even after he is believed to be slain in battle with the Turtles. She assumes the mantle of the Shredder, but instead of pursuing her vision for the future of the Foot Clan, her misplaced honor demands a prolonged quest for revenge that accomplishes nothing, wastes a great deal of man power and resources, and ultimately makes Karai look very foolish, like a child stumbling about in their father’s shoes. Her devotion to her deceased father undermines her authority with his followers. Of all the Shredders seen on this show, Karai’s tenure was the shortest. When her father returns from the grave, she immediately surrenders the clan and all of her autonomy to him. But a glimpse of a possible future showed her leading the Foot Clan once again, suggesting that Karai will tire of dutiful daughterhood eventually.

The fourth and final Shredder is a copy. Not like a devoted fan that went way too far, but a literal digital copy. See, Ch’rell the impostor created an AI backup of his mind as a final failsafe. For very complicated reasons, the copy is awakened in the distant future and hitches a ride on a robot that travels back to the present day. Although he rules cyberspace with a silicon fist, the Cyber Shredder spends most of Season 7 trying to find a way into the real world. The Turtles have to digitize themselves to fight him INSIDE THE INTERNET. Which conveniently necessitated a redesign of all the main characters and a new line of vehicles for cruising the information superhighway that no doubt sold a lot of brightly colored plastic to children. 

Bonus round: a fifth Shredder does make an appearance before the end of the show. But he doesn’t really count for reasons that would be spoilers, and I don’t want to ruin the fun. 

Overall, this show proved the narrative versatility of the Ninja Turtles. Part of what makes the concept so brilliant is that giant talking turtles who do martial arts look weird and out of place even in their hometown of NYC. Since our heroes always look weird and out of place, you can drop them into almost any kind of story and it still makes sense, even if it doesn’t. The Turtles are equally at home fighting street punks, robot ninjas, mutant monsters, or alien warlords. Even this (slightly) more grounded show sends them to outer space and alternate dimensions. They travel back in time to ride on dinosaurs, and they travel 100 years into the future on accident, getting stuck there for all of Season 6. They even go inside a computer to fight a sentient virus. The Turtles wear the weirdness on their non-existent sleeves, simultaneously acknowledging and ignoring it. Looking strange is their normal, so much so that when they are in a place that takes no notice of them it feels wrong. It may not make any sense for giant turtles to show up and start kicking butt all over feudal Japan, but it’s always interesting. That’s why so many episodes of this show start in medias res—it’s fun to just throw the Ninja Turtles into unusual situations and watch them fight their way out of it. 

The 2003 revival was a pleasant surprise for me. I always knew it existed, but never found the time to watch it until now. It seems to have taken all of the coolest stuff I remember from the original comics and cartoons and given it all a fresh coat of paint for modern audiences while adding plenty of new stuff to the canon for future creators to play around with. The artwork, animation and writing are all improvements over its predecessor. Although I didn’t know it back then, this show was proving that the Turtles franchise wasn’t just a beloved relic of the ‘90s—it had real staying power, and the potential to keep producing loyal fans with every passing generation. It’s no exaggeration to say that without this show, there would have been no more Ninja Turtles on our TVs every Saturday morning. And to top it all off, it’s still a pretty good watch today. It still has the obviously neutered action of children’s television, but it never lets that get in the way of telling a good story about four brothers against the universe. 

If you haven’t seen 2003’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I highly recommend you rectify that error as soon as possible. I’m glad I did. It has inspired confidence that I made the right decision starting The Complete Cowabunga Critique, and I’m looking forward to what the next series (2012’s computer-animated affair) has to offer. Am I in for another pleasant surprise? Or am I overdue for a crushing disappointment? Let’s find out.