I’m still annoyed that Paramount decided to pull down INTROS to the original series (I should check after this to see if they’re still up) but when am I going to get a chance to highlight the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series?

Yeah, by now you know the characters’ origins but Playmates enters the scenes and sees toys for kids, since adult collecting of action figures really wasn’t a thing back in the 1980s. At least not at today’s level. The show, produced by Fred Wolf Productions, changed almost everything, so technically it’s a bad adaptation of the comics if not for the fact that the personalities, flattened a bit for the audience and format mind you, are still there. Leonardo’s in charge, Donatello makes gadgets, Michelangelo is the fun-loving one, though Raphael’s tempers was toned down to just the snarky one. They opted to make Splinter into Hamato Yoshi rather than his pet so they didn’t have to kill off the human, which is also why fighting over a woman was replaced with fighting for control of the Foot Clan. Interestingly the movie would restores all of those changes, except that Oroku Nagi and Oroku Saki were now the same character and Tang Shen just didn’t want Yoshi to risk fighting him.

Tonight, thanks to Nickelodeon’s official YouTube channel, we get to see the first five episode, originally released as a miniseries. There are some changes to note, and I will after the video embed, but it’s still the original miniseries after the later edits to match the series, like episode title cards. Also, they changed the intro. The miniseries used the same version as the original series, but I guess somebody couldn’t get access to that one so they simply re-recorded it. Enjoy.

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