7 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Characters Ruined by the Movies

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has always been a highly malleable IP. From their gritty black-and-white indie comic origins to their goofy, yet still iconic ’80s cartoon, from CGI to live-action, the Turtles have been adapted in every way imaginable. This is especially true when it comes to movies. While the original 1990 film is still regarded as a classic by Millennials and Gen Xers everywhere, some of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ more recent theatrical outings have not been kind to the Heroes in a Half Shell.

Videos by ComicBook.com

While the elephant in the room is obviously the two Michael Bay productions, 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its 2016 follow-up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, the truth is, that several movies have done the boys in green — and their associates — dirty. We present to you a radical list of totally tubular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters ruined by bogus big-screen adventures.

1) Casey Jones

Casey Jones is one of the TMNT’s oldest allies, so it was pretty much a given that when the time came for the Turtles to star in their first movie, the hockey-mask-wearing vigilante would be along for the ride. And while he first live-action Ninja Turtles film delivered a comic-accurate Casey, played perfectly by Elias Koteas, things quickly went downhill after that.

After skipping Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, Casey returned for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III only to spend the whole film babysitting a trio of time-displaced samurai. The fourth film, 2007’s TMNT, featured a Casey Jones so lackluster that even the talented Chris Evans couldn’t make him interesting. By the time Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows rolled around, the character was almost unrecognizable.

While we’re not saying that Casey Jones has ever gone full ACAB, having the Stephen Amell version of the character work for the police kind of goes against the very idea of a dude who uses sporting equipment to cripple purse snatchers and litterbugs without hesitation.

2) Karai

Depictions of Karai in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle media vary quite a bit. Most incarnations, however, share the same three traits: she’s a fierce ninja warrior, is usually depicted as having some blood relationship to Shredder, and is a high-ranking member of the Foot Clan, sometimes even higher than Shredder himself. The Karai from the two Michael Bay-produced Ninja Turtle films is maybe one of those three things, if that.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) featured a Karai that can best be described as the film’s version of Tatsu, Shredder’s second-in-command from the first two Turtle movies. She’s essentially Shredder’s lackey, and while that may mean that she’s a high-ranking member of this universe’s Foot Clan, she comes off as a generic hired thug who uses guns instead of ninja weaponry.

Karai comes off even worse in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016), where she’s defeated in one-on-one combat by April O’Neil — an unskilled hand-to-hand fighter in most incarnations of TMNT.

3) Splinter

Of all the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle characters, Splinter is the one who goes through the most changes from adaptation to adaptation. The character went from a mutated rat in the comics to a human in the ’80s cartoon and back to a rat for the first movie. Through all the changes, however, a few things usually remain consistent: Splinter is the Turtles’ adopted father, he has a connection to Hamato Yoshi, and Shredder is his arch-rival. We say “usually” because of 2023’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (if you’ve been paying attention, you probably know where this is going.)

Mutant Mayhem was overall a fun take on the Turtles, but some classic TMNT characters felt off, chief among them being Splinter (voiced by Jackie Chan). While the mutant rat was still depicted as the father of Mikey, Donny, Leo, and Raph, he had no connection whatsoever to Hamato Yoshi, Shredder, or even martial arts for that matter.

In perhaps the lamest version of the TMNT’s origin to date, Splinter taught the four brothers the art of ninjutsu using old Jackie Chan movies and YouTube. Call us crazy, but that doesn’t seem like a viable way to train a squad of highly specialized shadow warriors.

4) April O’ Neil

Very few fans are aware that the 2007 CGI animated film TMNT is set in the same continuity as the three live-action films that came before it. This is mainly because TMNT makes almost no references to the previous films, has an entirely different tone, and, oh yeah, April O’Neil is a ninja archaeologist for some reason.

When taken as the fourth entry in a series, we suppose it makes sense for April’s character to grow and eventually change professions, but let’s be real: almost everyone watches TMNT as a stand-alone-adventure and when they do, they’re left scratching their heads over why their favorite news reporter is now a random ancient artifact dealer with a black-belt in ninjistsu and katana skills that rival Leonardo’s.

5) Baxter Stockman

Poor Baxter Stockman. First, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze features an entirely new scientist character who, by all rights, should have been Stockman, then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem kills him off in the first couple of minutes. Not that the Baxter Stockman in Mutant Mayhem resembles the character’s other iterations in any way whatsoever.

Baxter Stockman is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ oldest rival, second only to the Shredder himself. Despite usually being portrayed as a villain through and through, who revels in his evilness, the Stockman in Mutant Mayhem is inexplicably a good guy who wants nothing more than to raise a bunch of mutants as his surrogate children. In a just world, Secret of the Ooze’s Professor Jordan Perry would have been Baxter Stockman, and the Mutant Mayhem Baxter would have been a random character created for the movie.

The fact that it’s the other way around is just further proof that we’re living in the darkest timeline.

6) Shredder

The Shredder from the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with his knife shooting, robotic mech suit, is easily the worst version of the character ever put on film, but believe it or not, he was almost worse. Original plans for the movie would have had a white man, Eric Sacks (William Fichtner), revealed to be the Shredder — a character traditionally portrayed as Japanese. When this ridiculous plot point was leaked online, the movie was quickly restructured to include Oroku Saki as the “real” Shredder.

The change was so last-minute that the 2014 Nintendo 3DS game based on the movie still features Sacks as the Shredder.

7) Donatello

We know it seems like this list is heavily skewed towards the two Michael Bay-produced TMNT films, but the truth is they’re universally recognized as the weakest representations of the Turtles on film. Case in point, their over-the-top portrayal of Donatello. The brainiest turtle has always been the most unbelievable, what with his talent for whipping up state-of-the-art inventions from scratch with no education to speak of, but Bayverse Donatello takes it to a ridiculous level.

This version of Donny has an iPad strapped to each leg, what looks like a Super Nintendo controller stuck to his arm, and some kind of Ghostbusters-esque high-tech pack on his shell with exposed circuit boards everywhere. The whole design looks like it was put together by a ten-year-old whose only instructions were to include a bunch of popular electronic devices and to make it look “cool.”