Open Channel: What’s Your Favorite Ninja Turtles Version?

Paramount’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the first movie version of the comic book characters since the two live-action films nearly a decade ago. The Heroes in a Half Shell have had an off-and-on relationship with movies, but Mutant Mayhem is shaping up to be one of the better received incarnations. Not only has it been receiving high marks from critics and social media, it’s reportedly shaping up to earn $43 million in North America.

While the Turtles have an inconsistent movie presence, they’ve been around much more over in the TV space. For a lot of older adults, the 1987 cartoon forever hangs over the shows that followed. From then on, other series have each been memorable, for good or for ill. TMNT: The Next Mutation is the only live-action series for the franchise, and introduced the first-ever female turtle in the form of Venus de Milo. For 90s kids, Fox’s 2003 series may be the more iconic show, thanks both to its theme song and its fairly long seven-season run.

Nickelodeon’s 2012 series brought the Turtles to CG for a respectable five-season run, and felt like a nice comfortable balance out the pair of live-action movies. 2018’s Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles took some considerably bigger swings—not only were the Turtles all visually different from one another, they had mystic powers and weapons in place of their regular gear. Despite those changes, Rise ended up winning a lot of folks over, especially after last year’s Netflix movie brought things to a semi-definitive close. And now the Mutant Mayhem incarnation is here as the definitive version for the next generation of Turtles fans, further helped by both a sequel and TV spinoff set between the two movies.

There’s clearly no shortage of TMNT versions that audiences have grown up with—and for this weekend’s Open Channel, tell us your favorite version (or versions, plural). What’s the key to making the Turtles work beyond being having a catchy theme song and living up to their name? Let us know in the comments below.

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