Cowabunga, dudes! The one secret ninja sect any kid could be a part of, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are best known as wise-cracking heroes in a half shell with a burning craving for pizza and a vernacular of 80s surfer lingo. But did you know the TMNT go back further than that? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was originally a comic book, all spawning from a joke drawing by Kevin Eastman of a masked turtle swinging nunchakus. Finding it too hilarious to throw aside, they added three turtles and gave each a specialty weapon, launching a test-run issue soon after that would become a huge collector’s item. From there, the comic would become a cult hit and would be published from 1984 all the way to the present day, still going strong alongside the animated series.

Written as a parody of popular comics of the time, the TMNT comic also had a crimson red headband for each turtle and more violent content with significantly darker themes. The comic predated the “cowabungas” and wisecracks, depicting the Ninja Turtles as the strong and silent ninjas of their namesake. Exploding in popularity, the company was quick to license their characters to a toy line, which demanded an accompanying tv series. That 1987 animated tv series reinvented the TMNT, giving them their different headbands and personalities and introducing many of the iconic characters for the first time, like Bebop and Rocksteady, as well as altering the comic villains into new forms. Shredder stayed fearsome but became lighter in tone, changing from a deadly and silent ninja warlord to a boisterous evil mastermind, the perfect thing for the new prankster Turtles to play off of. One crucial change was changing the Foot soldiers into robots, which made the Turtles free to destroy an unlimited number of them on television. Combined with the popular high-flying ninja acrobatics famous at the time from shows like Power Rangers, the public love affair with the TMNT began. From there it’s all history, spanning from a massive toy line to video games to multiple tv shows to movies and so much more.

Today, the latest animated series goes back to the darker tone of the comic series, paying homage to the Turtles’ roots. There was even a movie, Turtles Forever, that had the wisecracking Turtles and their darker incarnations fighting alongside each other! As the TMNT go a more extreme direction, there’s never been a better time to check out their past and get reacquainted with the long past of modern society’s most popular clan of ninjas. Call it “far-out,” “tubuloso,” “bodacious”, or simply “awesome”, no red-blooded child can deny the excitement of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.