The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are four ordinary turtles turned human-sized and human-smart by mutagen, a glowing ooze, and raised as ninja in the New York sewers by Splinter, a mutated rat. Their enemy is the Shredder, Oroku Saki, master of a ninja clan called the Foot. Who Splinter was, where the ooze came from and why the Shredder hates them all change from one version to the next.
So this names the version for every claim: the original 1984 black-and-white comic, the 1987 cartoon, the 1990 film, the 2003 and 2012 series, and the comic that began in 2011. Every design on the TMNT shelf comes from one of them.
Which Turtles? The main versions
The original comic, first published in 1984, is dark and violent: the Turtles' first fight with the Shredder ends with his death in the very first issue. The 1987 cartoon turned it into a comedy with pizza, catchphrases and robot henchmen, and is the version most people mean by the theme song and "Cowabunga". The 1990 live-action film follows the comic's story closely.
The 2003 series went back towards the comic. The 2012 series mixed the comic's darker family history with villains from the cartoon. The comic that started in 2011 rebuilt the whole story again, and the same publisher's The Last Ronin, a standalone story set in a future of its own, follows the one turtle left alive.
Mutagen: where the ooze comes from
Mutagen does not work the same way everywhere. In the 1987 cartoon, it mixes a creature with whatever it last touched, which is why a pet turtle that was handled by a human becomes a turtle-man.
In the original comic, a canister of ooze falls off the back of a truck and into a sewer, where it splashes four baby turtles and a rat, Splinter. The ooze belongs to TCRI, a front for the Utroms, small brain-like aliens hiding on Earth.
In the 1987 cartoon, Shredder pours the mutagen down a drain to kill Hamato Yoshi, not knowing it will mutate him instead. In the 2012 series, it belongs to the Kraang, alien invaders from Dimension X, and it keeps spilling across New York, so the city fills up with new mutants episode by episode.
Splinter's origin, April and Casey
In the original comic and the 1990 film, Splinter was the pet rat of Hamato Yoshi, a ninja. He learned the art by copying his master's moves from his cage. Yoshi was killed by Oroku Saki, and Splinter fled to the sewers, where the ooze made him the turtles' father. In the comic, he named them after the Renaissance artists in a book he found in a storm drain.
In the 1987 cartoon, Splinter is Yoshi himself. Framed by his student Oroku Saki and thrown out of the Foot Clan, Yoshi lived in the sewers with four pet turtles. The ooze hit them all: the turtles had last touched Yoshi, so they became humanlike, and Yoshi had last touched the sewer rats, so he became a rat.
In the 2012 series, Yoshi and Saki were raised as brothers in Japan and fell out over Tang Shen. Their fight burned down the Hamato home, killing Shen, and Saki took Yoshi's baby daughter and raised her as Karai.
The family also has two humans in most versions. April O'Neil is a lab assistant in the comic and a TV news reporter in the 1987 cartoon. Casey Jones is a vigilante in a hockey mask who fights crime with a bag of sports gear, who first meets Raph as an opponent and becomes a friend: Back Alley Justice.
On the shelf
The Shredder and the Foot Clan
The Shredder is Oroku Saki, a ninja master in bladed armour, and the Foot Clan is his army of ninja. In the original comic, Yoshi killed Saki's older brother, Nagi, after Nagi attacked Tang Shen, and fled to New York with her. Saki rose through the Foot, was put in charge of its American branch as the Shredder, and took his revenge by killing Yoshi and Shen.
The 1987 cartoon made the Foot soldiers robots, so the turtles could smash them on children's television, and gave Shredder two mutant thugs of his own: Bebop and Rocksteady, street punks he turned into a warthog and a rhino. Baxter Stockman, the inventor of the rat-hunting Mouser robots in both the comic and the cartoon, becomes a human fly in the cartoon.
The 2003 series revealed its Shredder as an Utrom war criminal inside a human-shaped exosuit. In The Last Ronin, Shredder's grandson, Oroku Hiroto, rules a future New York through the Foot, and the lone turtle who comes for him turns out to be Michelangelo.
On the shelf
Krang and Dimension X
Krang as most people picture him comes from the 1987 cartoon. He is a brain-like warlord thrown out of Dimension X, who rides in the belly of a giant humanoid robot body and runs the Technodrome, a mobile fortress. He supplies the alien science; Shredder supplies the ninja. They need each other and cannot stand each other, which is the joke of most of their scenes.
The 2012 series split the idea into the Kraang, a whole race of brain-like aliens in robot bodies, ruled by Kraang Prime. Dimension X is where they come from in both.
I Hate Turtles is Krang alone; Evil Power puts Shredder, Krang, Bebop, Rocksteady and Baxter Stockman on one back.
Turtle weapons and colours
In every version named here the turtles start out with the same weapons: Leonardo has two katana, Raphael two sai, Donatello a bo staff and Michelangelo a pair of nunchaku.
The colours are not. In the original black-and-white comic, all four wore red masks. The 1987 cartoon colour-coded them, and nearly every later version kept it: Leonardo blue, Raphael red, Donatello purple, Michelangelo orange.
The cartoon also fixed their personalities, and its theme song gives each a one-line job. Four tees take their names from those lines: Leads, Does Machines, Cool but Rude and Party Dude.
In the UK the cartoon aired as Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles; Mikey's nunchaku were cut from fight scenes. From the fourth season, the cartoon itself swapped them for a grappling hook, the Turtle Line.
On the shelf
On the back of a tee
All four brothers and their enemies are on the TMNT shelf, drawn from canon reference art: Cowabunga for the whole team, Never Enemies for the turtles and Shredder, Hothead for Raph and Sewer Kickflip for Mikey. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why it works on the back: four green brothers told apart by one colour and one weapon each is character design made for a back print, readable from the far end of the room.
Read next: Mystery Inc. and the men in masks: Scooby-Doo explained and Treehouse of Horror, El Barto and Krusty explained.
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