Talking about some of the modifications made to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie made in some regions. Including a weird version from Japan which renamed it Hero Turtles and took out all Japanese references.
TMNT Movie Edits
Talking about some of the modifications made to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie made in some regions. Including a weird version from Japan which renamed it Hero Turtles and took out all Japanese references.
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Cartoon sound effects over real life was the absolute worst part America’s Funniest Home Videos. Didn’t make Uwe Boll’s Bluberella any funnier either.
The UK’s old ban on ninjas & nunchaku was on par with China’s ban on ghosts, time travel, reincarnation, jasmine flowers, Alice in Wonderland, & Winnie the Pooh in stupidity.
The one with all the Japanese stuff removed is really baffling. I would have expected that from pre 1998 South Korea because of anti-Japanese sentiment, as well as from DiC or 4Kids, but from Japan itself on a local release? I guess we’ll never know why they tried to make them Korean but replaced all the Japanese names with Chinese ones, or why it had an english dub.
And we all thought 4Kids censorship was dumb…….
The only reason I can think of for the Japanese release with the scrubbed Japanese references is that the people doing the localization decided that the film’s depiction of Japanese culture was too inaccurate and thus changed everything to being Korean instead. Sort of like how Swedish broadcasts of The Muppet Show changed the Swedish Chef’s name to the Danish Chef.
That sounds like the most likely explanation. And, it could be that they didn’t do that to the Japanese dub because in that it was easier to correct the inaccuracies (like making the Japanese names more authentic).
The other thing that might have happened was that the Japanese company only had access to an edit created for the UK/European market that removed references to Ninjutsu (and Japan in general to be on the safe side), and simply subtitled it “as is” without restoring the Japanese references. That would explain the “Hero Turtles” title.
Though, that raises more questions, since you mentioned that the Europeans actually did get the “Ninja” version of the movie (but with Nunchaku downplayed), and why would they even send Japan the “Hero Turtles” cut of the movie, instead of the unaltered film?