I think the Korean edits must have been meant for a version to be sold in Korea. Japanese culture is generally edited out of all foreign media sold or broadcast in South Korea, because of resentment due to Japan’s occupation of Korea in World War II. It’s still bizarre that this would be on a VHS that was sold in Japan. My guess is that they put the Korean version on by accident, or else they didn’t have access to the original version and only had the Korean version in English when they were making the Japanese VHS. Still, it’s very strange.
"It was an accident" is the only theory I've read here that makes any sense. I've read that when the translators in that era made Japanese subtitles, they often didn't have scripts and just had to listen to the dialog. That would explain why the subtitles used the Korean names rather than the normal localized Japanese names for these characters. Tang Shen is not a Japanese name, though. I wonder why they changed that one?
Japan controlled Korea for decades prior to WWII; having annexed it after victory in the Russo-Japanese War. S-Korea's government has long used anti-Japanese rhetoric as a P/R crutch, whilst the DPRK... well they hate everybody XD.
@@jimtaylor294 Anti-Japanese rhetoric? You mean asking Japan to actually acknowledge its crimes against humanity? Also they didn't annex it. They occupied it. You're whitewashing and softening Japanese history with your rhetoric.
@@theangryholmesian4556 everyplace in asia did horrible atrocities to everywhere else in asia for centuries. the fact that it's now limited to china, north korea, and southeast asia, and their governments doing it to their citizens instead of spreading it somewhere else, doesn't change the broader perspective.
@@jackmcslay Not really. We usually have very good dubs. But just not for stuff like this. Germany is pretty much still caught in the idea that something is either for children or adults. If something is more for pre-teens and little bit more edgy the people working in the dubbing industry usually seem to be completely out of their depth and often simply decide to make it more cartoony and hence more child-friendly.
@@GermanLeftist I think another reason in this case might be, that they wanted to keep the rating down, so more children of lower age groups could watch the movie in cinema, since the sounds made it more cartoony and goofy and so took the seriousness out of the scenes.
This sounds fairly interesting for a movie about a bunch of Adolescent Abnormal Shinobi Reptiles. Also, when are you gonna rip The Next Mutation a new one?
I watched the first episode on Netflix with my friend a while back, and it was so bad. I lost it when Splinter came out with a bo staff, and he had his derpy mouth open so the stuntman could see.
@@chrispetty6956 I'm not really a fan of tmnt, just like to hear phelous talk about it. However I did *make* him watch the first episode of next mutation with me as a joke, and it was hilariously bad. We both had a good laugh.
I was never a super fan of any version of TMNT of the last 30-plus years. (I keep meaning to go back and read the original comics though they seem so dark and cool) That's said I remember when the next mutation was on TV and it was horrible. It was like they took inspiration from the three live-action movies and just ruined it in every way possible. Luckily the weirdly super accurate TMNT of the early 2000s was coming, it was oddly one of the few cool things to come out of the 4kids era on Fox.
Korea has, or had, a bunch of laws against movies and TV shows where Japanese culture is portrayed, which means no Samurai or Ninjas. I think it's possible that the Japanese version you saw was derived from the Korean version with the Japanese references removed, and then the subtitles changed from Korean to Japanese.
@@ImaNerdANDaGeek They had a problem with Ninja movies and the violence it could cause in real life. It was relaxed in 2002 so the 2003 series was unaffected.
That Japanese version was most likely the Korean version purchased for distribution in Japan. It was probably cheaper to get it licensed out of Korea than America because copyright fuckery.
I may have an explanation for the Korean stuff. In France, when we dub an american movie with a french character with A LOT of jokes about the accent and some language barrier, we change his nationality to "Italian" to keep the joke as much as we could. Pepe le Pew for example is Italien in the french version, the scene of The Mask where he transforme to a french guy is now talking italian and making italian reference instead of french references. So... it's probable than the Japanese version of this movie did the same to keep the dynamic of imigrant characters... wich is weird for a non dub version and a movie clearly not having this kind of problem, but it's just my theory.
@@fats3342 Yeah, China, Japan and South Korea basically have a "Triangle of hate." Everyone hates everyone. Though I think the hate for Japan is justified because of the Japanese Empire that led to them being a major member of the Axis Powers in World War 2. I can see where the bad blood would come from.
Not to mention using a grappling hook as a weapon sounds very... fatal. Like, if that hook took hold of someone's stomach and Mikey pulled... instant guts EVERYWHERE.
Specifically it's because Conservative parents believes kids may see shurikens and nunchuks as something not super dangerous and considering how easy it is to make fake ones, that's what happened. There's no point banning swords or guns though because obviously a kid knows a sword is dangerous
The only explanation that I could get about the anti-Japan Japanese version is that version might have possibly been for Korea and Japan just imported it and changed the subtitle track. Even that seems like a stretch.
I have long renounced to understand the incoherent motivations of censors. This people walk with their hands instead of feet. Just like the political correctness clique raging nowadays 🤷
@@Boltscrap B-But. You can't show brawling people to children, either. Or else it will encourage fights in the playground (If we applied the logic of these morons earnestly)
Random fact of the day: Ghostbusters has, like, 5 spanish dubs. Two of them are nigh identical, except the actor dubbing Venkman dubbed Stanz and vice versa.
Man, that anti-Japanese release in Japan was weird. The only possible explanation I could think of for the movie ending up like this is that Towa video decided not to buy the US cut of the film, but the Korean cut. After WWII, Korean had a lot of anti-Japanese policies for a long time, so stuff like this censorship was common. This is why when Super Sentai was being dubbed over there, they skipped over the ninja and samurai based seasons until the recent Shuriken Sentai Ninninger.
So the German edit is just the Uwe Boll "Funny" Version. Also, it's interesting that Towa used people that look and sound Japanese to play Korean characters.
Oh if only CBBC had done the same XD. I remember when Channel 4 - if memory serves - broadcast Evangelion in about 1999... at age 10 I got educated in why not all animation is for kids. Saw Gundam around the same time, which was quite dark by western standards. (that scene between Amuro & the just orphaned Fraw... brutal...)
This isn't even like censorship in the traditional sense. It's just so weird, it's more like when they change massive amounts of things in the dub process with anime. Though it isn't even what I'd call a localization it's just random changes made for reasons that don't make sense.
Perhaps they just succeeded with the 'Basil Faulty attempt' of not mentioning THE WAR.. They're Japanese.. What ever you do, don't mention Japan or Ninja..
South Korea goes through periods of being outraged at the very existence of Japan for one reason or another (to the point that the Korean dub of Pokemon removes all references to Japanese culture), and I can easily imagine that South Korea was one of the most promising markets outside of North America for TMNT.
We can’t have children finding out about things from other cultures. It would cause their stupid little heads to explode! Best throw those in the garbage with the pointy glasses.
TMNT is usually called "Mutant Turtles" in Japan, although the 2nd and 3rd movies were branded "Mutant Ninja Turtles" there. Kevin Eastman said in an interview a few years back that Japan actually had a problem with the word "Ninja" being used to describe heroic characters. I guess that eventually changed, like it would in Europe.
Kind of makes sense in a way if you think about it. Historical ninjas were spies and assassins who committed secret operations and that must have not been seen as very heroic in a society like Japan, where stuff like honor is very important. So makes sense that the concept of the ninja and even the term ninja would have been seen as negative and not fitting for heroic protagonists. It probably changed with newer generations who, ironically, were probably influenced in a huge way by the western depictions of ninjas as badass heroes, skilled fighters and protagonists. If you ever watch old anime from the 80’s and early 90’s and pay attention you can kind of see what appears to be the point where the Japanese views on the ninjas started to change and how they developed gradually because they often feature ninjas as bad guys, neutral characters and sometimes even as protagonists. By the time stuff like Naruto came along (late 90’s), those opinions had changed so much that you could make a popular franchise where the heroes were ninjas.
Splinter: Many years ago, when I lived in Korea… You know come to think about, I'd pay to see a bootleg movie where Splinter has to escape from North Korea and the Shredder being a government goon hunting him down.
It was pretty much thanks to paranoid moral guardians in Europe. However, certain Asian territories like Korea had Japanese cultural references banned for many years due to Japanese occupation in WW2. This weird print of the film that removed any mention of Japan or anything Japanese was probably meant for these markets, but got in the hands of the Japanese distributors by mistake.
It was purely political. In the 1970s, there was a gang in the U.K. who used nunchucks, so a bill was passed to make those illegal, and that stayed in effect throughout the 1980s.
Wow, being British seeing these alternate takes are weird. And yes I remember that awkward as hell fight with Shredder, It's the first time I've heard Splinter's full speech.
I don't think I could make it through the German version, those cartoony sound effects are just too much. I wonder if the version that cut all mention of Japan was specifically made to be sold to the Chinese.
That would only make sense if that version was intended for the Chinese population that lives in Japan and can understand Japanese, which, needless to say, would be extremely weird. Chinese people who can't read Japanese would not understand it. Yes, Chinese and Japanese both use Kanji, but they are extremely different languages otherwise, and the average Chinese person would not understand the subtitles any better than the average monolingual English-speaker.
This is actually really fascinating. Was the movie ever released in Korea? If so, I have a theory that, since Japanese culture is actually heavily censored in Korea, they may have done this edited version for release in the entire east Asian region and just added whatever language subtitles they needed for Japanese, Chinese, etc. No idea why they'd edit those things out in Japan. The revised Japanese names, I get, but they really don't even care that much about the historical accuracy of ninja, themselves. Just look at Naruto. I should ask my Japanese friend about it. Maybe I'll find something out.
I think you're right about it being a censored Korean version that the Japanese producers just got the track from. Clearly the Japanese weren't upset about the movie having Japan in it.
They probably changed "Japan" to "Korea" in Japan to keep up the feeling that things were happening in a foreign land. Since it was originally set in America, all the Japanese stuff was 'exotic' and 'foreign,' so they changed it to Korea to keep up that general feel.
I'm wondering if that version ever specifically mentions taking place in New York. If not, they may have been attempting to imply the movie took place IN Japan.
Weird versions, changes and edits are my thing. The 80s we're especially notorious for this apparently. But for some reason I'm always super into this weird random extremely obscure information. It's like stuff that as people living anywhere outside Japan or Asia a lot of times it's something you were never meant to see and seeing it is like seeing something that was like classified.
Does the Force Ghost of Hayden Christensen appear, does Shredder make a NOOOOO, does Greedo shoot first? All of these and more will be answered in this video.
Criminy, I was popcorning through this entire video. I have the American VHS and watched it to death as a kid. Seeing all these changes are fascinating because I know the original like the back of my hand. The new scenes and alternate shots are like brain candy. Thank you, Phelous! This is my new favorite video of yours.
I can't imagine what it was like growing up and knowing them as HERO Turtles. I wouldn't be surprised if those kids still called them "Ninja Turtles" colloquially and the censorship was only superficial. I hope one day we get a definitive home release of this movie with every last bit of alternate and missing scenes. I wish this video was ten hours long. I find this endlessly fascinating. A+, Phelous! I'm definitely sharing this on all of my social media.👍👍
The late 80s early 90s we're just littered with weird kids movies based on ninjas. There was 3 ninjas, surf ninjas and so many more that I just can't bother to remember.
The weird edit I remember was the Shredder death scene. Shedder lands in the back of the garbage truck, Casey pulls the lever, then ir cuts back to the turtles hugging splinter in slow motion, then back to Shredder's helmet crunched.
I never imagined that they made so many weird and awkward versions of the 1990 ninja turtles movie. Still though thank you phelous for showing us this it's interesting yet somewhat enjoyable lol
wait those sound effects are german only? wtf? and here i thought i've known everything there is to know about bad german dubbing :D if you wanna have a laugh compare the english and german dub of f.e.a.r. ... in the german one the whole menacing feeling of the dialogs are nonexistent and some lines are recorded in bathrooms :D
If they had such a big problem with "ninja" then I kinda wish they had taken a page from bootlegers and named one of the movie edits Karate Turtles Warriors or something.
Can someone explain the ninja censorship to me? Sure, censoring Nunchucks makes a stupid kind of sense but why censor the word ninja? It's a historical word that doesn't have much weight in this world because it's not like the turtles are commiting assassinations. This would be like if they retitled "Pirates of the Carribean" into "Sailors of the Carribean"
When Splinter throws the book in the actual cinema version in the U.K. that was actually in. They did an extra edit to remove it from the VHS. I thought I’d dreamt it until I imported the US DVD years and years later and saw him chuck the book.The BBFC would often cut more out for the video release as you could rewind that so more chance for harm as they put it. They don’t care now they pass anything and even lower some of the old ratings. Some more madness the turtle power song which got to number 1 in the chart, that song was called ninja even tho a hero version was put in the end credits.
The more I watch this video, the more I'm convinced that it's actually a localized dub for one of the east-asian countries that still speak primarily english, and whoever was responsible for it's release there was just feeling particularly patriotic or at least anti-Japanese. The fact that this is the dub that ended up on the Japanese release is just weird tho.
@@Takeshi357 Singapore, maybe? Philippines primarily speak English aside from Tagalog, but I don't picture them having an obvious patriotic anti-Japanese sentiment, despite their world war 2 past.
It's possible, since english language also would imply that they used to be part of the British empire, which Singapore falls under. However, this still doesn't explain to go with Korea specifically as the replacement. Korea also was, as far as I know, never colonized by the British.
Well, you know the old saying, "your guess is as good as mine". Right now we don't even know the name of the production company behind the dub, or even if such a thing existed because it's not even a dub, just some redubbed dialogue. All we got is a Japanese home video release utilizing a version of the movie that is extremely unlikely itself to be Japanese in origin.
@@Takeshi357 Hong Kong also used to be part of the British empire (and still was at the time the movie came out, as the movie came out in 1990 and Hong Kong stopped being a British colony in 1997), but yeah, it still doesn't explain the Korea thing.
Presumably, the Japanese-version English dubs changed many of the references of Japan to Korea and "ninja" to "combat/warrior" so that Japanese audiences, of whom would most likely be more familiar with _actual_ ninjas and the history behind them, would still be able to suspend disbelief instead of immediately noticing the Western Romanticized "ninjas" we're familiar with.
A less optimistic mind might just come up with the assumption that someone wanted to insert their own politics and associate anything "negativ" with Korea instead of Japan. Someone else be the judge of what is more likely.
So they sort of reversed 4Kids the movie; editing out cultural differences not so much to make it 'local' but to keep the audience from noticing the Americanization of their own culture?
Leo isn't a real leader anyway, he only exists because Raph doesn't have the balls to rebel against the team's actual leader, Splinter. It's just like Cyclops and Wolverine.
Okay, so I think I have a theory as to why the Japanese version of the first TMNT movie is so, well, anti-Japanese. In the past, Korea had this disdain for a lot of Japanese things. I'm not sure if this disdain still exists today (I don't think so), but it lead to a lot of interesting changes whenever there was an overtly Japanese theme or character who was brought into Korea. The first one that comes to mind for me is the character Mitsurugi from Soul Calibur. He's a Samurai straight up, katana and everything. When the first Soul Calibur game was released in Korea, Mitsurugi was replaced with this blond Englishman named Arthur. He was totally just an edit of Mitsurugi, but he wasn't a samurai. It was a bit confusing. Now I've heard Mitsurugi was replaced mainly because Korea doesn't like samurai's in general, and it might not just be a dislike of Japanese culture as a whole. Whichever one is true, is it to much of a stretch to think that they don't like ninja as well? My theory is that the Japanese edit isn't meant for Japan, but was instead meant for Korea, and that somehow someone sent the wrong edited tapes over to Japan, and Japan just rolled with it. It would probably explain why there's such a heavy emphasis on Korea as oppose to any other Asian country, and why they are called Ninja Turtles in the sequels with no changes, but not in the first one. But, hey, it's just a theory. I could be wrong, and for some reason, Japan just really dislikes Japan in the first movie. Personally, I find that more hilarious.
It’s strange that there are so many changes to the Japanese version. I can’t tell if it’s because they wanted the Turtles movies would be more interesting if it was anther culture other than their own , or they were afraid they offered some one. This was a research heavy episode and I really appreciate all that went into it.
@@freakfoxvevo7915 buy Police Man with Invisible Guns & Sometimes a Cartoonishly looking Hammer Gun, & also Thier Robots(European Censorship of Contra AKA Probotector).
Yeah, those Japanese dubs aren't alone in being affected by the censorship-weirdness. I've got a bunch of Finnish VHS-tapes of the '87 cartoon. The label says 'Hero' - but the opening theme is the original American one with 'Ninja' - and in the Finnish dub, the word _ninja_ is used frequently. No one ever called them 'hero Turtles' - but I guess that's what they officially were. The games were also 'Hero Turtles,' as were the Image comics - but then again I've got a Finnish poster of the movie from 1990... and you guessed it, it's 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.' Very confusing.
Because in UK they thought that kids would buy nunchucks and beat each other. True story. I live in Greece myself and it was Ninja all the time here though.
You got the Hong Kong dvd re-release of the TMNT movie from Joy Sales? I missed out on buying this when it came out back in 2007. Funny thing is, I'm the one who initiated this re-release. I used to work for Joy Sales. I told my boss at the time to use their Fortune Star license to release the trilogy just when the 2007 TMNT movie was coming out to theatres. The names of Oroku Saki and Hamato Yoshi were also changed in the Hong Kong dub.
If I had to take a wild guess, this is a Korean print of TMNT that was released in Japan. And the Japanese dub is a overdub of that. Korea had a hard ban on all things Japanese during this period. So that would explain a good number of the changes. But I guess only New LIFE Cinema/TOWA Video know for sure.
I want to make a new Anime-like Cartoon, where it combines 4kids' Censorship, The Removal of Japanese Culture, The Censorship of Swimsuits, & the Dubbing of Big Green.
Down a guy called James Ferman who was in charge of the UKs film classification board known as the BBFC, after Enter The Dragon he wanted to heavily cut down on nunchucks used in films, there was actually a government ban on the weapon right up til the early 2000s. Watchinf a video called Cutting Edge: Enter the Dragon it'll be explained better.
So, wait... the german dub added these wacky noises to the fight scenes? Maybe this person somehow later left to the US and worked on... Next Mutation? Hmmm...?
I'm from the UK and I have no idea why nunchuks are so "controversial" Why allow sai and fucking katanas, but not 2 tiny sticks tied together? It's so idiotic. As is feeling the need to remove the word "ninja".
they might have censored Ninja out of the german version but holy balls did they swear a lot in that dub even dropping the F-bomb at one point. German Hero Turtles is a treat!
