The 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was a phenomenon which brought the TMNT from an important independent comic book to a much wider audience. The first season of five episodes was produced and aired in December of that year. It was produced by Murakami/Wolf/Swenson and ran for 10 seasons, ending in 1996. The series ran for 193 episodes, and in most of them they opened with a very catchy theme song. But in later years this theme song has been altered or replaced. I will identify all distinct English versions of it and where they can be found.
The 1987 Broadcast Original
The show's opened with a theme song like other cartoons of the time. The original music was composed by Chuck Lorre (who later produced The Big Bang Theory) & Dennis Challen Brown, who contributed spoken lines ("he's a radical rat", "that's a fact, jack" and so on.) Singing duties were performed by James Mandel, a.k.a. Miles Doppler. It was shown for all episodes from Seasons 1-7. The soundtrack for the intro was modified slightly with new sound effects when the opening intro changed partway during Season 4. It is present on U.S. home video releases of the show, VHS, Betamax, Laserdisc and DVD. A completely different theme song was used for Seasons 8-10, a.k.a. the "red sky" seasons. Seasons 1-3: Link Seasons 4-7: Link
"Hero Turtles" and other International Variants
When the show was exported to the U.K., the current law forbid the use of the word Ninja in children's entertainment. This meant that all instances of "Ninja" in the team's name had to be replaced with "Hero." (Michaelangelo's nunchucks were edited out whenever possible and his weapon was eventually replaced with a grappling hook.) The line "Splinter taught them to be ninja teens" was changed to "Splinter taught them to be fighting teens." The song's lyrics were re-recorded for the U.K. market, but the spoken parts were retained. The music was re-recorded or an alternate take from the original recording session was used. Every non-English speaking country would have had its own variant of the theme song, and perhaps multiple versions if redubbed. Link
Turtle Power Documentary Cover
The unavailability of the original performance was nothing new. In 2009 a documentary group, FauxPop Media, began to make a documentary covering major aspects of the TMNT franchise, comic books, toys, cartoon, movies (but it only really covers up to the first TMNT movie in depth). It would have cost the production company $20,000 to license the song, so they obtained a re-recording from another source. In 2014 they released the documentary as Turtle Power: The Definitive History of the TMNT.
On the DVD the theme can be heard from 39:07 to about 39:34, but it during the second half of that time it is playing over an interview and a vintage TV broadcast. Link
The Arcade 1up Cabinet
The TMNT Arcade game, as originally released in 1989 for the arcades, had a a small portion of the original theme which played during the attract mode and over the first cutscene. The original theme heard was heard when it was available from 2007-2011 on Xbox Live! and was present in the 2024 Quarter Arcade release. When the Arcade 1up cabinet was released in 2020, it had its own version of the theme song. Link
The Arcade game was emulated in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 Battle Nexus, but all the music from the Arcade game was replaced.
The Cowabunga Edition Arcade Version
In 2022 the TMNT Cowabunga Collection was released for all major platforms and included emulated versions of all the Konami TMNT video games released during the 1980s & 1990s. This included the Arcade versions of TMNT and TMNT: Turtles in Time. It sounds similar to the Arcade 1up cabinet but not the same. Link
The Paramount Streaming Version
For a long time, the rights to the 1987 show were owned separately by Fred Wolf Films and not by Paramount/Viacom, which had bought all the available rights to the TMNT franchise from Mirage Studios in late-2009. In 2023 Nickelodeon (a Paramount subsidiary) bought the broadcast rights from Fred Wolf Films and began streaming the show. It does not appear to have been streamed in the past. Apparently Wolf did not have a contract with the original composers which could be interpreted to specify streaming of their performance, so the song was recreated in its entirety, music, singing and spoken lyrics. The end credits music was also totally re-recorded. Wolf's rights did include the original lyrics to the theme song. Season 1-3 Link
Season 4-7's variations additional sound effects are not included for those episodes, but the spoken lines may have been retimed to match the intro's animation. Link
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