Tales Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles doubles down on what made Mutant Mayhem tick

Leonardo. Donatello. Raphael. Michelangelo.

These are iconic names. And borrowed as they may be from European art history, when they’re cited together, they can only ever refer to one thing: a quartet of teenage mutant ninja turtles. From their start in 1984 as comic-book characters to their animated and live-action forays into TV and film, these four brothers have long operated as an almost impossibly tight-knit unit. And visually, they’ve been depicted as nearly identical, with only their signature colors and weapons helping to distinguish them. 

That changed drastically with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Last year’s wildly inventive and raucous animated film leaned heavily into further individualizing these four teen turtles. No longer were these radioactive humanoids mere replicas of one another. They were fully-realized characters in their own right. With Tales Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Paramount+’s new animated series that follows in its wake, that concept of really delving into each of these iconic characters both as individuals and as complementary parts of their New York City-dwelling crime-fighting family becomes a central concern. 

To be fair, from the very beginning, these sewer-dwelling turtles have boasted slightly different personalities: Leonardo is a straight-laced leader; Donatello is the brains; Raphael is the brawn; and Michelangelo is the clown. But with Mutant Mayhem, those distinctions became part of the film’s visual iconography (courtesy of lead character designer Woodrow White) and were further tweaked by the use of shortened nicknames for each of the brothers. Oh, and they were all voiced by actual teenage actors who lent the film a sense of authenticity in its depiction of angsty turtles going through puberty.

Raph (voiced by Brady Noon) may have boasted his signature red bandanna and expertly swung around his pair of sai but in this iteration he’s much bigger than his siblings. He’s a beefy, bulked-up, punch-ready teen who could play quarterback for a winning high school football team. Nunchuck-loving and orange bandanna-donning Mikey (Shamon Brown Jr.) is lankier here (he’s more of a skater boy, in fact), and his toothy grin is made all the more glaring (and inviting) with his braces being front and center. Donnie (Micah Abbey), nerdier than ever (with a phone and headphones always on hand to match his purple accessories and his staff), is smaller and a bit awkward, with his big framed glasses most obviously setting him apart from his brothers. All while Leo (Nicolas Cantu), the erstwhile leader of the group, is lean and well-built, and his blue bandanna and katanas heighten his sense of poise. More to the point, though, Leo is obsessed with writing comic-book stories about the many outlandish adventures he and his brothers stumble upon.

It’s Leo’s stories that make up the bulk of the 2D-animated show’s promised “tales.” As if wanting to hammer home how these four brothers—all voiced by the same actors in Mayhem—needed to be fully-rendered characters on their own, almost every episode of Tales Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles follows only one turtle at a time. Indeed, their titles all but announce this as the structuring device of the show’s freshmen season: “Leonardo Stands Alone!,” “Mikey Does the Right Thing,” “Raph Thinks It Through,” “Donnie Hangs Tough.” As a conceit for a television series about a famed group of big-city heroes, this is ballsy stuff, especially since, as those very titles suggest, each tale finds them embracing an aspect of themselves they’ve more often than not associated with another brother’s skillset.

The first six of this season’s 12 episodes all center on an unlikely threat following the events of Mutant Mayhem. And, as if borrowing from one of Twitter’s favorite memes (“Yup, that’s me! You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.”), every 22 minute installment of Tales finds our protagonists adrift in the middle of their own lone adventure. Each, as it turns out, is being hunted down by a sentient A.I. robot who’s been specifically programmed to destroy them. Scattered as they are all over the city, the turtles have to rely only on themselves and a ragtag group of unwitting allies, which include not just April (Ayo Edibiri) but a mutant pigeon (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and a doofus of a hostage (Pete Davidson), to get the gang back together and truly make the case for why there is strength in numbers.

Finding out precisely how the brothers got separated and how they’re going to find their way back together is the fun of these bite-sized tales. But it’s also a welcome chance to have Leo, Donnie, Raph, and Mikey become main characters in their own right, able to shoulder an entire episode’s worth of action and comedy, thrills and laughs, all by themselves. 

This, in turn, further infuses these stories with their own visual flair. Donnie’s memories, for instance, look like video-game 8-bit visuals, speaking to his dorky endeavors but also to the way he sees the world around him. And it’s no surprise Leo reshapes them in his mind as comic-book imagery where he reduces his brothers to one-dimensional punchlines. At a moment when he’s cool and level-headed in the face of a mysterious threat, he recalls how Mikey just opts to tell a joke (“Thinking is hard. I don’t do it, personally.”), Raph resorts to violence (“Let’s just punch it!”), and Donnie refuses to step away from his phone (“Sorry, gentlemen, I can’t engage right now because I’m knee-deep in a new algorithm.”). The episodes that follow are attempts to upend those cartoonish characterizations and in the process create more fully-fleshed teenage mutant ninja turtles than we’ve ever seen on the big or small screen.

Is it a bit of a bait and switch given that we’re supposed to be watching a show about all four of these ninja turtles? Perhaps. But the show is well aware of that ploy. “Where are your brothers?” Leo is asked in the first episode when he arrives by himself at a party. “It’s like seeing one Jonas,” the partygoer adds, a bit of a meta wink at the audience about how odd it may feel to navigate these tales one turtle at a time. 

As character development, this episode structure is a gamble. Leo’s a leader, and Raph is all muscle; Mikey’s a wise-cracker, and Donnie’s a nerd. But to merely stress the same features that have characterized these turtles for four decades now would make for a rather dull reboot of this much beloved franchise. It’s better to force Raph to see the benefit of lobbing jokes at his foes (like Mikey does) when trapped in a Brooklyn chicken warehouse—and for Mikey to find the value in having a plan (like Leo always does) while surrounded by dangerous animals in the New York City Zoo. 

The gamble pays off precisely because at the heart of Tales Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a wildly simple concept: To work together, you need to know your strengths, but you also need to not be wholly defined by them. That is as much a storytelling dictum as it is the kind of lesson any teenager (mutant ninja turtle or not) should learn in stride: There’s plenty to learn from those around you, and you have plenty to teach those who think they know you well.