Nightmare Fuel / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987)

"Say your prayers, Turtles."

• Shredder's iconic "Tonight I dine on turtle soup" line becomes a lot more horrifying when you stop and think about it. He's literally threatening to kill, cook and eat the Turtles, who are sapient intelligent beings. Granted he intends to turn them back into regular turtles before doing this however, which is nightmare fuel in and of itself if you think about it too long. How would you like to regress to a state of non-intelligence?
• "The Big Break In": The Minimizer, this super-weapon from Dimension X is pretty standard supervillain faire, "shrink army bases and tractor beam them inside it" to eliminate resistance for the Technodrome. Except, for the unseen army officer shouting, "We're getting smaller, WE'RE SHRIIINKIIIING!" with a voice that morphs into something right out of The Fly!
• Donatello's plight in What's Michelangelo Good For?. Doctor Lesseau initially comes across as a G-rated version of Doctor Moreau (hence the name), but he becomes a lot more nightmarish when it's revealed that he plans to actually remove Donatello's brain while he's still alive and fully conscious of what's happening. While Leonardo and Raphael watch, completely helpless.
  • Earlier in the episode, Michelangelo and Dr. Jane Goodfellow using the boat to get to Dr. Lesseau's Lair but he plants mines in the river so they don't make it out alive. Mikey gets out of the boat to save Jane but as he does so he gets too close to the mine and it explodes causing Jane to scream his name and his brothers watch in horror as well! Thankfully, Mikey survives since he ducked underneath the water but it's still the most disturbing moment in that episode! What if Mikey had died? What would have happened then?
• "Enter the Fly" is without a doubt one of the darkest episode from the original cartoon. Shredder, who's usually apt to take April hostage and place her in all sorts of crazy death traps, instead poisons her and forces the Turtles to seek an antidote, which he then manages to steal and forces them to confront him to get it back. Seeing the Turtles confronted with the fact that April could very well die and seeing her comatose body lie closer to death is disturbing enough.
  • But the real thing that makes this episode horrifying is Baxter Stockman's fate. After Baxter Stockman has failed Shredder one too many times, he winds up in Dimension X where Krang attempts to immediately dispose of him by tossing him into a Disintegration Chamber in the Technodrome's disintegration unit which then activates and causes his skin to disappear even as he is frantically pleading for his life. Then a random fly that also winds up in the unit merges with Baxter, and he screams as the thing combines with him permanently and he's morphed into a giant mutant fly-man.
    • The transformation of Baxter Stockman from a dorky if mildly psychotic little scientist to a deranged fly-man is pretty spooky in itself, since you see his screaming skeleton in the seconds before he's mutated. It somehow becomes even worse as time goes on, because you see his mind progressively deteriorating and becoming more fly-like.
• Night of the Dark Turtle was a pretty dark episode. Donatello gets electrocuted during a fight with the Shredder and becomes obsessed with defeating the Shredder. Yes, Donnie, the meek and intelligent turtle, became a vengeful vigilante that tried to kill the Shredder.
• Mutagen Man. Just... Mutagen Man. Even worse, the guy did that to himself. Had Seymour Gutz not been so insistent on being in that lab, he could have avoided falling apart in a vat of mutagen and getting mutated. Plus, Shredder was basically demanding that he leave prior to it (and without any spoken word or implication that he was going to send any of his minions after him once he did). Not helping matters is the fact the show tries to play what happened to him for laughs. A creepy scene in an otherwise light-hearted episode.
  • The Mutagen Man action figure isn't any better; it's a small batch of connected organs and a skull floating inside a clear container with limbs grafted on that are covered in torn flesh and exposed bones. Yes, this◊ was sold to kids.
• Seasons 8-10 of the show is pretty much all of this, considering that this show has always been different from the the original source material, seeing the final 3 seasons of this show shifting into a more serious and serialized storyline comes as a surprise for those who are familiar with the previous seasons that came before it.
  • If you are wondering how did the show's writers handled it, well for starters the show setting is now a Red Sky , which lead to many fans calling it The Red Sky Seasons. Guess the writers thought it gives a more Post-apocalyptic feel or the fact that this came out when Batman TAS (which also had a similar setting) was popular.
• The first episode of Season 8 titled "Get Shredder" has the Turtles trying to track down Shredder and Kraang, (No more going out for pizza, renting horror movies or going to the arcade) they are REALLY determined to take down Shredhead for good.
  • Shredder on the other hand acts like how he's portrayed in the earlier seasons, a megalomaniac who wants to take over the world. Hell, this episode is where he did the most despicable thing he ever did in this show blowing up and destroying the Channel 6 building as the Turtles failed to stop him.
• Starting from Season 9, there is an ongoing plotline where the mutagen that the Turtles originally mutate from proves to be unstable; so much that the Turtles began to suffer from mutations that temporarily mutates them into monstrous hulks with diminished intelligence.
  • In the Season 10 episode "The Return of Dregg" the Turtles attempt to cure their unstable mutations, until Michelangelo suddenly begins to mutate into a larger more monstrous mutation. The other Turtles and Carter attempt to hold him off with no success, as Michelangelo destroys his brothers' weapons and destroys the machine that's supposed to cure them. He then starts to grow and his ever-increasing body size causes the entire lair to cave-in. It all turns out to be a virtual reality simulation of what would have happened if they were to use the machine on themselves.
  • In a second attempt at the cure, it was a success and all of the Turtles are cured, except Leonardo. During the stabilization process Dregg's Microbot makes its way to the lair and sabotages the controls while Leonardo was still being stabilized. Leonardo then ends up mutating into an even bigger and more monstrous mutation that leads to him going on a rampage throughout New York city.
    • What's even worse is that in the next episode, Lord Dregg then creates a plutonium ray; planning to use it to further mutate Leonardo "out of existence". And during the climax, Leonardo got shot from the plutonium ray which causes him to revert to his usual state, Dregg then reveals that the plutonium is causing Leonardo to become even more unstable, meaning that he will reach critical mass and explodes within thirty minutes.
• In Season 9 Episode 6 "Split Second", we are introduced to Chronos, a villain obsessed with time. He also tells the Turtles that they have met before. So throughout the entire episode he became somewhat of a big threat:
  • These include setting up two different crimes at the same time:
    • The first one was setting up two subway trains full of people that was about to crash into each other, Raphael, Michelangelo and Carter managed to redirect it... only to discover that it was another set-up and they have just accidentally caused the train to careen down the wrong track.
    • The second one was involving a robbery in the bank, Leonardo and Donatello head off to stop it... only to find out that they locked themselves inside a vault with a thermal device activated.
  • Chronos also manages to kidnapped Master Splinter and somehow he knows everything about Splinter's past life and fighting style. He also threatens the Turtles in a form of a message that he will kill Splinter if they don't surrender to him.
  • Of course, the Turtles managed to stop him at the end of the episode but before that they found out who Chronos really is; at some point in the past, he was a normal man named Winston Fripp; where he was fired from his job at the city scheduling department due to his attitude problem. This leads to Fripp robbing a large sum of money from the city's treasury as a form of revenge, until he has been apprehended by the Turtles. The Turtles then caught him and left him trussed inside the City Hall clock tower for the police, but unknown to the Turtles it took hours for the authorities to find him, which lead to him becoming insane from the sound of the clock. It is until he was freed and employed by Lord Dregg where he decided to get revenge on the Turtles.
• Season 9 Episode 7 "Carter, the Enforcer" was also a pretty dark episode in this show. Two people named Landor and Merrik who came from the future to warned the Turtles about them being killed by their friend and ally Carter, who turns out to be a spy working for Lord Dregg. The Turtles don't believed them at first but then Carter appears out of nowhere and fires repeatedly at them, further supporting this.
  • Landor and Merrik then took the Turtles 20 years into the future where Lord Dregg has won (since the Turtles weren't there to stop him because they time travel) and ruled the world, everything is in ruins, and the Techno Gang terrorize the remaining humans that still survived.
  • After the Turtles infiltrate the Command Central building to get the Time Device they found out the head enforcer is none other than Carter, who greets them morbidly before he tries to kill them once more.
    • What's worst is that as they are outnumbered, Merrik and Landor get back the time device, and prepare to zap the Turtles back into the past. Leonardo is reluctant to leave their new allies in a deadly situation, but Merrik points out that they will both be saved if Dregg is defeated in their past. The Turtles vanish, and Merrik and Landor hold hands as they are about to die.
  • As it turns out that wasn't the real Carter, but an android created by Dregg's army, the real Carter on the other hand was captured and put in stasis by Dregg.
• The Globfather. He seems like just another weird alien creature causing trouble for the Turtles... until it's revealed that he is casually capable of turning any person into a blob of mucus-like slime. And he does it. Raphael is nearly one of his victims.
• Lord Dregg absorbed Krang's mental powers, causing a freakish image of Krang to form on his forehead at moments to provide him further insight. This, and the fact that the Krang image seemed to have a mind of its own was creepy enough. Still, as far as Dregg was concerned, it always gave him an edge and was reliable. Suddenly, at one moment, after clarifying a confusing situation to him, instead of offering a solution, it just coldly stated that he was doomed. Dregg was, suitably, horrified.

Lord Dregg: What on Earth?! My brain energy must be malfunctioning!

Krang Image: No, your brain is working perfectly. The turtles have brought their duplicates from the past to destroy you... and destroy you they will!

• In the final episode of the show "Divide and Conquer" (as pictured above) Michelangelo and Donatello went to Dimension X to retrieve Krang's android body so they could defeat Lord Dregg for good. Once they got into the now abandoned Technodrome, they presumably found the body buried on top of the debris, only for it to be an monstrous alien who happens to look like the android body, complete with a black freaky tongue.
• In the Season 3 episode, "Michelangelo's Birthday", Shredder uses a antimutagen spray gas on Leonardo, Raphael and Donatello. But instead of turning them into ordinary turtles, they inflate like balloons. While in that state, they don't talk at all and just stay hovering.