YMMV / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze

• Accidental Innuendo: A misplaced pause has Splinter responding to the question "What were you doing up on the roof?" with "Coming. ...to a decision."
• Anti-Climax Boss: Super Shredder initially appears extremely menacing, and then he does himself in without the Turtles needing to do anything.
• Awesome Music: "Ninja Rap". Bonus points for being performed by Vanilla Ice.
• Badass Decay:
  • The Shredder. He goes from defeating all the Turtles in the first to getting beaten by an electric keyboard in this film. He even acknowledges the fact he has failed against them when he commissions the creation of Tokka and Rahzar. The fact that his "Super Shredder" form gets defeated in a very anticlimactic fashion doesn't help.
  • Tatsu as well, he is the Shredder's right-hand man and had to be sucker punched by Casey Jones in the previous movie to be finally defeated. Here he goes down in one hit, when all the Turtles gang up on him, in a fight scene that is Played for Laughs, no less.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Vanilla Ice holding a concert in random nightclub at the docks and having a song about ninjas already prepared and choreographed. It's very weird, out of place even for a Ninja Turtle film, and, aside from the newspaper piece Splinter reads headlining "Ninja Rap Is Born!", nobody talks about it again afterwards.
• Complete Monster: Oroku Saki, the Shredder, returns. Shredder forces Professor Perry to create the mutant beasts Tokka and Rahzar, threatening to execute all three of them for failure when the monsters have the minds of "stupid infants" before bragging plans to unleash Tokka and Rahzar onto Central Park and endanger countless people. When his plans are foiled, Shredder takes an innocent woman as a hostage, threatening to douse her in mutagen and monstrously transform her while he makes his escape. And then he literally becomes a monster by consuming the last vial of ooze... which didn't help him at all.
• Contested Sequel: While it did well, fans are pretty split when it comes to it. Some weren't fond of the goofier elements and shying away from the drama/comedy split from the first movie (not to mention the downgrade in the Turtle costumes). But other did like the more colorful look and more jovial tone feeling it offset the flaws and gave the film more personality. Either way, the most middle ground is that where the first paid homage to the comics, this one pays homage to the cartoon and your enjoyment hinges if you were a fan of the 80s show.
• Evil Is Cool: While the film is a Contested Sequel, Tokka and Rahzar were fairly well-received for being powerful and dangerous mutants to pit the Turtles against while still being comical and fun. Although some were upset that the sequel created new characters instead of using Bebop and Rocksteady, over time this has become a non-issue as future TMNT media has had no problem having both pairs in the same incarnation.
• Heartwarming Moments: While the mess the Turtles make in April's apartment is Played for Laughs, they work together to clean the place up for her, showing that they care about her.
  • Splinter later consoling Donatello's heartbreak at learning the truth of the Ooze. He gently urges his son not to confuse, as Splinter puts it, the specter of his origin with his present worth.
  • Despite them being incredibly unstable and dangerous Professor Perry has nothing but sympathy for Tokka and Rahzar and yells down Shredder himself when he wants to destroy them.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Upon seeing the fancy gadgetry inside TGRI's headquarters, Michelangelo exclaims "it's like a video game in 3D!". 3D video games would become commonplace in only a few years after the movie's release, to say nothing of the small number of 3D games which already existed at the time.
  • After hearing the Turtles' story, Keno made the remarks that they and Splinter were "slimed", by which Splinter was taken aback and Raph was offered. In 2009, Viacom would purchase the rights to the franchise and make all future projects under Nickelodeon, a network renowned for game shows and award ceremonies where participants get slimed.
  • Kevin Nash (Diesel), the guy who played Super Shredder (the villain who lost his life) in the film, would ultimately lose to The Undertaker in WrestleMania XII five years later.
  • Tokka, the gigantic and muscular turtle, tries to follow the heroes into the sewer in one scene, but gets stuck in the manhole as he is too big to fit. In the 2014 reboot, the turtles themselves are turned into massive hulking monsters like Tokka and they have no problem fitting into manholes, oddly enough.
• It Was His Sled: Super Shredder dies when a bunch of wood falls on him.
• Memetic Loser: Super Shredder. Despite being built up as a major threat, he manages to kill himself without the Turtles having to do anything; and in the first movie, normal Shredder managed to survive in order — fighting and defeating all four Turtles, being thrown off a tall building by Splinter and landing in a trash compactor, which Casey then activates and crushes him inside — while Super Shredder is supposed to be even stronger and more dangerous, but is killed permanently (and in short order) by blindly collapsing a dock on his own head. For those reasons, the form tends to be made fun of for being an infamous Anti-Climax Boss.
• Narm:
  • Tokka and Rahzar's rampage in the street is meant to show the damage they could do if let loose in Central Park. The threat is ruined when we see a pair of unfazed citizens regard the sight with annoyance, suggesting if that the Shredder made good on his threat, nobody would care. ^note Though the joke for the scene is that its New York and the place has been through so much craziness, something like that is just an average Tuesday to them. Plus the area was pretty much abandoned anyway and meant to serve as a message to the Turtles.
  • The first Latin American Spanish dub, which was done in Argentina. The main problem with this dub was the fact the Argentinian voice actors dubbed the film with their local accents without any effort on trying to neutralize them on any way. Keep in mind Argentinian Spanish is very notorious in the Spanish-speaking world for having a very notable accent, compared with other Latin American accents, especially the Buenos Aires (Porteño) accent.^note For English-speakers, the equivalent would be Irish or Australian English.
• Narm Charm: When the Turtles are on the phone with April, at one point, Leo's face visibly twitches, possibly due to some animatronic glitch, but given they're cleaning up the abandoned subway station as their new home, (and he is unbelievably pissed off at Raphael for going off on his own, again) it can be handwaved as him being irritated by circumstances and the dirty and dusty environment.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The poster seen on the main page has some rather ominous shadows of Tokka and Rahzar looming over the unsuspecting Turtles.
  • The slow, unnerving camera pan through the junkyard as we eventually reach Shredder, who raises an arm to defy death. The music is pretty ominous and frightening as well.
  • Tokka and Rahzar have a slow burn introduction where we only ever see bits or pieces of them until their proper introduction. When they finally emerge, they’re not quite as terrifying as they were hyped up to be, but the scene is still unnerving (especially since Tatsu outright flees from them).
  • While mostly comic relief villains, Tokka and Rahzar are still hulking, immensely strong brutes who can do a lot of collateral damage. The Turtles never outright win a fight with them, and the news that Shredder is preparing to unleash them into Central Park to wreak havoc and possibly kill people is a major cause of alarm.
  • The close-ups on Rahzar’s face as he flings Mikey around in the climax are rather unsettling.
  • The Super Shredder. Sure, he ends up dying almost as soon as he appears, but consider the fact the Turtles couldn't even best him in a fight when he was unmutated. How can they even expect to take him on as a towering, hulking beast?
• Special Effect Failure: While they still looked and worked fine enough, there is a slight decline between the suit quality between the first and second films. In the first film each suit was individually made with a build and details unique to each Turtle (Raphael has some tough-guy scars and is the second tallest, Michelangelo is the shortest, Donatello is kind of chubby, and Leonardo is the slimmest and the tallest). In this film, they had four (basically) identical suits with different heads for each Turtle. The heads are also slightly more cartoonish in appearance than they were in the first film. Which would only become more exaggerated come next film.
• Tear Jerker: When the Turtles learn the truth of their origin. They are essentially four orphans who have made a family with their adopted father; and upon learning the truth of where they came from, are told quite bluntly by the equivalent of their biological father that they were accidents, were never supposed to have existed in the first place and are essentially the first, last, and only beings of their kind in the world.
  Don: There's just got to be more to it!
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Super Shredder. Given what little we saw of him, there could have been a truly awesome final battle that the audience ended up not getting. The SNES port of Turtles In Time, The Hyperstone Heist, The Manhattan Project, Mutants in Manhattan and Shredder's Revenge would later fix this by having Super Shredder be the Final Boss in all five games, with each installment making him even stronger than what we saw in the movie. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) would make up for it even more by having a particularly horrifying take on him as the Big Bad of the remainder of the fourth season. Later on, NECA Toys went as far as to release several versions of Super Shredder's highly-detailed action figures in commemoration of the movie's 30th anniversary. Even Fortnite capitalized on the opportunity by featuring Super Shredder skin as part of its Cowabunga limited-time event from Season 5.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Wide shots of the Twin Towers in the background. But then again the film screams this as much in the dialogue.
  • The inclusion of a Vanilla Ice cameo would quickly become this as his fame became Condemned by History.
• Values Dissonance: Keno insulting a girl who turns him down by saying he'll dream of someone thinner is treated as a sick burn meant to endear us to the wisecracking kid. It's also clearly not meant to be taken too seriously since the actress playing the girl is thin, but today, the movie would be criticized for encouraging fat-shaming; especially considering the mental health issues society has had with intimidating thin people into thinking they’re overweight.

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