It’s a tempting maneuver, adding some new blood to a well-established team. The original-recipe Power Rangers shocked six-year-olds everywhere with the addition of the Green Ranger in the ‘90s, and Alexandre Dumas couldn’t even make it through the first act of The Three Musketeers without side-swiping his audience by adding a surprise fourth, the hack.
In the case of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the promise of a fifth Turtle has always been there, hanging over the audience’s heads like the twin katanas of Damocles. Even when the fans said no, or the toy companies said they’d run out of bandana colors, or Ninja Turtles co-creator Peter Laird blogged that adding a fifth turtle would be a “weak, facile, creatively bankrupt idea,” it’s always been just a little too tempting a thought for studios not to poke at.
And poke they have. Over the years, there have been a handful of contenders for the title of “Fifth Turtle.” Some of them were alright. Some of them, sadly, were not cowabunga. Not cowabunga at all.
Venus de Milo
It was 1997, and it was a bad time to be a fan of the Ninja Turtles. Man-sized turtle costumes had reached the point of diminishing returns. No longer state-of-the-art Henson Company creations, they were, more and more, becoming the stuff of so many Rock-AFire Explosions. The eyeballs got deader, and the expressions got scarier. Worse, in a crime no nine-year-old boy at the time would ever move past, Fox Kids added a girl.
Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation isn’t exactly fresh grist. The live-action Saturday morning TV series lives in infamy thanks to its introduction of Venus de Milo, the long-lost sister to the turtle brothers. Separated from her kin on the day of their fateful oozing when Splinter, in his wisdom, didn’t notice her, she was taken to China and, coincidentally, trained to do martial arts. It makes you wonder how many other turtles wound up anthropomorphized that day and just never got in touch with the rest of the team because they learned, I don’t know, touch typing instead of karate.
To this day, Venus, the fifth turtle who did some magic and was written to struggle with English as a hilarious joke performatively, remains specifically disliked by everyone from the fans to Ninja Turtles co-creator Peter Laird. On the one hand, yes, she was terrible. To be fair, though? So was The Next Mutation. Weirdly, she gets singled out as an atrocity in a show where Michaelangelo held a dance to raise money like he was in Breakin’. It’s like watching someone eat earwax soup and then complain that there are onions in it.
Jennika
The universe is balanced. There can be no darkness without the dawn, no evil without equal good, and no girl Ninja Turtle that everyone hates without one that we all kind of dug.
Jennika was a late-stage addition to Turtle lore, not debuting until 2015 and not displaying half-shell heroism for another four years after that.
Like most of our readers who aren’t hyper-intelligent birds, Jennika started life as a regular human being. Her life took a very She-Hulky left turn when an accident necessitated a blood transfusion, which she got, courtesy of Leonardo. As tends to happen in situations involving sci-fi blood, she morphed into a human-sized turtle and started fighting on behalf of Master Splinter. Helpfully, she was already doing much of that before mutating, so the most challenging part was getting a new uniform.
Zach
You can almost hear the production notes leading to Zach appearing in the 1987 Ninja Turtles animated series. “Sure, kids like turtles, but can they relate to them? We should add a kid character, so kids will have someone to pretend to be. Kids are dumb.”
And we were. Zach premiered in the third season episode, “The Fifth Turtle.” He’s a little boy who wants to be a Ninja Turtle so badly that he puts on a mask and climbs into a manhole cover. He gets labeled “the fifth turtle” for his efforts, while most kids who do that just wind up as cold cases. Also, Zach’s older brother, who’s always making fun of him for believing in the Ninja Turtles, winds up getting called “the sixth turtle.” They were just giving the title away back in the day.
Slash
Oh, Slash. Where to begin?
The broad strokes go like this: Slash is another mutant turtle. Sometimes he’s an alien. More often than not, though, he’s somebody’s regular pet turtle that gets mutated through exposure to dang old ooze.
However he gets there, Slash usually winds up in a doozy of a mood once he’s big enough to hold nunchucks. He’s spent most of his iterations trying to beat up, de-ooze, or otherwise doink with the other turtles. Oftentimes, he winds up a key member of the Mighty Mutanimals. Even more frequently, he dies horribly.
April
Comic book covers have always been effectively similar to the posters at a circus sideshow, promising that you’re about to be amazed by something that’ll be over in about four minutes and cost you five bucks. In 1994, the Archie Comics line of Ninja Turtles comics promised thrills, surprises, twists, and a strange and deadly turtle woman from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Winter Special issue cover.
It’s a classic story. April O’Neil wants to see if she can turn Splinter back into a human being for his birthday. She sneaks into a shady corporate lab to look for some anti-mutagen. She gets caught, nailed in the gob with ooze, and turns into a turtle lady.
Luckily, most of April’s social circle is turtle people, so she has a good support system. She and the team break back into the lab, karate chops some ne’er-do-wells, and turns April back into a human being. It was fun while it lasted.
Oh also? If you were wondering, Splinter doesn’t get to be a human again. It’s probably for the best. There’s a quiet dignity to being a giant rat raising four boys in the sewer, but when a human being does it, it’s just the premise for a true crime documentary on Netflix.
Honorable Mention: New York City
In a lot of ways, New York is really the fifth Turtle.
Whatever, I thought it was funny.