Nearly 40 years after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made their comic book debut, how would you describe Raphael? It’s difficult, right? His brothers have always been easy to sketch out. Michelangelo – that cut up – is a party dude. Donatello does machines. Leonardo’s a little trickier to pin down, since he’s always so busy leading.
But Raph? Across all iterations, he’s a quandary – a living testament to the duality of anthropomorphized lizards. Sure, he’s cool. Nobody’s arguing that. But he’s also rude – some might even go so far as to say crude, or compare him to some kind of a brute. He’s a complicated balancing act of a guy.
Today, we turn a thoughtful eye to that dichotomy, ranking every reimagining of Raphael on the big screen, offering an impartial analysis of his rude-to-cool ratio across each iteration. For interested parties, this exercise will make use of the NOAA’s impoliteness/radness semiaquatic reptile scale, as well as gut decisions that we went with out of laziness while we were tired.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
Rudeness to Coolness Ratio: 77:12
What makes him cool: Raphael owns a fedora, the preferred hat for cool guys.
What makes him rude: The fedora was clearly made custom for him, since it fits his giant, mutated head. Since none of the turtles have jobs, there’s no way that Raph could have paid a haberdasher to make that hat for him. He either stole the hat, or stole the money to pay for the hat. Either way, rude.
Additionally, Raph spends a good chunk of the movie dying from internal bleeding after taking a severe beating from the Foot Clan. Making your friends worry about you like that isn’t just rude, it’s selfish. At a more meta level, Josh Pais, the actor who both voiced and did the suit work for Raphael in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, neglected to return for either sequel. This Raph effectively snubbed not just Vanilla Ice, but the people of feudal Japan. Extremely rude.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze (1991)
Rudeness to Coolness Ratio: 41:39
What makes him cool: When Keno, the teenager that the Ninja Turtles sort of amiably kidnap, tries to Trojan Horse his way into the Foot Clan, Raphael helps him cheat on his entry exams. Cheating on tests is cool.
What makes him rude: Raph and the other turtles trick Tokka and Rahzar into eating anti-mutagen by sneaking it into donuts. Nobody should ever use donuts for dishonest purposes, not even to rob two genetic abominations of sentience and doom them to a life haunted by the echoed memories of their stolen capacity for basic speech, intellect, and emotion.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time (1993)
Rudeness to Coolness Ratio: 88:3
What makes him cool: He almost owns a cowboy hat at the beginning of the movie. Cowboy hats rank just below fedoras, according to Buzzfeed’s ranked list of the best hats for cool guys.
What makes him rude: Raphael comes out of the gate swinging rudeness in Turtles in Time. He whines about how unappreciated he is. Then, in a “hurt turtles hurt turtles” moment, he doesn’t appreciate his gift from April: the second coolest hat she could have gotten him. Ruder still, he goads Michelangelo into a fight over a magic time travel scepter, nearly trapping everyone in the past when it breaks. This sort of behavior is probably why Vanilla Ice outright refused to write and perform another beautiful melody for the threequel.
TMNT (2007)
Rudeness to Coolness Ratio: 9:4
What makes him cool: Doubling down on his origins as a comic book hero, Raphael stalks the streets of New York as a superhero called the Nightwatcher. So cool.
What makes him rude: He breaks his brother’s cool swords. Despite some pretty solid, character-driven writing, the movie still looks like a cutscene in an original-gen Xbox game being played on a TV that’s barely not black and white. While not strictly “rude,” this aesthetic decision wasn’t very polite either. Was that Raph’s fault? We have no way of knowing, but it seems unlikely that he spoke up during the production process.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)
Rudeness to Coolness Ratio: 94:13
What makes him cool: The Raphael of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) isn’t too up-ons to do an elevator musical number with his brothers. Being supportive of your family’s recreational activities is cool as heck.
What made him rude: He was in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014). It’s a pretty bad movie. Being in a pretty bad movie is never a polite thing to do.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)
Rudeness to Coolness Ratio: 17:2
What makes him cool: He’s not in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) anymore.
What makes him rude: First, Raphael is all worked up over not being a human, since it means he can’t go to a Sam Goodie, get an ice cream cake at a Carvel, or do any of the things that normal, non-turtle people do. Then, when he and his brothers have a chance to turn into people thanks to a vial of anti-mutagen, Raph smashes it and encourages everyone to accept who they are. That sort of rude, crude brutishness is enough to make you glad that he’ll never get to enjoy a Fudgy the Whale with the light of the sun on his face. The punishment fits the crime.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)
Rudeness to Coolness Ratio: 10,000,000:1
What makes him cool: He’s written pretty well. His story is emotionally effective. The Spider-Verse-esque animation style is fun and fresh and whatnot.
What makes him rude: This fresh, Gen Z-oriented take on the Ninja Turtles franchise serves as a reminder of time’s terrible push towards the future, and of the way that the stories and characters you grew up loving must inevitably pass you by. That’s the rudest thing that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise has done since that time when I saw the stats screen on a Turtles In Time arcade cabinet and realized I was older than Splinter. Again, it’d be hard to put all of this on Raphael, but he shares at least part of the blame.
