The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have had a lot of enemies over the years. When you’re a giant, humanoid, talking turtle it seems like it’s going to happen, especially if you know how to fight. And while their list of enemies and allies have kind of waxed and waned some of the greatest never seem to go away or get lost in the shuffle when it’s all said and done. Being ninjas they have some of the deadliest enemies around, but being born from a comic book they also have some of the goofiest and most insane caricature-like enemies you could ever imagine. Seriously, growing up with these guys and watching them fight their enemies was kind of a laugh riot at times since the bad guys would constantly lose and almost never find the kind of cohesion it took to really pull their plans together and stomp the turtles. After all, how many times did Shredder say that he wanted to dine on turtle soup? The poor guy went hungry more often than not.
Here are some of the the best TMNT villains of all time.
5. Krang
Yes he looks like a chewed up wad of bubblegum, and yes he’s a rather annoying character that, somehow, survives when he should have been flattened by now. But Krang is a super-intelligent creature that somehow knows how to put that brain of a body of his to such good use that he’s been one of the Turtles’ most dangerous adversaries for decades. Even if people had a serious beef with Out of the Shadows the fact remains that bringing Krang it was a serious leap forward. To be honest the whole idea of the new TMNT movies isn’t that bad, it simply feels like the producers are just trying to bring the series back in movie form, and it’s not working the way they wanted it to.
4. Bebop and Rocksteady
These two have to be mentioned together because working alone they’re just hopeless. The Turtles can defeat either one of them alone without much difficulty, but when they’re paired up the guys tend to have a few issues just because these two are insanely strong and faster than they look. What helps however is that they’re not too bright and tend to make poor decisions during a fight, as blasting the cockpit of a plane to pieces would indicate. However in a one on one street fight either one of these guys would give any of the four Turtles a serious run for their money, and might even beat a couple of them down.
3. Baxter Stockman
Baxter Stockman is a very overlooked villain that didn’t really do much as a human/fly hybrid but was still the twisted genius that came up with the mousers, small machines that were designed for one thing, to kill rats. Unfortunately this meant that Stockman was more of a villain that someone like Splinter would have to worry about, the Turtles found themselves surrounded by the munch-mouth machines as well a few times. In the early comics the mousers were particularly nasty as they could chew through just about anything and were absolutely relentless as well as vast in number.
2. The Rat King
The Rat King is probably one of the most comical and least-remembered of the Turtles’ enemies as he was kind of a kook and didn’t have anything else going for him but the fact that he could telepathically communicate with rats. The one downfall of this for the Turtles was that this mean that the Rat King could control Splinter, and he did for a while. Of course this meant that Splinter, who taught the Turtles, turned on them at the Rat King’s order and was more than a match for his students/sons. Eventually Splinter was able to break free of the Rat King’s influence, but it was some time before he could get the man’s voice out of his head.
1. Shredder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhGPPWayeqk
There’s no other bad guy that could take the number one spot when it comes to the enemies of the Turtles. Shredder is one of the most highly-skilled and overly aggressive bad guys ever created. In the cartoon he was pretty comical, but in the live action movies he became something far worse. In the most recent rendering of the Turtles, Shredder was a walking technological nightmare of steel and martial skill. How he was able to move with all that stuff attached to him was amazing, but even worse for the turtles was that his skills easily placed him head and shoulders above them until they found out that working together was the way to defeat him. In the first live-action TMNT movie and the most recent Shredder has just been too much for them one on one, but standing together has been their greatest weapon against this guy.
Some of the enemies are goofy as all heck and others are just deadly serious, but every enemy of the Turtles has the potential to be absolutely deadly.
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