Shredder Recast: Any In-Universe Explanation?
 

In Out of the Shadows, they had a new actor playing Shredder, who looked nothing like the original one (who seemed to be taking his cues from the Nick Shredder). Was there ever an in-universe explanation for his drastic change, or was it supposed to be something we ignored?

Much like this entire incarnation, it should just be ignored

Just rewatched
While there are many things I dislike, I think as a whole it's not bad
Pretty funny

No explanation whatsoever. As was the case for many other plotholes & stuff.

No official explanation, but a fan theory is the mutagen seeped through his gloves, and rejuvenated him into a more youthful state after the skyscraper fall.

Nope, not a hint to explain anything in the film. While I like him as Shredder, I don't really get the point of bothering to recast both he and Karai if they were hardly going to use them anyhow.

Even if the film had tried to pass it off as the mutagen rejuvenating theory, how do they explain Karai. o.O

Plastic surgery to not get arrested like shredder was? She was unmasked during the subway hostage crisis, and could be recognized and arrested.

I was cool with Shredder being recast, I think it should've been him from the first movie, but I thought re-casting Karai was pointless, I liked her better in the first movie.

As for the explanation, I guess the mutagen helped him, but that didn't matter much to me. I really enjoyed the movie, better than the first definetly. Bebop and Rocksteady were the best, my man!

That was actually my assumption. I was curious if there were other ideas out there, esp. since the filmmakers have been silent on the subject, as far as I know.

Although you can tell that different actresses played the character, they looked close enough that I don't see a "need" to explain it. The fact that Karai dresses in an utilitarian style in the first movie but is more dolled up in the second one also helps disguise the differences as makeup and clothing details.

(Another possibility is that the Foot Clan had two people named Karai as members. Movie one Karai could've been killed when Raph smashed into her jeep during the snow chase (we don't see her after she ducks inside and the jeep takes quite a beating afterwards), and movie two Karai then wound up where she was in movie two.)

I think what happened was that, the 11th hour reshoot guy who played him in the first one was decided to be too old by the brilliant powers that be when it came time for a part 2 for toddlers and the Fred Wolf whack pack. As such, they also had to recast Karai a little younger than the now-younger Saki because she's still presumably supposed to be his daughter.

None of this makes a lick of a sense at all if the Fichtner character was raised as Saki's son, as the first movie told us.

A simple, dumb line inserted about "the mutagen healed me... it gave me back many years" would at least show some effort to reconcile the recasting with everything, and then they wouldn't even have to recast Karai.

But just dumb, dumb, dumb decisions all around by people that don't even care. Even now, they probably don't care. "I got paid, yo." It's not even worth seriously discussing.

Same in universe explanation as the re-casting of April in the second and third movie ;)

....and changing Donatello's voice...

maybe the original actor from the first movie saw his CGI counterpart was easily taken out by Megan O'Neil and decided to commit seppuku?

Maybe the actor from the first film has been to this forum and saw what a bunch of bung-holes some of us fans are.

I don't get why people wonder if there's an "in-universe" reason why an actor changed. Do people wonder what the "in-universe" reason is for why Steve Ditko Spidey looks different from Gil Kane Spidey?

Well, it's a bit different here when the new actor is noticeably younger, not bald and not scarred up like this:

http://cdn.movieweb.com/img.site/PHGcQMwrut3sJP_1_l.jpg

to this:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UKgzlqyBTM8/maxresdefault.jpg

I don't understand why these writers are incapable of seeing the small, simple solutions that would just smooth it over and leave it at that. New Shredder is Saki, previous guy was his now injured or deceased father. There. Easy. He even gets a motive against the Turtles. Would take just a couple seconds of dialogue to point out then move on and the recast no longer matters.

I guess when you exist in Bay World you can only mostly just see BIG and BIGGER things and the little stuff gets too confusing and lost or disregarded as being little and therefore unimportant.

I don't know how they manged to keep the moderately subtle underlying tension between the Turtles going for a bit.

Maybe you creeped on his girlfriend, and that's why.

I'm going with that.

They recast him because they messed everything up in the first place, and when they finally realized what a mess they'd made they recast some characters and tried to ignore the first mess up by making a sequel that has almost no connection to the first movie but is still considered a sequel. There is no in-universe, it's all just a big pile of bad decisions.

Why is this a big deal? They recast what's her name between Batman Begins and Batman: The Dark Knight Rises.

She was Katie Holmes in the first movie and then the other actress in the second. Nobody cared or called it a plot hole.