Why do you think some mutants gain the ability to talk and others do not?
 

We've seen this happen regularly in almost every TMNT series:

1. In the original cartoon a lot of the mutants talk, but some oddly do not. The mutant bull with the horns who kept getting bigger and duplicating itself into two from Season 3 (the one Don had his alternate VA in), the giant bugs from "The Big Bug Blunder," the mutant bug people in Season 7 when Baxter used his mutagen gun on a bunch of pedestrians, etc.

2. In the 2k3 series in Notes of the Underground, only Quarry spoke. Stonebiter/Razorfist didn't speak at all. They weren't mindless yet like the other mutants down there. Then later on in Season 4 when there's a mutant outbreak in NY, again all those mutant bugs are just mindless and don't speak. Then we had that Cockroach mutant or the 4-eyed monster Bishop experimented on when he mutated that soldier...they didn't speak either.

3. In the Nick cartoon several mutants did not speak. Cockroach Terminator, Justin, Mutagen Man, Squirrelnoids, Kirby-bat, Antrax, Traag, The Creep, etc. It seems like some mutants gained the ability to speak over time (like Rockwell monkey who couldn't talk in his first appearance), while others could not.


Why do some mutants gain intelligence and can speak, but others are basically just mindless monsters or feral creatures?

Can attribute that to the mutagen being nonsense in those. And unless someone teaches you to speak, how would a splash of mutagen automatically teach you English?

This.

I think the writer just do it to add some variety.

Well isn't it the same for Leatherhead in Mirage? We can assume Splinter taught the Turtles how to speak, but he was still just a rat.

The TCRI Utroms taught him, we can assume.

Not an ordinary rat, but even if he was... simple human observation as he was maturing post-mutagen exposure could have taught him enough of the basic English language building blocks to then teach it to the Turtles while boning up on the finer details via literature. After learning to read. We don't see hardly any of those earliest years but we have to assume that's what was happening.

I just assumed that speaking came with the territory of becoming (or remaining) humanoid. Other cases could just be characters that weren't given dialogue. Such as Quarry being the only one speaking. Though in her case I also assumed she was the last to keep a limited, fragile connection to her real self, while the others had lost it. Which could in theory also be the case elsewhere, such as the the bug people you mentioned in the original cartoon; lost too much humanity. Which the same could all be said of Nick... either not humanoid, lost too much human-ness, or I guess in the case of The Creep it was plants to start with that turned into a monster, so it lacked coming from any animal with vocal cords in the first place.

As Groundchuck would say:

"Quit going on all philosophical on me! You're making my horns hurt!"

I love that scene where Dirtbag starts asking existensial questions immediately upon mutating in "Planet of the Turtleoids", like the writers were making fun of the concept of animal Mutants immediately knowing perfect english and having human intelligence upon transforming.

Heh, I'm kinda disappointed Groundchuck/Dirtbag never showed up in the Nick show. I would have liked to see what they would have done with them, even though I know their designs/characters would have been completely different if they appeared like most old characters.

If you want an 'in character' answer - I guess the reason would be that mutation has no guarantees (with the exception of perhaps controlled experiments like Stockman in the later Nick seasons). The effects are largely unpredictable, with a few exceptions, and even when you have a rough idea what is being spliced, theres no guarantees how it will turn out.

Nick also suggested that mutagen can have adverse effects on the mind - such as Slash and Apocalypse Leo. So it may be a combination of not all mutants having the capacity to talk (either physically or mentally), or being too mind warped to manage more than basic phrases - if that.


Of course the real answer is - writers convenience - but I assume you wanted something a little more in depth than that :)

That's only a Nick TMNT cartoon mutagen thing. In the Fred Wolf stuff you're 50/50 with whatever you touched. In Mirage you get big and you get sentient, same as the old films.

Was that always consistent? I thought it was still a little random even in the other iterations. The only consistent thing was - as you say - the tendency for mutants to be physically larger than what they mutated from.

Probably some random nonsense in Fred Wolf. Mirage/the old films was always consistent, beyond the dumb "his armor and clothing mutates too!" with Super Shredder in TMNT II. In Mirage the mutagen seems perfectly consistent between the Turtles, Splinter, Leatherhead and Bloodsucker.

It really should be consistent, though. Even in the Nick cartoon, why would Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo all mutate in exactly the same way if there's a random element in play?

There was "unstable mutagen" in Fred Wolf that was used to explain any wonky mutations. Nick Mutagen is just a total free for all. It does whatever the writers want.

Yeah it was a nice little jibe at trying to explain such ridiculous ideas as mutating. :lol: