I'm not gonna lie, "Many years ago, I lived in Korea," is probably one of the funniest edits I've ever heard.

"Many years ago, I lived in Korea".
They should have called them The Tae Kwon Do Turtles.

That Japanese version was most likely the Korean version purchased for distribution in Japan. It was probably cheaper to get it licensed out of Korea than America because copyright fuckery.

I honeslty thought the German version was just a Phelous edit at first.

I think the Korean edits must have been meant for a version to be sold in Korea. Japanese culture is generally edited out of all foreign media sold or broadcast in South Korea, because of resentment due to Japan’s occupation of Korea in World War II. It’s still bizarre that this would be on a VHS that was sold in Japan. My guess is that they put the Korean version on by accident, or else they didn’t have access to the original version and only had the Korean version in English when they were making the Japanese VHS. Still, it’s very strange.

Soo...Leo could keep his swords but nunchucks were too far. Makes perfect sense.

TURTLES GET SLIGHTLY EDITED, CENSORED AND/OR ALTERED WITH HONOR!!

UK: Watership Down and Plauge Dogs : Fine

UK: Ninja Turtles : Way too violent!

Random fact of the day: Ghostbusters has, like, 5 spanish dubs. Two of them are nigh identical, except the actor dubbing Venkman dubbed Stanz and vice versa.

Korea has, or had, a bunch of laws against movies and TV shows where Japanese culture is portrayed, which means no Samurai or Ninjas. I think it's possible that the Japanese version you saw was derived from the Korean version with the Japanese references removed, and then the subtitles changed from Korean to Japanese.

The fools! They should’ve censored the real terrifying thing: TEENAGE!

"Oh, a fellow Combat Warrior, eh?"

Obligatory reminder that when TV Tokyo finished up airing TMNT '87, Neon Genesis Evangelion took over its timeslot

So nunchucks are too violent to show to children, but a SAMURAI SWORD is perfectly fine, yeah okay.

I may have an explanation for the Korean stuff.
In France, when we dub an american movie with a french character with A LOT of jokes about the accent and some language barrier, we change his nationality to "Italian" to keep the joke as much as we could. Pepe le Pew for example is Italien in the french version, the scene of The Mask where he transforme to a french guy is now talking italian and making italian reference instead of french references.
So... it's probable than the Japanese version of this movie did the same to keep the dynamic of imigrant characters... wich is weird for a non dub version and a movie clearly not having this kind of problem, but it's just my theory.

Splinter: Many years ago, when I lived in Korea…
You know come to think about, I'd pay to see a bootleg movie where Splinter has to escape from North Korea and the Shredder being a government goon hunting him down.

14:30
“Many years ago I lived in Japan”
“Many years ago I lived in Korea”

😂😂😂😂😂😂🤦🏻‍♂️😂🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

This is great. Censorship is always interesting.  In NYC we use Koreatown or KTown now

This sounds fairly interesting for a movie about a bunch of Adolescent Abnormal Shinobi Reptiles.

Also, when are you gonna rip The Next Mutation a new one?

The only explanation that I could get about the anti-Japan Japanese version is that version might have possibly been for Korea and Japan just imported it and changed the subtitle track. Even that seems like a stretch.