The Catwoman from Channel Six

	Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1988 Season; October 1, 1988 - December 31, 1988 ; List of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episodes
	Episodes: "Return of the Shredder"; "The Incredible Shrinking Turtles"; "It Came from Beneath the Sewers"; "The Mean Machines"; "Curse of the Evil Eye"; "The Case of the Killer Pizzas"; "Enter: The Fly"; "Invasion of the Punk Frogs"; "Splinter No More"; "New York's Shiniest"; "Teenagers from Dimension X"; "The Catwoman from Channel Six"; "Return of the Technodrome"; 1987 Season – 1988 Season – 1989 Season – 1990 Season – 1991 Season – 1992 Season – 1992-1993 Vacation in Europe sideseason – 1993 Season – 1994 Season – 1995 Season – 1996 Season

“The Catwoman from Channel Six”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) episode
	; Title screen
Season Code:	02
Episode:	12
Original airdate	December 24, 1988
Written by	Richard Merwin
Producers:	–
Episode chronology
"Teenagers from Dimension X"	"Return of the Technodrome"

"The Catwoman from Channel Six" is 17th episode in the 1987 TV series, and the 12th episode of season 2. It is available on the DVD box set released on April 26, 2005.

Synopsis[]

April is transformed into a mutant catwoman after her genes are spliced with a cat in a transporter.

Appearing in The Catwoman from Channel Six[]

Major characters[]

Donatello (Barry Gordon)
Leonardo (Cam Clarke)
Michelangelo (Townsend Coleman)
Raphael (Rob Paulsen)
Splinter (Peter Renaday)
April O'Neil (Renae Jacobs) (mutates) (retro-mutates)
Shredder (James Avery)
Krang (Pat Fraley)
Bebop (Barry Gordon)
Rocksteady (Cam Clarke)
Vernon Fenwick (Peter Renaday)
Irma (Jennifer Darling)

Minor characters[]

Species[]

Human
Mutant rat
Mutant rhinoceros
Mutant turtle
Mutant warthog

Objects and vehicles[]

Locations[]

Alleyway
April's apartment
City streets
City Zoo
Junk Yard
Shredder's hideout
Turtle Lair
Woo's Oriental Palace

Plot[]

The episode begins with the Turtles watching a monster movie about a monster in Cleveland. Splinter says that the Turtles watch too much TV, especially since their monster movies interrupt his meditation.

Meanwhile The Shredder is experimenting with Krang's Matter transporter, which allows him to teleport anyone or anything wherever in the world he wants in just a few seconds. The Shredder demonstrates this by sending Bebop and Rocksteady to a nearby landfill, where a machine grabs the two mutants and sends them down to the sewers. There, Bebop and Rocksteady find the Turtles' sewer lair by sheer dumb luck. The Turtles fight Bebop and Rocksteady, but the attack is cut short when Shredder teleports both of them back.

Since their old TV was destroyed in the fight, the Turtles call April O'Neil to come with a new TV.

It turns out that Rocksteady left behind a carton of Chinese food from Woo's Oriental Palace, and April decides to check up on the place to see if she can find leads to Shredder. She asks if anyone has seen men who resemble a rhino and a warthog, and learns that the food was delivered to a warehouse on the pier.

At the warehouse, she finds the transporter and takes pictures, only for a stray cat to accidentally activate it before leaping onto the platform with her. A dazed April is left on the matter transporter, feeling woozy and horrified at the fact her nails now resemble claws.

Going back to her apartment, April is followed home by a large group of cats, and begins to mix her speech with meowing while talking to Irma. She also develops a taste for milk.

The Turtles drop by Woo's, and immediately end up in a nasty fight with the wrestlers and martial-artists who frequent the place.

Later in her office at the Channel 6 building, April's physical and mental condition has deteriorated further - she has claws, catlike eyes, a slightly deformed face, hisses and often punctuates her speech with cat-like vocalizations. Irma realizes what's happening, but is powerless to stop April from leaving the building and running away. Irma contacts the Turtles and meets with them at a subway station to tell them what happened.

April's goal is to get back to the warehouse and reverse the transformation, but Shredder and his mutants quickly cage her and put a mind control collar on her. Shredder commands her to hunt down Splinter, which she does after freeing a tiger from the zoo. After narrowly avoiding the tiger, the Turtles find April's photos.

Splinter is meditating when April and the tiger appear in the lair, and despite his terror, Splinter manages to reach April through her brainwashing. The Turtles force her to recognize them, but the collar begins controlling her until Leonardo slashes the collar off. Michelangelo manages to entrap and cage the tiger with a windup toy.

In the warehouse, Shredder discovers that the Mind Control Collar is destroyed. Suddenly, a rat (which Bebop had earlier used to mock the mutated April) bites Bebop and then leaps up on the Matter Transporter. Rocksteady tries to hit the rat with his baseball bat, but instead he hits the transporter, which immediately overloads. Shredder, Bebop, and Rocksteady run out just before the transporter explodes and destroys the warehouse. The Shredder vows revenge against the Turtles.

Because the effects of Matter Transporter were only temporary, April soon becomes human again. Irma drops by the sewer in hopes of meeting Master Splinter, but is horrified that he's actually a rat.

Notes and errors[]

Animation errors[]

When Bebop and Rocksteady are flushed down the sewer pipes the close up shot of Rocksteady shows him with brown taping around his dagger handle.
When Rocksteady uses his dagger in the fight against the Turtles, his dagger sheath is missing from his back.
When Bebop and Rocksteady find the Turtles watching TV, Bebop is carrying a wooden dagger which changes into a baseball bat during the fight.
Bebop's mohawk turns brown in some shots.
Raphael is seen with Michelangelo's colours in the shot after Bebop disarms him.
Right before Leonardo calls April for help, Michelangelo's mouth moves for no reason.
When Leonardo introduces himself to Irma, he is seen with Raphael's colors.
The molecular transporter in April's photos is radically different to how it appeared when she was in it.
After the Turtles find the stray cat with April's genes, Michelangelo's image is shown speaking but Raphael's voice is heard complaining when Donatello says that he is April's favorite.
April's tail disappears between shots.
When Leonardo runs to knock off April's thought control, he is seen with Michelangelo's colors.
After Leonardo runs up and chops off April's thought control cat-collar, in the next shot it is instead Donatello there holding Leo's Katana. The shot after, he is once again holding his Bō staff.
When Leonardo is talking to Irma on the Turtlecom, part of his wrist is missing.
This is one of two episodes in which the titular plot is instigated due to a technological malfunction resulting from a cat pressing a random button on a control panel; the other episode being "Funny, They Shrunk Michelangelo".

Continuity errors[]

Bebop and Rocksteady toss their Chinese food boxes away at the entrance to the Turtle Lair, but when April finds one, it's sitting on top of some wrecked furniture.
April couldn't have possibly taken that photo of the cat on the molecular transporter. Aside from the fact that it looks different (see the animation error above), she was zapped with the beam in the few moments the cat actually was on it. She also stopped taking photos when she first saw the cat.
As April reaches for the doorknob to enter her apartment, her claws are gone. Although, she could have just clipped before she got to her apartment, only to have them grow back later on. In fact, her nails are shorter when she grabs the knob than even before she got mutated, as she had rather long and pointy nails at the start of the episode when answering the Turtlecom.

Trivia[]

The table holding up the Turtles' television set is missing a leg, and is supported by a few hardcover books to keep balance. Not that this matters for long, anyway, as Bebop totally wrecks the TV barely three minutes into the episode.
Donatello and Raphael have eaten at Woo's Oriental Palace before, at least enough to know that it's bad news, including the food.
Woo's Oriental Palace is chock full of Asian stereotypes, from customers wearing gis and being sumo wrestlers, to Woo's act of going "Hee-YAH!" when chopping some cabbage and judo flipping a disgruntled customer.
Bebop and Rocksteady's appreciation for Chinese take-out food will be seen again in "The Turtle Terminator".
Irma has a key to April's apartment and is waiting there when the Turtles enter through the window. This might suggest that they shared an apartment for some time after the events of "A Thing About Rats," but "The Case of the Killer Pizzas" establishes that Irma has an apartment of her own, possibly inside the same building.
This is Irma's first interaction with the Turtles. She apparently took this a whole lot better than April did (of course, Irma had suspected about them for several episodes beforehand). Unfortunately, the same can't be said about her reaction to Splinter.
When Michelangelo kicks Rocksteady into the wall horn first it plays the same piece of footage from when Donatello did the same thing earlier but mirror-flipped.
This is the first of three occasions that April is temporarily turned into a mutant, the second being a fish woman in "Rebel Without a Fin" and as a giant wasp in "Revenge of the Fly".
As a mutant, April's claws are sharp enough to rip a metal lock from solid concrete.
Understandably, Splinter has a fear of cats.
Playmates Toys created an April O'Neil action figure based off this episode, as part of their Mutatin' TMNT series. Mutatin' April (1993) was a part of the second wave of this series, along with Mutatin' variants of Shredder, Rahzar, Tokka, and Foot Soldier. The April figure could change from human to humanoid feline and came with accessories including clamp-on claws, mutatin' video bag, Retromutagen ooze canister, and a mega mutation chart which illustrated April's transformation.
When Irma meets the Turtles in the subway station, Don grabs her by the mouth when she is being too loud and about to blow their cover. This conflicts with his normal passive behavior.
Leonardo imitates Humphrey Bogart in the restaurant. Michelangelo follows this up with an James Cagney impression.
This one of two episodes in which the titular plot is instigated due to a technological malfunction resulting from a cat pressing a random button on a control panel, the other episode being "Funny, They Shrunk Michelangelo".

Home media releases[]

VHS[]

Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles: Return of the Technodrome

DVD[]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Volume 2
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Complete Classic Series Collection

External links[]

Episode at Ninja Turtles
"The Cat Woman from Channel Six " at The Official TMNT Web Site (archived)
[1] - Episode analysis at TMNT Dissected