As kids, we had absolutely no idea that there was ever anything other than Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. To us, they were awesome and cool and fun and we were completely and utterly hooked and obsessed with them. It was one of the best cartoons that we had growing up - we just didn't know that it was supposed to have been so much better! Thankfully, by the time the movies rolled around, it was deemed okay for them to retain the "Ninja" name in the title, but the rules regarding the censorship of nunchucks still continued for many years until the DVD release. You can see a side-by-side comparison of the differences here: http://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=3927

This did give us one benefit though; for many years, we grew up being able to easily differentiate between the two properties, with "Hero Turtles" being used as the name representing the cartoon series and "Ninja Turtles" being used as the name for the movies.

Years later when I discovered the original unedited series I was in utter shock. I had almost worn out my Hero Turtles VHS tapes when I was younger, so I was very familiar with 'How It All Began'. And yet here I was watching the pilot episode opening on a violent scene of Bebop & Rocksteady and their fellow goons destroying a car. There were a multitude of scenes I hadn't seen before, and a coherent story, and far more entertaining cartoon violence, and Michelangelo actually kicking ass. It was incredible, and I was in shock. I didn't know whether to be happy that I'd just discovered an even better version of the series I grew up with, or to cry that we'd been handed an edited piece of crap in comparison. I scoured the internet trying to find out what it was that I was watching and what on earth went wrong in the UK all those years ago.