 What's up guys, my name is Glassfoot, and today I want to do the history of a character that I personally love and think is one of the best comic book characters of all time. That character is Casey Jones, the badass hockey mask wearing vigilante from the Ninja Turtles franchise. And yeah, I'm just gonna keep wearing this on my head for the rest of the review. I may intermittently switch between actually being on my face and that. But Casey Jones is a character from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. He was first introduced in the issue Raphael, Me, Myself, and I, where he was beating the shit out of muggers. I don't know if they were given a gang affiliation specifically in that issue, but I'll get to that later. Anyway, Casey has always been a violent vigilante type character. He's kind of this unhinged badass to the Turtles more calm and stealthy approach, where he will kind of just go out and beat the shit out of criminals. Okay, the mask has to come off. I don't like how it's distorting my voice. Anyway, he's always been this just crazy vigilante type character. He was originally written as a parody of vigilante type characters. I'm presuming characters like The Punisher because it's a little unhinged, especially in his Illumeraage comic runs. But yeah, I just want to today go over the evolution of Casey Jones, because he is one of my favorite characters, if not my favorite character from the Ninja Turtles franchise. And I just want to talk about him and how Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles royally fucked up his character. And I know that other channels potentially have done this. I don't actually know if other channels have. I'm not trying to rip them off if they have. This is just my personal take because he's my favorite character from this franchise. Anyway, without further ado, let's jump into the evolution of Casey Jones. Casey Jones was first introduced in Raphael Me, Myself and I, a story where Raph, obviously, runs away from the rest of the Turtles because he's in one of his angry and brooding moods. Raphael and Casey meet up and obviously fight because they are going to. I'm pretty sure that Casey actually kind of kicks Raph's butt. This then prompts Raph to try and reach out to him and befriend him, somewhat on some level, and they fight a few more times, eventually meeting up, taking out a number of gang members before Casey eventually finally becomes friends with the Turtles. This iteration of the character is much more violent and edgy than almost every other iteration of him that has ever existed. If you are about my age, you know Casey has this fun-loving, goofy character. This character is violent, alcoholic. His critical thinking skills have kind of eroded over time because he just kind of sat around watching bad cop shows on three TVs that he ran simultaneously. Also, his original intention of his backstory in the mirage version of his character was that he just watched too many bad cop shows. I'm not kidding, and I love that his origin is just that he watched too many bad cop shows and thought, you know what, I can do that. But yeah, this version of the character kind of went through a lot of shit. He accidentally killed someone, became a drunk, moved out west, met and married someone. They had a daughter. She died. He kept the kid and went back to New York and raised his kid who he named Shadow with April. Like I said, this version of Casey is extremely unhinged. He's a much more violent version. He is very inclined to homicidal tendencies and very, very quick to anger in the original. He's actually not that much of a recurring character in the original mirage comics. He was a recurring character, but it wasn't very common and he was much more rare. Next version is from the 80s cartoon series. I actually don't like that show, but that's another kind of worms all together. With that show, I think Casey showed up about six times total in the original 80s run of the cartoon. And much like the rest of the Turtles, he was a much more goofy iteration of the character, not nearly as violent or prone to anger and rape. We then got the version from the 1990 movie. This one is very goofy and much more of a jokester than really a violent unhinged maniac. And personally, I like that change. That's how I know Casey. I know him as a bit of a jokester. Next major iteration of the character that we got was from the 2003 Ninja Turtles TV series, which is where I personally know Casey the best from. This version of Casey is very quick to anger, especially when the gang the Purple Dragons are involved. As Hun, the leader of the Purple Dragons, beat the crap out of his father when he refused to pay them protection money. I believe it's also implied that Casey's father actually was killed by Hun after he went to the police with this, but it's never out and out stated. This version of Casey is much more of a joking and jovial type character. And personally, my favorite version of the character. He views the Turtles much like little brothers that he didn't have, with his best friend on the team being Raphael. Not only this, he will go to bat for you pretty much instantly if it comes down to that. And I personally find that absolutely hilarious. He also had much more time to grow as a character in the 2003 version because he was there pretty much from the beginning of the show. Again, this is my favorite version of the character, because I just like his more jovial and joking attitude within the 2003 series. I'm also going to touch on Cody Jones for just a second. Cody Jones is the great grandson of Casey and April. And the heir to O'Neill Tech, which is a company that Casey and April started back in their time. Now I'm only touching on Cody really quick, because he has a thing called the Battle Shell, which resembles Casey's hockey mask. And he effectively functions as both a Casey and an April stand-in in the fast forward season of the show. Now the next two, I don't know which came out first, but I'm going to talk about the IDW comics first, because I want to. So in the IDW comics run of the series, Casey Jones is a college student who is on a scholarship to play hockey for New York Tech. Now he much prefers playing hockey to actually studying, but that's neither here nor there. In this version, Casey's father is an extreme alcoholic, and he became more so after his mother died of cancer. Casey met Raphael while Raph was living as a vaguer on the street, and Raph saved him from a beating from his death. Casey and Raph became good friends after that, and then Casey later became friends with the rest of the turtles after Raph found the rest of them. And personally, I like this version of the character a lot. I like the dynamic of him and Raph knowing each other prior to the rest of the turtles to the point where didn't even know the turtles when he met Casey. And Casey being a little bit younger, at least in my eyes, to where he's of college age makes him a little more relatable to me because that's about the age I am currently. It's also just for me a lot of fun to see a slightly younger version of the character being able to kick as much ass and go toe to toe with heavier weighted villains that he probably shouldn't be able to, because he is just a dude with baseball bats, cricket bats, and hockey sticks at his disposal. He is not a super human, he is not a mutant. The fact that he's just willing to go up against people is really cool. And now this brings me to the 2012 version of the show where Casey is re-imagined as a high schooler who has been held back a couple of grades and so he's being tutored by April so he can keep his place on this hockey team. Casey, of his own volition, decided to take on mutants and other baddies on the streets after him and April ended up in a fight with Mutagen Man. This version of Casey wears a goalie hockey mask as opposed to the typical hockey mask that he's seen wearing most of the time. I actually don't know if this is also considered a goalie mask but the design of the 2012 version is a different one than this. But that version of the mask, he's actually also painted to look more like a skull. He also wears face paint under that to resemble a skull as well. His weapons are a little more high tech. He wears a goalie glove with a built-in homemade taser in it. He has spikes and nails inside of his glove and he actually built for himself shoes that function as both shoes and rollerblades that he can kick the rollerblades out onto. Personally, I like that addition making Casey a little more tech-savvy on that end and when it comes to the mechanical building of stuff as opposed to just making him a bit of a meathead. Now, yes, Casey is pretty technically savvy. He's able to help the turtles work on things like the turtle van and their motorcycles and whatnot. But it's still nice to see that he was able to come with something like this before meeting the turtles at all. I just thought it was a nice addition. Plus, this version of Casey is a little more reckless but also it's actually really cool to see him because the way he doesn't carry a traditional golf bag. He just has his weapons strapped to his back so it's like hockey stick, cricket bat, and then goalie stick. It's actually kind of cool. There's also the version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles out of the shadows played by Steven Amell. This version of Casey feels very not Casey. And out of the shadows, they made Casey a top which I don't think is a bad addition because I think it is a kind of interesting take on the character to see him in law enforcement but it doesn't really fit what we typically think of Casey as. Personally, I think it's one of my less favorite versions of Casey but it's still an interesting take on the character even if the movie that it's from isn't all that good. Also, we actually have seen Casey as a police officer before in Batman and Ninja Turtles 3, I believe. He actually appears as a comp working for Commissioner Gordon on New Prime Earth but that's either here or there and I'm not getting into side stories and all that right now. And the final version of Casey Jones is Cassandra Jones from Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Cassandra irritates me to a level that she probably shouldn't and here's why. Cassandra feels like a comp out to put Casey in the show without actually putting Casey in the show. Cassandra is shown as a psychotic, unhinged, crazy person who wants to be a member of the Foot Clan following the leader and all of his orders to a letter. Every time she fights the Turtles, she belittles and makes fun of them to the point of it just getting annoying and her laugh and psychotic tendencies start to piss me off. She doesn't exhibit any qualities that we've ever seen from a version of Casey before because they cranked up his more crazy tendencies from other iterations to 11 and then took away everything else that makes Casey Casey. But here's the kicker. Here's what makes me really hate the fact that this character is Casey in Rise because she is only revealed to have the name Casey Jones in the final episode of the freaking show. In the series finale, she breaks away from Shredder because she realizes Shredder is bad which is a can of worms that I'm gonna get into in another episode because how they handle Shredder in Rise gets on my nerves so much but she says, my name is Cassandra Jones. My friends call me Casey while bending a Naginata and then hitting a rock like a hockey puck at him. So you're telling me this character who has never exhibited any qualities like Casey has ever had wanted to join the Foot Clan, a notorious gang that Casey in every other iteration of his character has fought against tooth and fucking nail is Casey Jones. Right. I do not even have a problem with the fact that this iteration of Casey is a girl. I have a problem that you took Casey and made him the opposite of what he is. Casey is not a stooge. Casey cannot stand taking orders from people other than himself. Casey hates all forms of organized criminal activity because they hurt his family in a lot of iterations of his story. Casey is not a stooge of the foot and that's what bothers me about her character. The fact that he feels so phenomenally mishandled to make her Casey and on top of the fact that it feels mishandled it feels like they purposefully did that to the character just to be able to say, Hey, Casey Jones was in Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles even though it doesn't actually feel like the character at all. Now, if it had been something like Casey was willingly going undercover into the foot clan as like his own personal undercover mission to put an end to them and that had been revealed at some point throughout the show then I'd probably feel a bit differently but the fact that that doesn't happen we don't see any evidence of that. The character doesn't feel like Casey at any point in the series is all it makes me say that Cassandra Jones is the worst possible iteration of Casey and yeah, but that's the evolution of the character. I hope they all enjoyed this. This is not the normal type of content that I would make. Anyway, I hope that you all enjoyed this. I had a lot of fun making it. Casey again is my favorite character in all of the Ninja Turtles but yeah, I hope they all enjoyed this. If you did leave a comment down below letting me know, you know the drill I'm not gonna ask you to do all the things that the rest of the YouTubers do because I don't care to but I hope, but that's all I have for now I hope that you all have a fantastic fucking day as always and as always guys. Peace out.