One cool thing that happens when you have a property that's been around for a while is that you get all these different versions of the same characters, which almost inevitably leads to a team-up. It's something that happens in comics all the time, with superheroes from different Earths teaming up to battle a threat that's too big for the heroes of any single dimension to handle.

It's a little more rare on television, but on Sunday, March 27, it's going to happen to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when Nickelodeon's current version of the team joins up with their counterparts from the original 1987 TMNT cartoon in a cross-time team-up called, appropriately enough, "Trans-Dimensional Turtles." Check out the clip above!

 

Trans-Dimensional Turtles
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A few really cool things about this team-up: First, your ears do not deceive you. That is, in fact, the original voice cast from the '87 show --- Cam Clarke, Rob Paulsen, Barry Gordon and Townsend Coleman --- reprising their roles as the animated Ninja Turtles. Second, it's really neat to see the modern CGI turtles taken back into traditional 2D animation. And third, while it's not evident in the clip above, the press release from Nickelodeon mentions that there will be at least a "glimpse" of characters from Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's original black-and-white TMNT comics.

But now, the teenage mutant ninja elephant in the room: If you're getting a sense of deja vu, it's because it's all happened before. In 2009, just before Nickelodeon bought the TMNT franchise, we had Turtles Forever:

 

Turtles Forever
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Stop me if this sounds familiar, but it was a team-up between the then-current TMNT series and their 1987 animated counterparts, which also included an appearance from the darker, comic-inspired original Ninja Turtles. The only big difference is that it was a full-length TV movie, while "Trans-Dimensional Turtles" is only an episode of the current series, but it looks like both are going to be a pretty fun time.

As for whether we'll ever get a true Crisis on Infinite Turtles, in which the various cartoons team up with Turtles from the movies, the rebooted movies, the Archie comics, the IDW comics, the live-action Next Mutation show, and the "Coming Out Of Our Shells" arena rock spectacular, that remains to be seen. It's gotta be the next logical step, though, right? Right.

"Trans-Dimensional Turtles" airs on Nickelodeon on Sunday, March 27, at 11:00 a.m. (ET/PT).

 

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