10 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn't Know About The Teen Titans Cartoon

5. Why They Couldn't Call Deathstroke 'Deathstroke'

Teen Titans gave us one of the true great supervillain performances in Ron Perlman's Slade, who was better known as Deathstroke in the comics. He was all kinds of menacing, which was made all the better by the fact Perlman was turning in the exact opposite kind of performance on the big screen as Hellboy in Guillermo del Toro's films.

Still, for all that Perlman's Slade was legitimately unnerving (at least to seven-year-olds tuning in on a Saturday morn), there were some restrictions that prevented him from matching the villainous persona found in the comics. For starters, they couldn't call him Deathstroke, as any explicit reference to killing or death wasn't allowed. Instead, like most cartoons of the time, the writers had to use phrases like "destroy" or "eliminate", thus sacrificing the Titans' most famous adversary's name.

There were always going to be limits to what could and couldn't be shown on Teen Titans - with the show's adaptation of the Judas Contract having to leave out the comic's darker moments, like the relationship between Terra and Deathstroke, which takes on a whole other sinister edge in the original story - but Titans still managed to get dark when it wanted to, with Slade bringing plenty of menace to the table.