10 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn't Know About The Teen Titans Cartoon
5. Why They Couldn't Call Deathstroke 'Deathstroke'
Warner Bros.
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.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
