one of the most interesting things in my opinion about 80′s splinter that separates him from any of the others I’m aware of is his view of the turtles – most noticeably, he doesn’t consider them his sons in any way.
which is actually pretty strange when you consider that not only did he raise them all their lives, but they were literally partly made from his DNA.
he sees them as his students, and is not too concerned with being their guardian – we see this since season 1 in episode 5 “Shredder & Splintered” when Splinter is all too willing to go after the retromutagen gun in order to become a human again despite knowing perfectly well that the same can’t be done for the turtles.
he only destroys the gun when the turtles’ lives are on the line since he does actually care about them.
becoming a human again is a constant wish of his the turtles are well aware of to the point that Donatello ends up making a cure for Splinter himself in season 2 episode 9 “Splinter No More”.
seeing as how it’s pretty obvious he would not have gone to all this trouble to change back just to keep living isolated from humanity in the sewers and of course he couldn’t take the turtles to live with him on the surface, it means he was willing to leave 4 fifteen-year-old kids who never had anyone but him to rely on in order to regain his humanity.
I want to make it perfectly clearthat I’m not judging him – I have no idea what I would do were I put in the same situation, but I have a feeling he wouldn’t have considered it if they were human children he was leaving behind, however highly trained they are.
80′s Splinter had a surprisingly deep and emotional character arc (in theory. I mean this was a 193-episodes-length commercial for the toys. nobody had an intentionally deep character anything…). he learned to accept his life as a rat with 4 turtles students, eventually rejecting the possibility of becoming human via Donatello’s aforementioned cure.
This Splinter started out human and it shows.
He cares about April as a fellow human being – the first he got to talk to in years – since the moment the turtle bring her in and never seems suspicious of her even though she is fully capable of ruining his and the turtles’ lives in terrifying ways I’m glad my 5-year-old brain could not imagine.
He has never considered them his sons and probably never will – it is actually brought into focus in the “turtles forever” movie when they are shocked to hear the 2003 turtles refer to their own Splinter as “father”, but when 2003 Leonardo talks to 80′sSplinter he remarks that even though the settings are very different the place felt like home.
So while he is unique in his treatment of the turtles and thus doesn’t have a place in my rat dad list (he’d probably be my 2nd favorite instead of 2012 Splinter) he is definitively a great sensei and he has a special place in my heart.
*yeah, I remember the episode where Michelangelo was transformed into a human but it was never mentioned since and master splinter had no way to know about that, especially so early in the series