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Eric Bauza came to the Turtles as a villain, and stayed to play their father
Every obituary filed since last night leads with a rabbit, and not one of them is wrong to. Eric Bauza had been the voice of Bugs Bunny for most of a decade, along with Daffy, Tweety, Marvin the Martian and Woody Woodpecker, and he won three Emmys for that work. But the Looney Tunes column of his resume is only one of two long ones, and the second is the Turtles.
Eric died on Sunday at a home in Los Angeles County, aged 46. His family announced it that evening on his own Instagram account, saying that he had “passed away suddenly” and that more details would come; the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner has since given the cause as hypertensive cardiovascular disease, and the manner as natural. His manager, Judy Coppage, confirmed the death on Sunday and called him “a unique and versatile voice actor.” He was born in Scarborough in 1979, and the Turtles reached him there through an older brother’s comics lying around the house in the late eighties.
He arrived in the franchise as the enemy. Tiger Claw came into the 2012 Nickelodeon series in its third season, a scarred, one-eyed sabretooth with a jetpack and a grudge, hired by Shredder because the Foot kept losing to teenagers; Eric played him for the rest of the run and in the games that followed. [1] He was candid about where that left him. “I really wasn’t on the show in 2012 until Season 3 as Tiger Claw,” he told Animation Scoop in 2018. “Here was a guy who did a voice for a brand new villain for a show.”
Then Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles handed him the opposite job: the father.
He knew it at the time, and said so in the same week the show premiered: “Fast-forward to 2018 and the next wave of the Ninja Turtles and I get to play a good guy for a change.”
The Splinter he was given was not the one anyone was expecting. Andy Suriano showed him a design first, before a word of script, and what Eric saw was “this new, rather pudgy, kind of cute gerbil-looking kind of rat.” The 2012 version had been tall and solemn and spoke last; this one was small again, scruffy, and funny on purpose. He described the approach as “a mixture of Mr. Miyagi and Danny DeVito,” and as a “drunken master” who is “all laughs” until he is not. The line he kept coming back to was about how the teaching lands: “He’s like that weird, aloof teacher who teaches you the clues, and then later on you discover what he was trying to get across.”
That is a harder performance than the stoic one, because the comedy has to carry the authority rather than sit on top of it. Rise made Splinter a washed-up action star, Lou Jitsu, whose best years were behind him before his sons were born, which meant the same voice had to sell the gag about his old films and the fact that they are over. [2] Eric had become a parent not long before he took it. “I’m a dad now, so to be voicing a dad like Master Splinter, it’s kind of cool,” he said.
He stayed past the series. He was Splinter again in the Rise film in 2022, he turned up as Leonardo in the Batman crossover, he covered Donatello and Leonardo both in the run of Summer Shorts, and he was still taking Turtles work in 2024. [3] None of that is what the headlines are about this morning.
Rob Paulsen played Raphael in 1987 and came back as Donatello in 2012. The designs reset, the continuity resets, and the cast is what carries over; our voice cast page tracks the ones who came back. Eric played the assassin Shredder hired to kill the Turtles, and then he played the rat who raised them. He got to play the good guy for a change, and he was very good at it.
[1] Tiger Claw also carried across to three Turtles games: Danger of the Ooze, Portal Power and Wrath of the Mutants. Eric voiced him in all three, the last of them a decade after the character first appeared.
[2] Lou Jitsu is Splinter’s human past in the Rise continuity, a lucha and action-movie career that the series treats as both the joke and the reason he is the way he is. Eric is credited as Splinter, Hamato Yoshi and Lou Jitsu across the show’s two seasons.
[3] Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie, 2022, Netflix. Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 2019, as Leonardo. Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 2024, in the episode “Donnie Goes Deep.”
Sources: Animation Scoop interview, Jackson Murphy, 13 September 2018, Collider interview, NBC Los Angeles, CBS Los Angeles, Animation Magazine. Photograph: Eric Bauza at San Diego Comic-Con, 2025, by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0.
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