Martial arts masters to pizza-guzzling turtles: the best ninjas in pop culture
The shrouded history of ninjas dates back to feudal Japan but these martial arts masters became an unavoidable pop culture craze in the 1980s. The 1982 GI Joe action figure line included breakout character Snake Eyes, a ninjutsu-trained US commando whose damaged vocal cords made him literally silent but deadly. In the new prequel movie, Henry Golding offers a chattier take on the mythos.
Cho OsakiThe Ninja trilogy
The Japanese actor Shô Kosugi made a loose trilogy of ninja movies for cheap thrill specialists Cannon Films in the 1980s. In Enter the Ninja (1981) he was a baddie; in Ninja III: The Domination
(1984) he was an eye patchsporting exorcist. As Cho Osaki in Revenge of the Ninja (1983) he got to play the lead, a noble, retired shinobi smashing a heroin ring.
RaidenThe Metal Gear franchise
From early arcade classic Shinobi to the unkillable Mortal Kombat franchise, video games have always loved a good ninja. Raiden was the breakdancing cyborg shinobi from the Metal Gear series who earned his own spin
off in 2013. The brilliantly titled Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance game added Fruit Ninja-style sword-swiping to his skill set.
Elektra NatchiosDaredevil
The on-off squeeze of Marvel’s blind crimefighter, Elektra is heir to a Greek shipping fortune with a side hustle as a ninja assassin. Embodied on the big screen by Jennifer Garner in 2003 – and more recently by Élodie Yung on Netflix – she is notorious for her wicked sai blades and seeming inability to stay dead.
Colin KingNinjak
What if James Bond was Batman? That is the premise of Ninjak, the comic-starring, katana-wielding MI6 agent Colin King. He’s gone through various revamps since debuting in 1993 but the current Ninjak series – featuring art by Javier Pulido – evokes psychedelic 1960s spy-fi such as The Prisoner.
Sara LanceDC’s Arrow
In the early days of the vigilante TV drama, society girl Sara (Caity Lotz) was forcibly recruited into gloomy ninja clan the League of Assassins. Fast-forward to now and she has swapped ascetic fealty for hedonistic ass-kicking, leading time-travelling super-team the Legends of Tomorrow.
Naruto UzumakiNaruto
Manga artist Masashi Kishimoto’s magical coming-of-age tale about an orphaned ninja with the malevolent spirit of a nine-tailed demon fox inside him began as a sprawling comic series in 1999 before being adapted into hundreds of anime TV episodes. The plucky teen’s characteristically headlong “Naruto run” has also become a resilient inspiration for memes.
Nicholas LinnearThe Ninja
Linnear is the half British, half Asian, fully deadly protagonist of the doorstop-sized novel by Eric Van Lustbader first published in 1980. Saturated with vague mysticism and featuring as many sex scenes as martial arts duels, Linnear’s lurid misadventures – which continued in multiple bestselling sequels – helped stoke the decade’s ninja fever.
Teenage Mutant Ninja TurtlesFilms, comics, games and TV
The word “ninja” was considered so alarming it was replaced with “hero” when the Turtles cartoon debuted on Children’s BBC three decades ago. Based on the surprisingly gritty series of comics created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the pizza-guzzling reptilian warrior dudes have proven surprisingly hardy, surviving countless reboots in TV and film.
Lloyd GarmadonLego Ninjago
Across myriad construction sets, a long-running cartoon (Ninjago: Rise of the Snakes, which began in 2011) and a 2017 film, the Lego Ninjago franchise sees six colour-coded champions protect their island realm using the art of “spinjitsu”. Stressed green teen Lloyd has the added problem that their archenemy Lord Garmadon is his estranged dad.