Freakin' Mutagen: how does it work?
 

I know there are different mutagens as well, be they Mirage or FW, but for the most part there are just the 2, but how do they work.

For the most part FW mutagen "causes whoever touched it to take on the form of whatever animal they had most recently been in contact with," but you occasionally get mutagen that turns 3 cows into a multi-horned super bull. It also tends to destabilize with age, like in Wererats from Channel 6 and the whole ofseason 9

Mirage mutagen either "hyper-evolves" or makes things larger and more intelligent, depending on who you ask.

I guess that is the question: does the Mirage mutagen cause things to only "larger and more intelligent" or does it cause them to take leaps up the evolutionary ladder?

If you remember in the ep with the giant mutant bull, they were trying to mix the right chemicals together to form the mutagen, but they obviously messed up when Rocksteady/Bebop were fooling around with the tracks.

Likewise why did Mutagen Man transform into what he did?

[ASSUMPTION] The dinosaur creatures from Venezuela in vol 4 did not have vocal cords before their exposure to the transmat biproduct [/ASSUMPTION]

Cop Out answer: A little of both

Actual stance: I say the latter. A leap up the ladder because the creatures from vol 4 gained the ability to speak. As did the turtles. Sliders have no vocal cords but the turtles can speak as well so simply making them larger and more intelligent would not give them vocal capacity. Come to think of it, growing larger would no explain why they have only 3 fingers and two toes on each hand when that is not anatomically correct for sliders

The Fred Wolf mutagen doesn't even warrant any kind of intelligent analyzation. I mean, where does the line even come down on what living organism you "last touched"? If you have some living AIDS virus inside you and touch some Fred Wolf mutagen, do you morph into AIDS Man? If a flea jumps onto you a minute after petting the cat, is that the deciding factor between whether you become Flea Man or Cat Man?

It's just silly, silly, silly.

Agree... BUT. I always thought of it in terms of acquiring DNA information. Animorphs anyone? When those kids touched something they read the animal's DNA.

:roll: Didn't your parents ever teach you the difference between reality and make-believe?



:P

It techs the tech, of course.
Duh.

;)

It pains me to say it's more of the latter, but only because I'm a pedant when it comes to equating "progress" with "evolution."

Stupid What-If Fred Wolf Mutagen Scenarios (just because):

1) You thoroughly de-louse a guy and throw him in an isolated, completely sterilized chamber devoid of any kind of organisms. You leave him in there for a few weeks or a year... (point being, there would be no "imprint" of any kind of any DNA other than his own in/on him) then dump some mutagen on him. What does he mutate into?

2) You sit in a room while holding a hamster, with a puddle of mutagen in the middle. You touch the puddle of mutagen, then make the hamster touch the mutagen too. Since the last lifeform you touched was the hamster, and the last lifeform the hamster touched was you (a human), does that mean you both mutate into identical Hamster Man mutants?

My head hurts

:tgrumble:

Oh, have a baby raspberry, Andrew...


EDIT:
Also, Jester, haven't we discussed this before? :-)
http://forums.thetechnodrome.com/sho...ghlight=carter

I've read on the internet where a lot of people didn't understand why if the last creatures that Hamato Yoshi had contact with was the turtles, why would he turn into a rat? But it still makes sense to me. Think about it this way. If you've spend weeks or perhaps even months living with cats, but then you spend just a matter of days with another animal. Odds are, you're still going to have cat hair all over you. So even though Yoshi had made contact with the turtles. He still had enough rat hair/dna on him to mutate into a rat.

Jester and I figured this out in our TMNT Commentary on Turtle Tracks. We decided that Yoshi still had rat hairs on his body, thus the "creatures" with which he's been in contact most recently are the rats.

But, I guess, you can take that explanation with a grain of salt.:lol:

But hair doesn't contain any DNA.

It does in the Fred Wolf universe!:twink:

And, again, for good measure:

Well one could arguably state that there was a hair follicle or two attached to one or more of the hairs on Yoshi and that was the DNA that mutated him :tlol:

But I tend to try to not use logic in terms of the old cartoon, regardless of how much I am growing to love it :tgrin:

It'd be neat to compile every line mentioning anything about how it works, how it's made, etc and see if there is any remote consistancy to it or not.

I've been kind of kicking around the idea of trying to make a mutagen mod for minecraft, but since what it does seem so inconsistant, what it would actually do in game is hard to nail down. Of course, the game already has a pigman in it, so human/pig mutations would be simple enough.

Why is it that I created this thread and every time I see it I can't help but think of this:

and this:


In fact...there....changed. :D

its simple
 

Here's my theory. In the show we see him walking towards the turtles and he picks them up off the mutagen. This gives us the answer.

He was in another room where he had contact with rats. Then he goes and sees the turtles. On his way to pick them up he steps on the mutagen first(we see this in the show).

So he touches the mutagen after touching rats and the turtles are of course touched by him before his own mutation has begun.

Hmm... good point! I like it... simple but effective!

This has no scientific merit, and barely any thought put into it, but maybe Splinter had more rat DNA on him, but also some turtle DNA. So he turned into a rat, but with a wee bit of turtle in him.

That explains why he lived so darn long for a rat.


:P

I'm confused. Did you mean Splinter in the Fred Wolf universe or Splinter in the Mirage, 4Kids, or movie universes? Because there's no explanation needed for him living "so darn long for a rat" in the Fred Wolf universe because he's half human. And if you're talking about the Mirage, 4Kids, or movie universe Splinter, the mutagen in those doesn't do any splicing.

I guess Fred Wolf. I really didn't mean anything. Like I said, I barely thought it out, just remembered a conversation once about Splinter living a long time for a rat, and that just came into my mind and thought it was kind of funny.

I pretty much expected to have a more thought out answer tomorrow, when it wasn't so darn late!

But this just can't be true, Jo Dawn! Because everybody knows mutant turtles love PIZZA! And we all know OT Splinter's view on pizza, don't we? ;)

Touche, good sir.

What's really interesting is the way in which Mutagen works in ARCHIE. Rocksteady and Bebop have a conversation in one issue where Rocksteady says, "Our bodies and memories are both..." implying that mutagen fused them with the animals. This is the basis for Rocksteady and Bebop going to the Eden worlds instead of being punished like Shredder and Krang: they can't be "evil" because "beasts" can't be evil. Krang and Belly-bomb, while not "human," aren't "beasts" in the sense that they were the intellectual equivalents of humans on their respective planets.

In the episode "Planet of the Turtleoids," one of them says, "This is the zoo we came from," implying that the mutagen worked the same way on them in the cartoon as it did in Archie.

Yeah, both of those revelations were really surprising. One might assume that Rocks and Bebop become more animalistic the longer they stay mutants... or it might just be the result of both of them being idiots and forgetting they were actually human to begin with.

Yeah, I noticed this as well and was reminded of it in recent days. Rocksteady even has a dream of being a normal Rhinoceros in Africa, trotting alongside a female Rhinoceros, and when he wakes up he tells Shredder and Krang that he was dreaming that he was with his old girlfriend.

Very strange, and bizarre actually. There's no memory in DNA, and it's not like when human Rocksteady touched the Rhinoceros before touching the mutagen he ABSORBED the Rhinoceros. That wild Rhinoceros is still out there somewhere.

I wonder if Murphy was confused on that.

I don't think Murphy was confused; I think he simply found it more "artistic" to have the animals "fuse" with human Rocksteady and Bebop (which is how Mutagen works in Archie). Murph is one of those hippies who believes that animals have souls and what not, so it isn't at all surprising. :tlol:

Well... that's not completely true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic...8psychology%29

Not to mention there were other mutants that were mutated by other means other then the mutagen.

Stockman got his molecules slammed with a fly

Mona Lisa got eradiated by the reactor on Filtch's sub

April got her molecules slammed with a cat

This are the only examples I know of at the moment.

Ray and Fish April were made through different, yet unknown means.

I don't think Murphy was confused; I think he did it for reasons of artistic merit.

I'm suprised the subject of dandelions hasn't come up in this thread :tlol:

hey jester... started thinking the same thing as I was reading ;)

I find it interesting that in many origin stories of superheroes a lot of times nuclear radiation is the catalyst for mutations.This kinda give the wrong impression that if you get exposed to radiation that you will get super powers.Just a thought.

Good point. That's socially irresponsible. Kids, always remember to close the microwave door before turning it on or you'll get cancer.

I think the whole "evolutionary step" thing is definitely a good way of explaining the original ooze from the comics. I don't know if it counts as canon, but it's how it was explained in the old RPG books. It even stated that a human being exposed to ooze would get a larger brain and psychic abilities.

As for the mutagen of the 87 toon... that really doesn't seem to have any rhyme or reason, and is incredibly inconsistent. I think the best example of this is that episode where Michelangelo turns human. The mutation is unstable, and he keeps switching between a fully clothed human with no headband, elbow+wrist+knee guards, and belt, and a turtle with those items of clothing but no human clothing (like shorts, a shirt, and shoes). Seriously, clothing is part of the mutation? :ohwell:

But that episode was pretty horrible, in general, too. What with Michelangelo being useless as a human due to the loss of his "turtle powers" and whatnot... since, you know, obviously being a turtle is what somehow makes him kick ass and not all that ninja training.

Honestly, if you're trying to figure out the Fred Wolf Mutagen, do yourself a favor and just write it off as magic. Trying to figure it out scientifically will only cause you headaches.

Just imagine if the last thing you touched was poop.. ;P

Hi guys!
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4pmUNQE7ll...s1600/turd.jpg

My thoughts...

Regarding Yoshi's transformation into Splinter: Yoshi made physical contact with the mutagen before touching the turtles (there is a big puddle of it, after all). Since he touched a rat beforehand, the mutagen reacted to that DNA instead of the turtles'.

Why a rat and not something like bacteria, insect, etc.?: Well, based on what we see in the Mirage comics, the mutation caused those exposed to evolve.

If the evolution idea applies to the OT, then perhaps the DNA of organisms exposed to the mutagen chooses to evolve with whatever external DNA would prove more advantageous to survival.

In a nutshell, Yoshi's DNA chose a rat over bacteria because it would optimize his ability to live.

Maybe I'm being presumptuous, but I don't think the writers put much thought into it. But who cares? Stuff like this is what fandom is all about!