Disturbing Moments In TMNT Media (Various Spoilers)
 

Lately I've been thinking about how many wild things have happened across the TMNT multiverse. Given the exception of certain volumes of the original comics, just about everything has been designed with children in mind, or at the least, it's geared towards a general audience but remains overall kid-friendly. Despite that, it seems that almost every version of 'turtles-light' has had several pretty messed up incidents take place. Some are right on the surface, whereas others require a little thought to truly realize how grim they are.

Heads up, there will be spoilers of some sorts being that these moments span across the many versions of the turtles. Anyway, here's just a few. You contribute too!

1987 Fred Wolf Series:
-Mutagen Mans Origin: A poor lonely delivery man finds his way into an abandoned facility where Shredder & the gang are working with a very unstable batch of mutagen. The klutz falls in and literally MELTS. All of his body parts are torn apart, his bones/muscles/guts all separate and he is eventually haphazardly put back together with random parts as his gooey insides are tossed into a containment chamber-turned-bodysuit.

-Muckmans Origin: A garbageman is splashed with some sketchy ooze, and the contents of a dumpster literally fuse to him, turning all of his skin and such into piles of slop. This could be anything and everything. Rotten food, dead roaches, dirty diapers, you name it. That's a terrible fate. :eek:

2003 4kids Series:
-Baxter Stockmans "Punishment": Shredder constantly destroyed Baxter, physically and mentally. We never saw what took place, nor did we hear about it. We only saw the consequences of his mistakes. First his eye is removed, and later he finds himself being chopped up bit by bit until he's eventually nothing more than a brain in a jar. Think about it for a minute, this implies that when the episodes end, Shredder takes Stockman in back and does something like literally carving his eye out with a rusty gauntlet blade. Dear god.

-Insane In The Membrane: Similar to Mutagen Man, Baxter Stockman finds his flesh falling off. His skin is rotting and melting off of the bone, his limbs are breaking apart, his mind falters. His experimentation with trying to make himself a new body is a total failure. Grotesque indeed!

2012 Nickelodeon Series:
-Mutagen Mans Origin: Yes, again, Mutagen Man. Yikes. Pulverizer insisted on becoming a mutant despite knowing the risks in dealing with unstable mutagen. He screamed for what felt like forever, feeling his skin burn until it fused with the ooze, turning him into a giant tentacle slamming blob of gelatin with only his warped-from-heat lips and popped out eyes for a face, his internal organs suspended inside the goo. At this point it seems he can barely hold a thought, let alone speak. He's a true tragic monster now. Eugh.

The Next Mutation:
-Mutant Reflections: Dragon Lord requires Dr. Quease to make a spy robot, one they can send into the sewers to stalk the turtles and collect DNA samples (to make clones). Rather than use a little camera from Radioshack or something, Dr. Quease busts out a scalpel, runs a nice vertical slice from the eyebrow to the cheek, and plucks out his own eyeball. That's what he made a camera out of. With no qualms. What the helllllll. To make matters weirder, when he grabs a new eye from a jar the damn thing makes squealing infant sounds. It's pretty unsettling in my opinion. :blanksta:

Mirage Comics:
-Donatellos dark side: We could go on for a while pointing out crazy stuff that went down in the comics, whether in the Mirage books or Image books. But one thing in particular that sticks out, is the big secret Donatello kept for a long long time. In the Mirage series, Baxter eventually found himself being a brain in a robot body, basically. He was at a certain point defeated, blown mostly apart and forgotten about. Fast forward a few years, in Donatello: The Brain Thief mini series, we come to find Donny took the remains of Baxter (who we see is still fully conscious) and kept him in a basement for years. He was just held captive there, given little to no stimulation, nailed to a wall. Later in the books Donny carelessly kills a stray dog 'for science' and starts rearranging cockroaches body parts giving them cybernetic add-ons & such. It's just... creepy.

So there's a full dose of spooky stuff! Lets hear some more!

If we go by the old cartoon, some of the stuff would have been VERY DISTURBING if the Turtles didn't come on time. I can imagine Mikey's final screams as that acid ooze melts him to nothing in that Flushomatic torture trap. Or if April got run over the Technodrome in that one ep. Hell, the one where she almost suffocated in that air-tight vault really got to me as a kid cause it was one of the most realistic possible deaths she could have gotten, instead of some sort of cartoony ray run death.

Let's not forget Baxter's execution by Krang. He was damn lucky that the fly wandered in there. For better or for worse, at least he was still alive. And then his apparent 'death' at the end of season 3 by the giant spider... that was somehow forgotten about when the Turtles hit saturday morning.

80's show:

* Channel 6 blowing up.
* Dregg. What a sick monster!
2k3:

* The Underground Mutants. The mere concept of mutating so much you becme mindless...


2k12:

Mutagen Man's origin. He just wanted to be a hero... Poor guy.

Exactly the scene that came to mind when reading the original post. Baxter being drug kicking and screaming to what should be his doom by having his entire being zapped into complete nothingness. gruesome.

Still not sure how a single tiny fly causes the contraption to malfunction but thats another story haha.

Exactly. By all means, the fly would have just been disentegrated too.

I think it's a reference to the 1958 version of "The Fly" in which the transporter device that causes the transformation is called the "disintegrator-integrator". The cartoon, though, just calls it a "disintegrator" unit, because it's for destroying stuff.

People often forget that Mutagen Man almost killed April, by tying her into ropes that were pulling her into GEARS that would have grinded her body into shreds.

If the Turtles hadn't saved her in two seconds, her body would have been literally torn apart by gears with blood splattering everywhere Mortal Kombat style. Its rather funny to me that April forgave Mutagen Man so quickly later in the episode when he literally almost sent her to death in the most gruesome way possible.

April has a lot of other close calls in the original toon as well. Shredder also tried to kill April in a number of episodes or left her to her doom.

I kinda don't think April knew that guy she was gonna date was him. That's why the Turtles were all groaning at the end.

I'm glad you brought this up. I turned to my GF after the episode was over and said. How soon til they pull this episode off the air forever. It's not only the horrible mutation either.

There's the description of how some Japanese soldiers were used as "cannon fodder".

Ohh and how can we forget the great lesson the turtles learn in this one "Anything can be used as a weapon". Yup, grab a broom, a chain, a fence post, whatever. Now you too can fight like a ninja turtle:teek:

4kids series had a lot of stuff they got away with but everyone knows that.

I like to look for stuff in the original cartoon they got away with since its seen more as a kids show. There's also stuff like the Technodrome going to squash April while she was upside down trapped in her news van.

Is this thread gonna be another excuse for Cubed to miss the point, like with the Easter Egg thread?

And don't forget Rat King's rather fitting end in the 2012 show! Apparently, he was devoured by his own rats. I once created an OC superheroine for a communal team-fic on Marvel, who could mentally communicate with/control animals, and she killed a villain the same way- by mentally "telling" a horde of rats that he had food on him, and then leaving him alone in the room to get eaten..... She's not a very nice character, admittedly.

If you think about it the Turtles literally torture Chronos from season 9 or 10 of the OT (not sure which season its in). The guy is driven insane after being left tied up in a clock tower by the turtles. and the turtles do this not once but twice to the guy.

And what about in the first movie, when Casey oh-so-casually throws the lever on the garbage truck after Saki fell into the back? That's just EVIL!!! And he just brushes it off with an overly--innocent "Oops!"

Or Norinaga in the bell in the thrid film, when Donatello slams it with his bo and you hear the poor guy cry ou in pain inside from the noise. It's played for laughs, but that was really sort of sadistic on Donnie's part.

Or minor moments in the OT like Mikey banging on the oil drum with the Crooked Ninja Turtle Gang member inside it- not only is the noise probably painful, but he beats it into a shape that leaves the guy basically unable to breathe.... Come to think of it, They did things like that a LOT.

I agree with this. I had never paid attention to how dark that scene in "Enter the Fly", along with April being poisoned and how Stockman seemingly dissappearing after flying into his own trap.

I don't thing he was devored, just carried away by the rats.

Speaking of the 2012 show, the way Raph took out the cockroach in "Cockroach Terminator" was pretty graphic.

Isn't every thread?

I didn't get that from that scene. You can clearly see them swarming over him, but when they run off, they are all at the floor level, instead of lumped like they were when on him. It looked like a wave washing over him and then flowing back down- but leaving nothing left behind. Add in the way they kind of looked angry or hungry right before that.... Well, it's a pretty simple conclusion to make. Although it would be cool if he does show up again.

Raph trying to kill Mikey (Mirage comic, issue #2 I think).

Raph trying to kill Leo (TMNT 2007 movie).

Keep the psycho down, Raphie boy.

And don't forget he also tried to kill Mikey in that episode where he met Casey in 2K3! Yeah, he's always seemed a bit psycho to me, too. And maybe suicidal, to boot. (That rush right in and go berserk when outnumbered fighting style? Just TRY to tell me that ain't a sign of a death-wish....)

Rocksteady/Bebop try to shoot April/Irma/Vernon out the Channel 6 window about 10 stories up.