The TMNT don't fit the personalities of the Renaissance artists they were named after
 

Leonardo da Vinci was not only a painter but also a scientist. Doesn't sound like Leo at all. Sounds more like Don.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was a rather temperamental, stingy and broody man. Not befitting of the Turtle that's meant to be defined by their heart like Mikey who writes poetry and is the party animal in the kid-friendly versions. Sounds more like Raph.

Raffaello Sanzio was a charming and affable individual who also was a bit of a Casanova.... doesn't sound like Raph at all. Hell, sounds more like Mikey.

Donato di Niccolo... seems like not much is known about his personal life. A quick research tells me he had a reputation for having a volatile temper and an abrasive sense of humour. Doesn't really sound like Don. Sounds more like Raph, just like the Sistine Chapel guy.

So, is this a coincidence? That NONE of the TMNT fit the personalities of the guys they were named after? Or was it just poor researching skills and historical knowledge of Laird and Eastman? We already know how their knowledge of Japanese culture and history was not exactly stellar either. So should we be surprised they didn't know much about the Italian Renaissance painters beyond their big works?

Why would they be? Can Splinter somehow see their futures when they're barely even mutated?

Imagine how stupid that would be if you applied that logic to human naming. "Brian doesn't act anything like a Brian, he acts more like a STEVE! Why did his parents name him wrongly when he was born?"

Did y’all know they originally argued over Donatello’s name?

Eastman wanted to name him Bernini but Laird insisted on Donatello.

I think he means from the perspective of Eastman and Laird naming them.

Yeah ofc I mean it from the perspective of Eastman and Laird naming them...

No, I didn't know Eastman wanted to originally name Donatello "Bernini". I do think that the bandana colours in the FW versions of Don and Mike were swapped near the last moment? I recall seeing an unreleased version of the first line of TMNT action figures with Donatello wearing an orange bandana...

I could have sworn it was Leo and Mike, but maybe I’m confusing the fact that Cam Clarke and Townsend Coleman switched characters pretty late in the game.

The Turtles didn't really have distinct personalities in the first couple of Mirage TMNT issues so it's hard to imagine Eastman and Laird having any thoughts about that initially. The Turtles grew into them as time went on, kind of like people do.

Hum, maybe you're right... it was ages ago and I might have mixed them up.

Pretty late in the game? How so? They voiced Leo and Mikey respectively from the very first episode of the FW series. Did they just swap last minute or so the day before VA recording for the first episode began or something??

I remembered that too, so I looked it up, it was Leonardo and Michelangelo!

I just realized, this entire time we thought the Fred Wolf title cards had a coloring mistake… could this be the reason why?

I'm pretty sure there was already a thread about this, or at the very least someone mentioned it, but whatever. The Turtles aren't really based one the men they're named after, the names are just a fun reference for people interested in art, it's not like it's meant to be more meaningful than that. In my creative writing class I often used placeholder names and once I used names of Simpsons characters, which is something someone else noticed and asked me if they were indeed meant to be the Simpsons characters, which they weren't because I just used those names because I needed something I could easily remember for the first draft and they just kinda stuck. Now that I mention it, the main characters of the Simpsons were themselves named after Matt Groening's family members, not because he intended to make them a fictionalised version of his family but because he created them right before he pitched them to FOX and nobody ever bothered to change the placeholder names. Harry Potter, despite being a character in a series full of pun names like "Tom Riddle" and "Remus Lupin", was really just named after the author's neighbour.

I really wouldn't put too much thought into a name. Sometimes a character name is intended to mean something special that ties into the story, other times it's just a pun with little other meaning and most of the time it seems random. Neo in Matrix might have a meaningful alias but his real name, Tom Anderson, seems to be picked at random and I seriously doubt it's meant to be a Beavis and Butt-Head reference.

Interesting thread.

From a story perspective, I suppose if Splinter named the turtles out of the book of painters then he wouldn't have had "personality" as a cue for each turtle - only the names and pictures of some of their paintings. And also, if the turtles were named as "babies" then they wouldn't have had personalities pronounced enough yet to correlate them to the painters.

From a creator perspective, Eastman and Laird didn't have google in the 80s, and I imagine that a ton of research on the names wasn't warranted as it was a quick and interesting naming convention for the project.

Lastly, I can't believe I'm rationalizing this, but.... eh... it's the hobby.

Yeah, true. Mike and Don get virtually zero characterization in #1.

But Peter made it no secret that Donatello was his favorite, so maybe he had plans for him early on and had to wait a while to get to them.

Per my memory, when they went to record the first episode they were going to run it with Clarke as Leo and Coleman as Mike. Then after that, do a second read with them reversed and decide which take to use afterwards.

They either ran out of time or just didn’t feel like running it back, so the casting stuck from there.

I think we’ve cracked the code. This crap finally makes sense!

Here's the Donny/Mikey color swap: (thanks Tokka)

Well, it does make me wonder exactly how random these colors were. One these pieces of concept art seems to indicate they were considering having two different shades of red and a dark blue/purple, before deciding to go with a bright blue and purple instead.

I'm not sure about the title screens though, they would have had to have been made before the character models were decided upon for this mistake to make sense or used the wrong ones by mistake, which just sounds weird to me. They also more closely resemble the updated character models from season 2 onwards, which makes me wonder if they were always there or if they were spliced in later. It honestly seems more like they just screwed up than it being a remnant of an old idea.

I knew it!

But was he his favorite from the moment he drew him the first time, or did he become his favorite after writing/drawing him as he got into material like #11 and especially #12?

wait are the renaissance artist the turtles were named after like real people or not? Aren't they just mythological beings like Athena and Ares etc?
Because it depends on the interpretation you're reading about them, some may have them as different personalities.

This was evident throughout the 1987/1988 era with the Roseart board games like Pizza Power - like Michelangelo and Donatello had their toy skintones swapped.

https://storage.googleapis.com/hipco...5c461a-800.jpg

Paper products like board games and puzzles are much faster to produce than action figures, so these hit the market first and were clearly based on earlier concepts before the four turtles colors got finalized.

Hey, we’re both right!

Maybe. But Leo clearly the focused leader and Raph is clearly the rebellious loose cannon in #1. He might have had an idea of who he wanted Don to be. There just isn’t any room in #1 for Don or Mike’s personalities to shine (which would continue in be a thing throughout TMNT history).

I don’t know why else he’d be so opposed to “Bernini”, unless he just didn’t like the way it sounded.

At least on the Evil Turtles' Earth in the Fleetway comics, Leonardo was the inventor.

Since TTN mentioned Laird' fave is Donny... I find it interesting that Eastman's fave is Raph as well.

I don't know either man, obviously, but Eastman and Raph... they couldn't be more different, based on what I've seen and read about Kevin. He sounds more like Mikey to me. Laird also seems like he'd be more of a Raph than a Don... except maybe for FW don who had a temper and edge to him. But that's the version he and Kevin had the least creative input in, funny enough.

We often like characters that are similar to us or have qualities we aspire to have. But what does Kevin admire about the broody and angry Raphael, exactly? Fun thought.