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« on: April 29, 2005, 07:26:13 PM »
Well, it's that time of year again. Either the time that I make a thread, or redevelop my interest in the ninja turtles. This thread is for general TMNT chat, plus if you like it or not, etc.
Anyway, yesterday an episode of TMNT was halfway over on Cartoon Network, so I left it on for the heck of it. Suddenly, the most incredible thing came to my attention. It wasn't Raphael drinking tea with a blind woman, nor was it Splinter and Michelangelo figting Misters Touch and Go, but something better. Without warning, there was a shot of the other turtles in their lair and something caught my eye. An extra turtle, twice the size of the others and with a long tail and snout, was adjusting some satellite project for Donatello. It was a crocodile! Having missed out on any previous mention of this character, I watched the remaining 30 seconds of that scene in awe, hearing him utter "Haven't seen him" to Leonardo who was looking for Raphael. This was the coolest thing, a walking, talking, gigantic crocodile on the ninja turtles! It's like a two-in-one deal! Rewinding and listening to what his name was, "Leatherhead", I looked him up on the internet. Apparently he had been a villian in the previous TMNT series in the late 1980s, but also appeared in like two of the comics.
I watched the next episode today, and there he was again, plus the episode focused on him and hallucinations he had in his dreams of when some guy messed up his brain so he usually couldn't control sudden bouts of anger, which was pretty bad since he was the biggest guy in the sewer and knocked down a few friends in his "Mr. Hyde" rampages(thank goodness they only lasted about ten seconds each). The episode is about how he thinks his uncontrollable mood swings is a threat to the turtles and that he's a monster, so he runs away only to be found by this Australian hunter who uses high tech guns to ...hunt. He came to get rid of the alligator/crocodile that the newspaper mentioned, plus now he wants to catch the four walking turtles whose footprints he somehow can read. The turtles come looking for Leatherhead, find him and the hunter, beat the hunter and get Leatherhead a home in a ninteenth century underground train station that is just three minutes away from their own lair, so he can work on controlling his temper and still be in contact with the ninja turtles.
I looked him up on the internet again, and found that this episode was based on the first comic he appeared in, when they first meet him as an enemy because of his temper but become friends when the weird hunter guy comes along. Not much information there. Then in the second comic book he appeared in, he has turned his new home into a laboratory where he is working on a device that will reunite him with his family. His "family" is a group of aliens from another planet(the Untrons I think) that raised him from a baby alligator, after he came in contact with the same chemical the ninja turtles did. Sadly, when they returned to their home planet, they left/forgot him behind, so he was building a device to get him there. Because of his size though, he needed help from smaller people to do the finer details on the machine. He got the turtles and some foot ninjas somehow to help him, but a foot ninja had removed an integral piece from the machine(accident or purposely I don't know) that caused it to fail and blow up. Because of the failure, Leatherhead goes on another rampage and swears that he will have revenge on them all someday. He flees the scene, and the last we see of him is when he's in some deserted part of the sewer. He looks at his reflection in the water and thinks, "Now I'm alone... forever...". The turtles are later on a rooftop discussing what happened, what it must be like to be all alone like Leatherhead must be right then. And Leonardo says "At least WE have each other." It was really sad, and I wished Leatherhead had re-befriended the turtles, or at least gotten back to his home planet.
At least in the modern cartoon, they sort of changed it around. They first meet him a little violently, as Michelangelo walks in on him and in blind rage chases Mikey around underwater, until Mikey is cornered in some room and successfully reasons with the reptile who was having an uncontrollable anger moment. The other turtles try to save Mikey, and somehow pin the giant "monster" to the ground, even though a truce was met before they got there. They all become friends(Yay). They learn that he is creating a device to get him home, but they find out that he was working with Dr. Stockman, who was really using him so he could get to the other planet and probably seize power. Discovering his plans, Stockman flees but throws some science thing on the ground that causes an explosion and the ceiling to cave in. The mighty Leatherhead holds up the ceiling so the turtles can escape but doesn't escape with them, as "life isn't worth living if you can't have a family" or something. The ceiling falls, leaving a bunch of rubble and no Leatherhead in sight, and the turtles repeat their "At least WE have each other" conversation, and it ends.
Somehow Leatherhead must have survived, since he appeared in the episode I saw today with the hunter. In that episode they find him the train station home, so I'm guessing that's the conclusion for Leatherhead, as he can contact the turtles but doesn't need to appear in the episodes anymore. It would be REALLY sad if they made another episode where he rebuilds the machine, it fails, he blames and abandons the turtles and is going to be alone forever again, because reading that for the first time made me cry, because I had also felt depressed for the turtles at the end of the third movie, because even though they had each other, they were still kind of stuck underground all their lives, but not so severely or sadly as Leatherhead was.
There, that's my long, obsessive, possibly boring rant about the ninja turtles. Does anybody else know about Leatherhead, watch the new or old episodes, or the movies or play the new or old games?
Edited by - Markio on 4/29/2005 6:43:58 PM
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