CRACKED: 7 Shockingly Dark Origins of Lovable Children's Characters

[China]

7 Shockingly Dark Origins of Lovable Children's Characters

#7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The ninja turtles have seen more incarnations than some Hindu gods. They've been in cartoons, comic books, movies and even a rock band with a bunch of guys in secondhand Muppet costumes. You know the gist, though: Wacky pals who spend their days skateboarding, eating pizza, cracking wise and jumpkicking morality into confused teenage Foot Clan members.

Including a young Sam Rockwell

But before that, they were:

Cold-blooded killing machines. If you've only seen the movies or cartoon shows, you're probably vaguely aware of their origin story: After being exposed to radioactive ooze, four turtles were raised as ninjas by their adoptive father Splinter, a giant rat who's basically like Yoda with parasites.

In the very first issue of the comic series, Splinter reveals why he's been training the turtles for 13 years: to kill Shredder. Not "bring him to justice" or "stop the evil foot clan," but specifically to murder this one man for Splinter's personal revenge. They were single-purposed hit-turtles, trained by their insane master for over a decade just to take one life. The comic doesn't show much of that lovable father-son relationship that the turtles have with Splinter in the cartoon, either. They are not a loving family obliging their master's wishes out of affection and duty; they're just Splinter's pre-programmed death machines.

The very first issue ends with the turtles searching out and hunting down Shredder (no long and storied rivalry for the turtles to build up animosity toward him or anything -- they were total strangers up until the point the turtles jumped out of the shadows and tried to murder him). The encounter ends with a brief fight on top of a building, where this happens:

Turtle Power, mother****er!

That's Leonardo -- the boring moral center of the group, the generic good guy, the default leader character that nobody wanted to pick when it came time to declare which turtle you wanted to be -- and he is straight up brutally murdering a man with a sword. After Leo stabs Shredder, the rest of the turtles surround the mortally wounded man and tell him in no uncertain terms that he can either be dishonorably murdered (by them) or else honorably commit seppuku, which is essentially suicide by disembowelment.

He refuses and eventually dies while trying to kill the turtles, but really picture that first scene: Wisecracking Raphael, nerdy Donatello, noble Leonardo and Michelangelo -- farking Michelangelo with his surfer accent and cowabunga attitude -- are all standing around an injured man trying to force him to cut his own guts out. And this was not a weird, unique misstep in an otherwise harmless comic. Nearly all of the early Turtles books were absolutely filled with the kind of ultraviolence that would make Alex DeLarge dry-heave stomach bile onto his loafers.

#6. Casper, the Friendly Ghost

The lovable ghost just wants to make friend, but always ends up scaring people's eyeballs out of their skulls, possibly leading to permanent retinal detachment. Like most forms of non-threatening entertainment, Casper he Friendly Ghost has silently persisted for decades even though literally nobody can remember ever watching the show.

But before that, they were:

Casper, the Friendly Living Child. Really stop and think about the implications there. This is a dead kid, forever haunting the Earth, unable to rest. That's the protagonist for your children's cartoon: a tortured apparition who spends all of his time in a graveyard, hanging out behind his own gravestone.

It's all fairly disturbing and obvious once you stop to think about it, but Casper creator Harvey Comics' won't cop to it: Its official stance since the 70s is that ghosts are simply supernatural creatures, like goblins, and friendly ghosts like Casper are born when two adult ghosts love each other very much. Except that explanation actually contradicts some of its earlier cartoons, like "There's Good Boos Tonight", in which Casper befriends a fox that is later killed by hunting dogs. Casper weeps over the fox's body and even puts together a little grave for it, but the fox immediately comes back as a ghost and they go right back to romping. That may be in competition with Futurama's "Jurassic Bark" episode as the most depressing cartoon plot ever, but it has absolutely no competition for Worst Lesson Ever Taught to Children.

"Go ahead and ride Waffles into the street, Billy! If he dies, he'll just come right back

and keep playing, but now he can run through doors! Yaayyy, Waffles!"

And if he's just a friendly, untroubled spirit who has always been that way, then why, in some of the early cartoons, does Casper seems less "friendly" and more "clinically depressed"? Half the shows follow the same basic format: Casper tries to make friends, scares friends away, immediately tries to commit suicide. In his very first appearance, titled "The Friendly Ghost" Casper fails to make lifelong friends within the first couple of minutes, so his next step is to go lie down on a train track. He did the same thing in the comic book series, too: trying to off himself by jumping from a cliff, and then again by tying himself to a rock and jumping into the ocean. It all kind of makes us question how Casper became a ghost in the first place ...

But don't worry! The 1995 live-action movie puts all those concerns to rest.

It flat-out says his name was Casper McFadden and he died of pneumonia.

Hilarious!

#5. Birdo

A some-time enemy, some-time friend of Super Mario, Birdo is a recurring character in many Nintendo games, usually shooting eggs at other characters, but sometimes not. That's called "depth of character," folks. Look it up.

But before that, they were:

A dude. Birdo's a transvestite, or possibly even transgendered, and it has always been that way. When the pink, bow-wearing dinosaur first showed up in Super Mario Bros. 2, the instruction booklet claimed, "He thinks he is a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He'd rather be called 'Birdetta.'"

That's not an American translator having one last hurrah before they fire his ass for stealing forks from the lunchroom, either. That's a fairly accurate translation from the original Japanese booklet, where the character is called "Catherine" but prefers being called "Cathy." In fact, the Japanese booklet even uses the word "omoikomu" for "thinks," which more accurately translates to "wrongly believes." That's right: There was a small section in the Super Mario Bros. 2 handbook that was dedicated solely to passing judgment on Birdo's sexual identity.

The weirdness could have ended there if not for Nintendo's policy of sticking every character it owns into every video game it makes, and then pairing up said characters into opposite gender relationships: Mario has Princess Toadstool, Luigi has Daisy, Donkey Kong has Dixie Kong and Yoshi has ... Birdo.

Hey, we're not here to judge. Maybe Yoshi's just kind of a freak like that.

But the prudes over at Nintendo of America have tried to downplay the transgender angle. They're too timid to make a final decision on what the sexually confused dinosaur really is, but in Japan at least, we know Birdo is definitely a guy. The Japanese website for Super Mario Kart Double Dash describes Birdo thusly: "It appears to be Yoshi's girlfriend, but is actually his boyfriend!? He participates in the race with eggs."

That's Nintendo for you: always prefacing descriptions of characters' special powers with complicated, unanswered questions about their sexuality .

#4. Cubone

Cubone is a Pokemon, and though its cuteness can never hope to reach Pikachupian levels of adorability, there are still millions of children the world over who would gladly never see their parents again if it meant getting a real-life whatever-the-hell-this-thing-is. Like all of its Poke-brethren, Cubone was given a hastily cobbled-together backstory, which was completely ignored by the kids because, turns out, they don't give two shiats about story so long as you've got a cute animal that barfs fireballs.

But before that, they were:

An Oedipal lizard. The most distinctive thing about Cubone is that over-sized skull it wears on its head. It could be clever camouflage, or the skull of a vanquished enemy, or even the Cubone's own exposed bone. But it's not.

That's the skull of its dead mother.

#3 Grimace

Back in the swinging 70s, the McDonald's marketing campaign revolved almost entirely around McDonaldland, a fictional fairy land where French fries grew on trees. It was populated by characters like Ronald McDonald, Mayor McCheese and the Hamburglar, whose obsession with stealing and eating burgers quickly becomes unsettling when you realize that in McDonaldland, hamburgers are people.

"A census-taker tried to test me once. I ate his liver with McNuggets and a vanilla milkshake. Rabble rabble."

And then there's Grimace, Ronald McDonald's dimwitted, roly-poly purple pal, who tags along on Ronald's adventures providing the kind of comic relief that only the morbidly obese can pull off.

But before that, they were:

Pure evil. When Grimace made his first appearance way back in 1971, he wasn't the lovable moron we know him as today. Grimace was "The Evil Grimace," a four-armed monster with a milkshake lust equaled only by history's greatest monsters.

#2. Odie

Garfield's dog pal, whose hobbies included drooling, staring vacantly and being kicked off tables. God, there are just layers upon layers! This here is comedy Steinbeck, people.

"We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us."

But before that, they were:

Somebody else's dog. Pop quiz: What's the name of Odie's owner? If you answered Lyman, the guy with the beady eyes and thick mustache, then congratulations, you're correct! There's also a very good chance you don't exist. You may want to consult a physician about that.

#1. The Tin Man

The Tin Woodman, or Tin Man, was one of Dorothy Gale's three companions in The Wizard of Oz. The movie tells us nothing about the Tin Man's origin, except that he has no heart and apparently rusts a lot. Even though tin can't rust.

But before that, they were:

A clumsy RoboCop. According to L. Frank Baum's original novel, before he was the Tin Man, he was Nick Chopper: a regular dude and a lumberjack. Then one day he accidentally chopped off his own arm. Then another arm. Then his legs, torso and head. But while slowly chopping his entire body into ragged chunks, Nick Chopper was also replacing his missing flesh with tin, making him literature's first cyborg.

The only thing he forgot to replace was a heart.

Like most problems in Oz, the Tin Man's problems were all caused by a Wicked Witch: Chopper had fallen madly in love with Nimmie Amee, a Munchkin woman forced to work under the Wicked Witch of the East. Wanting to keep all the hot, awkward dwarf sex to a minimum (why would you ever want to do that?), the witch cursed Chopper's axe so it would turn on him when he swung it. Without a body and now without a heart, he was no longer capable of loving anyone.

But it gets weirder. In The Tin Woodman of Oz, Baum's 12th Oz book, the Tin Man decides to once again pursue the woman he once loved. Unfortunately, he learns that she has already married someone else. Someone made entirely out of his old body parts.

Nimmie married a thing called Chopfyt: a Frankenstein-like monster hacked together by the same tinsmith who built the Tin Man's body. Since no one in Oz ever dies (except the Wicked Witch), the tinsmith was left with a whole pile of nondecaying body parts just sitting around in a barrel after fixing up the Tin Man. Rather than giving them a respectful burial or, you know, using them to rebuild the Tin Man's mortal body since he could have apparently just done that in the first place, the tinsmith decided to build a dude out of them to help out around the shop. A lab zombie, if you will.

The tinsmith decided not to use Nick Chopper's face on Chopfyt, though, as he had another man's dismembered head apparently just lying around the workshop. What? What's weird about that? Asking too many questions is what put the first head here, friend.

Oh, but you know that wacky tinsmith: He just can't bear to throw his dismembered body parts away! He kept the Tin Man's original head. He didn't do anything with it, he just kind of held onto it; it lays around the lab, occasionally chiming in with witticisms like a Billy Bass made out of bleeding meat. Later, the Tin Man had an existentially terrifying conversation with his own skull in the tinsmith's shop, and then presumably drank himself unconscious every day for the rest of his life.

Click on the link for the full article

[TD_washingtonredskins]

Nick Chopper...hahahaha.

[Forehead]

This is the kind of stuff I love reading on this site. And believe it or not, I actually knew the answer to the Odie questions since I have a bunch of old Garfield comic collection books. Here's a picture of Lyman in the last panel.

Side note, why is Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute) not playing Jon Arbuckle in any Garfield movie ever made?

[d0ublestr0ker0ll]

at "literature's first cyborg."

[FanboyOf91]

The originals are always the best.

[Henry]

I own an original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 from way back in the early 80s. I think I have the first 20 issues lying around in my basement somewhere. They were SO much cooler before Archie Comics got their grubby little hands on them.

[ACW]

I knew about Birdo.

[TK]

I own an original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 from way back in the early 80s. I think I have the first 20 issues lying around in my basement somewhere. They were SO much cooler before Archie Comics got their grubby little hands on them.

I had a run of old b&w Ninja Turtles issues as well. GREAT stuff before they got commercialized.

[PokerPacker]

yeah, I do like the idea of the turtles actually using their weapons. Leo and Raph are only allowed to parry with theirs.

[HailGreen28]

I remember reading a website of "dark origins" of fairy tales.

Dunno how accurate thees are, but possible fairy tale dark begininngs include:

Hansel and Gretel killed and ate the witch.

Snow White I think they actually did show the dwarves hunting down and killing the witch in the animation, though I think she just fell off a cliff or something. In the original story, the dwarves hacked her to death.

The Prince didn't just "kiss" Sleeping Beauty to try waking her. And nobody could figure out why nothing woke her up. After she gave birth 9 months later, her baby placed next to its still unconcious mother just happened to be chewing/suckling on Mom's fingers. The baby accidentally removed the tiny unnoticed splinter keeping SB asleep. Only THEN did she wake up. :rubeyes:

[China]

I remember reading a website of "dark origins" of fairy tales.

Dunno how accurate thees are, but possible fairy tale dark begininngs include:

Hansel and Gretel killed and ate the witch.

Snow White I think they actually did show the dwarves hunting down and killing the witch in the animation, though I think she just fell off a cliff or something. In the original story, the dwarves hacked her to death.

The Prince didn't just "kiss" Sleeping Beauty to try waking her. And nobody could figure out why nothing woke her up. After she gave birth 9 months later, her baby placed next to its still unconcious mother just happened to be chewing/suckling on Mom's fingers. The baby accidentally removed the tiny unnoticed splinter keeping SB asleep. Only THEN did she wake up. :rubeyes:

CRACKED: The Gruesome Origins of 5 Popular Fairy Tales

[bishtw]

I own an original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 from way back in the early 80s. I think I have the first 20 issues lying around in my basement somewhere. They were SO much cooler before Archie Comics got their grubby little hands on them.

Looks like you might have something if you still have them.

http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=teenage+mutant+ninja+turtles+comic+%231&_trkparms=65%253A12%257C66%253A2%257C39%253A1%257C72%253A4587&rt=nc&_sticky=1&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_sop=16&_sc=1

[thebluefood]

If you guys clicked the link that mentioned Garfield's life maybe only a figment of his imagination while he was starving to death, you're in for quite a shock. By far, the DARKEST thing I've ever seen that has anything to do with that comic.

[HailGreen28]

CRACKED: The Gruesome Origins of 5 Popular Fairy Tales

Great, now I can go to bed really creeped out. Thanks!

[Soup]

I still have an original TMNT comic from the 80s where they retold the entire story from the beginning but its filled with blood and gore.

got if from my grandmother which was funny because she's really religious. I guess she didn't open the comic.

[JMS]

You could throw in Hansal and Grettle in that mix too. The story comes from the dark ages. The famine associated with that time and dipicted in the story actually had parents taking their children into the woods in real life and leaving them. That kind of stuff really happenned.

Or little red ridding hood. Wolves are extinct from Europe today... But there was a time when wolves stocked people in Europe. I remember reading about Peter the Great when he built St. Petersburg in Russia. He used to post guards around the city to protect it from wolves. Occasionally the wolves would eat the guards.

[AsburySkinsFan]

You could throw in Hansal and Grettle in that mix too. The story comes from the dark ages. The famine associated with that time and dipicted in the story actually had parents taking their children into the woods in real life and leaving them. That kind of stuff really happenned.

Or little red ridding hood. Wolves are extinct from Europe today... But there was a time when wolves stocked people in Europe. I remember reading about Peter the Great when he built St. Petersburg in Russia. He used to post guards around the city to protect it from wolves. Occasionally the wolves would eat the guards.

Almost all of the Mother Goose and Grimm fairy tales are very very dark indeed. My mother-in-law bought a fairy tale book and was reading to my kids, I think she was reading Red Riding Hood half way through she stopped reading, and looked at me saying, "This isn't right..." My response was, "Yes it is, that's the original version, Red Riding Hood and Granny get eaten, and it's the Woodsman who kills the wolf." She was not happy.