TMNT - Dark Turtles

So here they are ... the dark turtles! They are evil clones of the TMNT.

Evil mostly meaning angry and dumb with no table manners. Except for Dark Raph who is less angry than normal Raph.

Yeah, pretty lame. They basically functioned as thugs for Darius Dunn in Fast Forward. They didn't get much character development or do much of anything ... but even for a saturday morning cartoon FF wasn't very deep.

And I'll say it right here ... I watched all of FF in two or three days and it sucks. Cody is the most annoying character shoehored into the franchise since Venus.

Drawing these guys was frustrating. NOT FUN AT ALL! The details aren't drawn the same way twice! Especially the glowing lines. Nor is there any character art online, save for Don and Mike. And Mike's missing the shoulder spike. It doesn't help that there's no damn character art ANYWHERE for these jerks.

In an instance like this, I'd go with the toys normally. Except the toy designs are totally different than the TV show designs! Oh, they look similar at first glance. But the details are totally off! So it's useless! I went with the TV designs figured they had the most exposure.

But I went with the toy weapons rather than the TV show weapons. Mainly because I found good quality pictures of those faster than the weapons from the show. Of course that was BEFORE I found a high quality vid of the episode .... UGH! I also gave Don his toy's bo even tho he didn't wield a weapon in the show. Don needs a bow, especially since these are supposed to mirror the poses I had for the origional TMNT in the last project.

Totally for fun I colored the bottom row like the prototype of the toys. Now, I didn't redraw them because, with the exception of Mike, they are annoyingly different, so they aren't really true to the early prototypes. But this is how they mighta turned out if the designers went a different route and kept those old color schemes.

Here's some factorid and musings I was able to dicern while drawing the Dark TMNT.

1) They do NOT have the colorings of the TMNT from the new cartoon! I never noticed it, but the toys of FF and the prototype DT toys match the old 80's TMNT line more than the new cartoon coloring.
2) The heads from the prototypes sorta give the impression that the DT were meant to be mindless drone types rather than angry. EXCEPT for Mike who has one wild expression. Which leads me to think that Mike was sculpted last, taking into account a new change in personality.
3) Now, the heads on the show match up to the prototypes more than the final heads. Except for Don's, which doesn't match up to either the final's or the prototypes. Either he has a third prototype head we have never seen or the animators changed the character design without consulting the toy guys.
4) Furthermore, although the DT all have bandana colored skin tones, Mike is yellow and not orange. Except for the belt! So, either he was the first to be recolored (as the cholor scheme in general is the most similar to the prototype toys shown) or he was colored last (when the designers saw orange skin looks lame).

The new cartoon of TMNT will have the turtles return home so there's little hope the Dark T will get any better than is shown. And I'm glad they can be put away, really. I suppose they're alot like Slash ... good designs, but the plot wasn't really thought through.