Horror, Sleaze and Trash.

7 Shockingly Dark Origins of Lovable Children's Characters

Sometimes it's the people closest to us that we know the least. We've all had that moment when we first found out that our best friend prefers The Monkees to The Beatles, that our significant other believes wrestling is real, or that our favorite uncle once killed a homeless man in Kentucky over a bottle of Night Train. Well, fictional characters are like that too: With just a little bit of digging, you can uncover all sorts of messed up crap that'll ruin all the things you used to love. So let's get started on doing that!

#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, motherfucker!

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 -- fucking 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.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_18906_7-shockingly-dark-origins-lovable-childrens-characters.html#ixzz39wUCsx8y