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I have made pictures paying tribute to all the incarnations of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in celebration of the upcoming 2012 cartoon and the upcoming 2014 Ninja Turtles, which will still depict the Turtles as teenage mutants despite the title. Not even Michael Bay would be stupid enough to make them aliens. He's not even the director!

I've already finished my tribute drawings for the Turtles' enemies and allies, so now I will start making tribute drawings of the Turtles themselves and their rat sensei Master Splinter, plus a special surprise character for last.

First, the leader Leonardo. Beware of spoilers.

Mirage Comics-

In the original Mirage series, all of the turtles wore red bandannas, not just Raphael. As those of us familiar with the original comic know, the story of the Turtles began with a feud between two members of the Foot Clan named Oroku Nagi and Hamato Yoshi.

Nagi and Yoshi both loved a woman named Tang Shen, but she only returned Yoshi's feelings. Nagi attacked Tang Shen only to be killed by Yoshi. Yoshi and Tang Shen went to New York, where Yoshi adopted a rat named Splinter as a pet. Despite being a rodent, Splinter was very intelligent and learned the ways of ninjistu by watching his master practice.

Unfortunately, Hamato Yoshi and Tang Shen would both be killed by Oroku Nagi's older brother Oroku Saki, who would later become leader of the Foot Clan and wear bladed armor, dubbing himself The Shredder. Splinter fled to the sewers, where at the same time four baby turtles fell. At the same instant Splinter approached the infant turtles, a mysterious canister of ooze from a company called T.C.R.I.(Techno Cosmic Research Institute) fell down there and mutated Splinter and the turtles into humanoid forms.

Splinter raised the four turtles as his own children and trained them in martial arts. Using a book on Renaissance art he found, Splinter named the four after the Renaissance artists Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Leonardo used the katanas, Raphael the sais, Donatello the bo staff, and Michelangelo used nunchucks. When the Turtles were fifteen, Splinter told them of their origins and their mission to defeat The Shredder.

The Turtles confronted The Shredder in combat and killed him, but he would continue to menace the Turtles even after his death. The Foot Clan were obviously pissed at the Turtles for killing their leader, and the Shredder himself came back from the dead a couple of times, the second time as a mutant shark.

The Turtles would much later learn that T.C.R.I., the company responsible for dumping the mutagen that created them, was run by a race of tentacled, brain-like aliens called Utroms. Leonardo also had a sibling rivalry with Raphael(an element that would be carried over in later incarnations of the Turtles), but they've mellowed out more recently.

1987 Animated Series-

The 1987 show was very loosely based on the Mirage series, but it is the most popular and most well-known incarnation of the Turtles and has introduced many elements that we commonly associate with them, such as the multicolored bandannas and their love for pizza.

The Turtles' origin was changed so that Splinter was Hamato Yoshi mutated into a rat, with the characters of Oroku Nagi and Tang Shen omitted. It was now made so that Yoshi was the former leader of the Foot Clan and rival Oroku Saki plotted to take his place. When a sensei visited, Saki used a knife to pin Yoshi's kimono to the wall behind him, making him unable to bow to the sensei.

When Yoshi removed the knife, he was then accused of trying to kill the sensei. Hamato Yoshi was kicked out and Oroku Saki took over the Foot Clan, turning it into an organization of crime. As Oroku Saki donned the bladed armor and became The Shredder, Yoshi would move to New York and be forced to live in the sewers with the rats due to his poverty.

Eventually, four baby turtles fall in and Yoshi has four new friends. The Shredder somehow encounters and teams up with an alien brain named Krang, who was a warlord from Dimension X that had been stripped of his body and banished to Earth. Krang also somehow brought a battle fortress called the Technodrome with him to Earth.

The Shredder dumps some of Krang's mutagen into the sewers to try and kill Yoshi, but it instead mutates Hamato Yoshi into a rat-man due to being more recently in contact with his rat friends, while the Turtles become humanoid because they were most recently in contact with the human Hamato Yoshi(in this continuity, T.C.R.I. and the Utroms did not exist).

The Turtles fight a gang of punks working for The Shredder and they encounter April O'Neil, a news reporter from Channel 6. She befriends and becomes allies with the Turtles and they proceed to start their never-ending battle with The Shredder.

The Shredder would start fighting back by first creating his own mutants(done by taking gang members Bebop and Rocksteady and mutating them into a warthog and a rhino respectively), recruiting an eccentric scientist named Baxter Stockman to mass-produce his Mousers into an unstoppable robotic army, enlisting Krang's loyal Rock Soldiers General Tragg and Granitor, and finally building Krang a new android body.

The Turtles would continue fighting The Shredder and other enemies with help from April and other allies they make on their adventures.

Leonardo was given a blue bandanna and made the leader of the group(there was no indication he was the leader in the Mirage comics other than frequently speaking for his brothers).

Eventually, the Turtles would seemingly defeat Shredder and Krang for good, leaving the four terrapin ninjas to face a new villain named Lord Dregg. After the Turtles foil Dregg's schemes of taking advantage of the Turtles' bad reputation and pretending to be the hero, Dregg decides that it's no more kid gloves and does everything he can to take them out.

But not even bringing back Shredder and Krang from Dimension X in a three-part episode worked. Dregg would finally be defeated for good in the series finale, where the Turtles retrieve Krang's android body from the Technodorme and use it to defeat Dregg and banish him back to Dimension X.

Leonardo also appeared in the Archie Comics series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, which began as a direct adaptation of the 1987 cartoon before going its own direction. One story arc showed that in the future he would found his own ninja school.

He would also be in a two-episode anime based off the 1987 cartoon in 1996, where he and the other Turtles are able to become Supermutant Turtles with the Mutastones with Shredder, Bebop, and Rocksteady becoming Devil Shredder and Supermutants Bebop and Rocksteady in the first episode and becoming Metal Mutants in the second episode via the mirror Mutastones.

Movies-

The first movie, called simply Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, was released in 1990, and was an adaptation of the first issue of the Mirage Comics series, but also had elements from the cartoon(multicolored bandannas, their taste for pizza, and April being a news reporter). Leonardo had less emphasis on his character than the other Turtles.

Leonardo would have more character development in the sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze, released in 1991. Due to the Foot Clan knowing about their former lair in the sewers, the Turtles have moved in with April, but later gain a new hideout in an abandoned subway station.

Leonardo and the others would again appear in the third film released in 1993, where they go back in time to Feudal Japan so they can rescue April, who mistakenly transported herself there.

The 2007 CGI film TMNT shows that the Turtles have gone their separate ways after defeating The Shredder for good. Leonardo has devoted himself to protecting a South American village, the people of which refer to him as "the Ghost of the Jungle". April convinces him to reunite with his brothers, who learn a new threat has arrived courtesy of four stone generals revived by billionaire Max Winters, later revealed to be an ancient warrior named Yaotl. The Turtles help Yaotl capture the last of the 13 Monsters needed to break the curse that gave him immortality, which also destroys the treacherous stone generals. Karai and the Foot Clan also aid them, but promise to meet them again and imply that The Shredder will return.

Leonardo will obviously be in the upcoming 2014 film Ninja Turtles. Again, they will still be teenage mutants.

Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation-

A short-lived and heavily criticized live-action show that was loosely based on the continuity of the live-action movies. In this show, the Turtles are now 18 years old and have fought Shredder for years. They also learn that there was a fifth female turtle, who was taken to China by a Shinobi master named Chung I(the writers apparently did not know that a shinobi was the same thing as a ninja).

The female turtle was raised by Chung I as his daughter under the name Mei Pei Chi, which meant "beautiful turtle of radiant energy". Chung I was also good friends with Splinter, and they kept in touch using an enchanted mirror.

However, it turns out that the enchanted mirror has been a prison for a race of dragon warriors called the Rank and their ruthless leader the Dragon Lord. Using the opportunity of Chung I's warning to Splinter as they take over the spirit world, Dragon Lord and the Rank kill Chung I, leave Splinter comatose, and escape into our world.

On his deathbed, Chung I tells Mei Pei Chi about her true origins and tells her to go to New York. The female turtle goes to the sewers, where she meets her brothers and is given the name Venus de Milo. She helps them take on Shredder and the Foot Clan, warping Shredder's memories so that he becomes horrified about what he's done and goes into a breakdown. Leonardo proceeds to tell the Foot Clan that they are a joke, disbanding them.

With Shredder and the Foot Clan out of the picture, the Dragon Lord and the Rank would take their place as the Turtles' archnemesis. After a battle with them, the Turtles succeed in helping Splinter come to.

Leonardo has a single double-bladed katana as opposed to two katanas and reveals to Venus in the second episode that the Turtles are not really blood relatives. The network apparently did that so that Venus could hook up with the four original Turtles without fear of incestuous overtones. Seriously, if they wanted Venus to play love interest, why did they even make her one of the original Turtles? They could've just made her a newly mutated turtle that the other four take in.

While the show was cancelled after one season, there were plans for a second season. This new season would have been animated and would have introduced April O'Neil and Casey Jones into the series, as well as kill off Splinter and have The Shredder back at being the Turtles' archenemy.

2003 Animated Series-

Leonardo was again the leader in the 2003 cartoon, which was more faithful to the Mirage series, but also had some nods to the 1987 show and plenty of its own original material. Leonardo would start off as the easy-going leader, but in the fourth season would become increasingly stern. He would get over it after training with the Ancient One, the sensei of Hamato Yoshi.

The Turtles would face four different versions of the Shredder in this continuity(the Utrom Shredder in the first three seasons, his adopted human daughter Karai in season four, the Demon Shredder in the Ninja Tribunal arc, and Cyber Shredder in Back to the Sewer season).

Turtles Forever-

The 2003, 1987, and Mirage incarnations of Leonardo are among the characters featured in this movie. 2003 Leonardo is the serious leader as always, 1987 Leonardo is even sillier than he actually was on the show(and was given a voice that doesn't sound like it belongs to ANY incarnation of Leo), and Mirage Leonardo is even darker than 2003 Raph. The three groups of Turtles team up to stop the Utrom Shredder from destroying the multiverse and erasing all incarnations of the Turtles from existence.

2012 Animated Series-

Leonardo is set to appear in the upcoming cartoon, set to premiere this year on September 29th. As always, he will be the leader of the group, but in the beginning of the series, he will be unsure if he is the right person to be the leader.

TMNT (c) Nickelodeon

Description
Made with deviantART muro

I have made pictures paying tribute to all the incarnations of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in celebration of the upcoming 2012 cartoon and the upcoming 2014 Ninja Turtles, which will still depict the Turtles as teenage mutants despite the title. Not even Michael Bay would be stupid enough to make them aliens. He's not even the director!

I've already finished my tribute drawings for the Turtles' enemies and allies, so now I will start making tribute drawings of the Turtles themselves and their rat sensei Master Splinter, plus a special surprise character for last.

First, the leader Leonardo. Beware of spoilers.

Mirage Comics-

In the original Mirage series, all of the turtles wore red bandannas, not just Raphael. As those of us familiar with the original comic know, the story of the Turtles began with a feud between two members of the Foot Clan named Oroku Nagi and Hamato Yoshi.

Nagi and Yoshi both loved a woman named Tang Shen, but she only returned Yoshi's feelings. Nagi attacked Tang Shen only to be killed by Yoshi. Yoshi and Tang Shen went to New York, where Yoshi adopted a rat named Splinter as a pet. Despite being a rodent, Splinter was very intelligent and learned the ways of ninjistu by watching his master practice.

Unfortunately, Hamato Yoshi and Tang Shen would both be killed by Oroku Nagi's older brother Oroku Saki, who would later become leader of the Foot Clan and wear bladed armor, dubbing himself The Shredder. Splinter fled to the sewers, where at the same time four baby turtles fell. At the same instant Splinter approached the infant turtles, a mysterious canister of ooze from a company called T.C.R.I.(Techno Cosmic Research Institute) fell down there and mutated Splinter and the turtles into humanoid forms.

Splinter raised the four turtles as his own children and trained them in martial arts. Using a book on Renaissance art he found, Splinter named the four after the Renaissance artists Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Leonardo used the katanas, Raphael the sais, Donatello the bo staff, and Michelangelo used nunchucks. When the Turtles were fifteen, Splinter told them of their origins and their mission to defeat The Shredder.

The Turtles confronted The Shredder in combat and killed him, but he would continue to menace the Turtles even after his death. The Foot Clan were obviously pissed at the Turtles for killing their leader, and the Shredder himself came back from the dead a couple of times, the second time as a mutant shark.

The Turtles would much later learn that T.C.R.I., the company responsible for dumping the mutagen that created them, was run by a race of tentacled, brain-like aliens called Utroms. Leonardo also had a sibling rivalry with Raphael(an element that would be carried over in later incarnations of the Turtles), but they've mellowed out more recently.

1987 Animated Series-

The 1987 show was very loosely based on the Mirage series, but it is the most popular and most well-known incarnation of the Turtles and has introduced many elements that we commonly associate with them, such as the multicolored bandannas and their love for pizza.

The Turtles' origin was changed so that Splinter was Hamato Yoshi mutated into a rat, with the characters of Oroku Nagi and Tang Shen omitted. It was now made so that Yoshi was the former leader of the Foot Clan and rival Oroku Saki plotted to take his place. When a sensei visited, Saki used a knife to pin Yoshi's kimono to the wall behind him, making him unable to bow to the sensei.

When Yoshi removed the knife, he was then accused of trying to kill the sensei. Hamato Yoshi was kicked out and Oroku Saki took over the Foot Clan, turning it into an organization of crime. As Oroku Saki donned the bladed armor and became The Shredder, Yoshi would move to New York and be forced to live in the sewers with the rats due to his poverty.

Eventually, four baby turtles fall in and Yoshi has four new friends. The Shredder somehow encounters and teams up with an alien brain named Krang, who was a warlord from Dimension X that had been stripped of his body and banished to Earth. Krang also somehow brought a battle fortress called the Technodrome with him to Earth.

The Shredder dumps some of Krang's mutagen into the sewers to try and kill Yoshi, but it instead mutates Hamato Yoshi into a rat-man due to being more recently in contact with his rat friends, while the Turtles become humanoid because they were most recently in contact with the human Hamato Yoshi(in this continuity, T.C.R.I. and the Utroms did not exist).

The Turtles fight a gang of punks working for The Shredder and they encounter April O'Neil, a news reporter from Channel 6. She befriends and becomes allies with the Turtles and they proceed to start their never-ending battle with The Shredder.

The Shredder would start fighting back by first creating his own mutants(done by taking gang members Bebop and Rocksteady and mutating them into a warthog and a rhino respectively), recruiting an eccentric scientist named Baxter Stockman to mass-produce his Mousers into an unstoppable robotic army, enlisting Krang's loyal Rock Soldiers General Tragg and Granitor, and finally building Krang a new android body.

The Turtles would continue fighting The Shredder and other enemies with help from April and other allies they make on their adventures.

Leonardo was given a blue bandanna and made the leader of the group(there was no indication he was the leader in the Mirage comics other than frequently speaking for his brothers).

Eventually, the Turtles would seemingly defeat Shredder and Krang for good, leaving the four terrapin ninjas to face a new villain named Lord Dregg. After the Turtles foil Dregg's schemes of taking advantage of the Turtles' bad reputation and pretending to be the hero, Dregg decides that it's no more kid gloves and does everything he can to take them out.

But not even bringing back Shredder and Krang from Dimension X in a three-part episode worked. Dregg would finally be defeated for good in the series finale, where the Turtles retrieve Krang's android body from the Technodorme and use it to defeat Dregg and banish him back to Dimension X.

Leonardo also appeared in the Archie Comics series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, which began as a direct adaptation of the 1987 cartoon before going its own direction. One story arc showed that in the future he would found his own ninja school.

He would also be in a two-episode anime based off the 1987 cartoon in 1996, where he and the other Turtles are able to become Supermutant Turtles with the Mutastones with Shredder, Bebop, and Rocksteady becoming Devil Shredder and Supermutants Bebop and Rocksteady in the first episode and becoming Metal Mutants in the second episode via the mirror Mutastones.

Movies-

The first movie, called simply Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, was released in 1990, and was an adaptation of the first issue of the Mirage Comics series, but also had elements from the cartoon(multicolored bandannas, their taste for pizza, and April being a news reporter). Leonardo had less emphasis on his character than the other Turtles.

Leonardo would have more character development in the sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze, released in 1991. Due to the Foot Clan knowing about their former lair in the sewers, the Turtles have moved in with April, but later gain a new hideout in an abandoned subway station.

Leonardo and the others would again appear in the third film released in 1993, where they go back in time to Feudal Japan so they can rescue April, who mistakenly transported herself there.

The 2007 CGI film TMNT shows that the Turtles have gone their separate ways after defeating The Shredder for good. Leonardo has devoted himself to protecting a South American village, the people of which refer to him as "the Ghost of the Jungle". April convinces him to reunite with his brothers, who learn a new threat has arrived courtesy of four stone generals revived by billionaire Max Winters, later revealed to be an ancient warrior named Yaotl. The Turtles help Yaotl capture the last of the 13 Monsters needed to break the curse that gave him immortality, which also destroys the treacherous stone generals. Karai and the Foot Clan also aid them, but promise to meet them again and imply that The Shredder will return.

Leonardo will obviously be in the upcoming 2014 film Ninja Turtles. Again, they will still be teenage mutants.

Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation-

A short-lived and heavily criticized live-action show that was loosely based on the continuity of the live-action movies. In this show, the Turtles are now 18 years old and have fought Shredder for years. They also learn that there was a fifth female turtle, who was taken to China by a Shinobi master named Chung I(the writers apparently did not know that a shinobi was the same thing as a ninja).

The female turtle was raised by Chung I as his daughter under the name Mei Pei Chi, which meant "beautiful turtle of radiant energy". Chung I was also good friends with Splinter, and they kept in touch using an enchanted mirror.

However, it turns out that the enchanted mirror has been a prison for a race of dragon warriors called the Rank and their ruthless leader the Dragon Lord. Using the opportunity of Chung I's warning to Splinter as they take over the spirit world, Dragon Lord and the Rank kill Chung I, leave Splinter comatose, and escape into our world.

On his deathbed, Chung I tells Mei Pei Chi about her true origins and tells her to go to New York. The female turtle goes to the sewers, where she meets her brothers and is given the name Venus de Milo. She helps them take on Shredder and the Foot Clan, warping Shredder's memories so that he becomes horrified about what he's done and goes into a breakdown. Leonardo proceeds to tell the Foot Clan that they are a joke, disbanding them.

With Shredder and the Foot Clan out of the picture, the Dragon Lord and the Rank would take their place as the Turtles' archnemesis. After a battle with them, the Turtles succeed in helping Splinter come to.

Leonardo has a single double-bladed katana as opposed to two katanas and reveals to Venus in the second episode that the Turtles are not really blood relatives. The network apparently did that so that Venus could hook up with the four original Turtles without fear of incestuous overtones. Seriously, if they wanted Venus to play love interest, why did they even make her one of the original Turtles? They could've just made her a newly mutated turtle that the other four take in.

While the show was cancelled after one season, there were plans for a second season. This new season would have been animated and would have introduced April O'Neil and Casey Jones into the series, as well as kill off Splinter and have The Shredder back at being the Turtles' archenemy.

2003 Animated Series-

Leonardo was again the leader in the 2003 cartoon, which was more faithful to the Mirage series, but also had some nods to the 1987 show and plenty of its own original material. Leonardo would start off as the easy-going leader, but in the fourth season would become increasingly stern. He would get over it after training with the Ancient One, the sensei of Hamato Yoshi.

The Turtles would face four different versions of the Shredder in this continuity(the Utrom Shredder in the first three seasons, his adopted human daughter Karai in season four, the Demon Shredder in the Ninja Tribunal arc, and Cyber Shredder in Back to the Sewer season).

Turtles Forever-

The 2003, 1987, and Mirage incarnations of Leonardo are among the characters featured in this movie. 2003 Leonardo is the serious leader as always, 1987 Leonardo is even sillier than he actually was on the show(and was given a voice that doesn't sound like it belongs to ANY incarnation of Leo), and Mirage Leonardo is even darker than 2003 Raph. The three groups of Turtles team up to stop the Utrom Shredder from destroying the multiverse and erasing all incarnations of the Turtles from existence.

2012 Animated Series-

Leonardo is set to appear in the upcoming cartoon, set to premiere this year on September 29th. As always, he will be the leader of the group, but in the beginning of the series, he will be unsure if he is the right person to be the leader.

TMNT (c) Nickelodeon