- Hello?
- Scott is unfortunately trapped
somewhere in Dimension X, I assume.
- Ricky?
(Skype ringtone)
- Oh, hey Dylan, what's up?
- Hey Ricky, Scott is still missing somewhere,
so could you fill in again for him this week?
- Yeah, sure.
What did you have in mind?
- [Dylan] I don't know actually.
That's a good question.
Maybe another Ninja Turtles video.
That last one did pretty well.
- You know I have other interests outside the Turtles?
- Yeah, but we already did a Doctor Who video, so.
- All right, Turtles it is.
(Skype ringtone)
Well that's weird.
Scott?
- Hey Ricky, how's it going?
- [Ricky] How's it go...
Weren't you in a hellish dimension for two weeks?
- Oh, yeah, guess I was.
Man, that place had terrible WiFi.
Luckily, I was able to catch a ride back
with a gross looking warlord who was stripped of his body
and banished to Earth.
Name was Krong or something.
- Krang!
Wait, did you see his original body?
What did it look like?
Spare no detail.
- I'll tell you right after this bumper.
(hard rock music)
- Krang, the evil talking brain,
is a complicated character to discuss
since there have been a few different versions of him.
He's been in cartoons, the comics, and of course,
the latest live action Ninja Turtles movie
which I still have not seen.
He premiered and was most dominantly featured
in the classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon,
making his debut in episode two of season one.
Ricky, I am sure you know more about the cartoon than I do,
so why don't you take over?
- Sure thing.
You see, Krang and Shredder had an interesting dynamic
where they really didn't care about each other
or each other's plans.
- I must have the parts to build my new thermal generator.
- Yeah, yeah, that's nice, Krang.
- Shredder was only using Krang for his technology,
and Krang was only using Shredder, or at least at first,
because he needed Shredder to build him a new body.
- Ah, with a new body he could be a new man.
But wait, hold on, what happened to the original one?
- Great set up question.
You see, in the cartoons,
Krang was a warlord from Dimension X
who was banished to Earth.
In the process, he lost his body
and was left with a brain-like thing
with tentacles for hands.
He couldn't really accomplish much in that form,
so nagged Shredder until he finally built him
a robot body that still creeps me out today.
But this whole origin thing
does raise an interesting question.
If Krang needed a new body,
what did his original body look like?
The most telling piece of evidence
comes from an episode in season seven entitled
Invasion of the Krangozoids,
where Krang, who was fed up
with the incompetence of Bebop and Rocksteady
and Shredder's tunnel vision
of defeating the turtles and Splinter,
Krang turns to the person who is clever enough,
fiendishly brilliant enough,
and just all around good looking enough,
to carry out his evil plans.
And that person is none other than himself.
So he hops into a cloning machine
that was just laying around and cloned himself six times,
creating a council of Krangs.
- What do you think the collective noun for Krang is?
Something poetic, like a wrinkle of Krangs.
(quiet piano music)
- Anyway, the Krang begin to change.
They start developing hands and feet,
and before we know it, they take on a reptilian form.
Why does this happen?
Well, we get two pieces of information.
Firstly, one of the clones says.
- Without sufficient data, I can only speculate
that it has something to do with the cloning process.
- Not long after, Donatello proposes his own hypothesis.
- I don't get it.
How come those clone clowns are growing bodies?
- Yeah, Krang doesn't have a body.
- Not now, but he used to have one.
- Well yeah, that's right.
It was taken away from him
when he got booted out of Dimension X.
- Uh-huh, and the clones have that data in their DNA.
So their growing bodies the way
some lizards can grow new tails.
- This has led several Turtle fans to theorize
that Krang's original body was some sort of
♫ Giant bipedal
♫ Reptilian creature
♫ Giant bipedal
♫ Reptilian creature
♫ Giant bipedal
♫ Reptilian creature
♫ Was Krang's original body
♫ Dimension X ♫
- Yeah, all right, that makes sense.
The DNA blueprint for that was in the Krang copies,
and something about the cloning process
triggered their cells to start regenerating
back into their original, much more menacing form.
Case closed.
Krang looked like a giant lizard
before he was banished from Dimension X.
Cue the end card.
If you like these theories--
- Unfortunately, no.
You see, a few seasons earlier in the same cartoon series,
we see a flashback of Krang's home world,
and we actually meet some other members of his species.
- Oh, well I assume they also
looked like huge, scaly creatures.
- Nope, they look exactly like the Krang
we're accustomed to.
Brainy in a bubble walker, and one even with a mustache.
- Okay, what gives, then?
Shouldn't they look like the monsters the clones grew into?
- You would think, but there's still
one more weird inconsistency.
When Krang's Rock Soldiers show up,
they do two things consecutively
that kind of contradict each other.
One, they immediately recognize Krang
in his brainy, squishy form,
and they follow that up with asking him
what happened to his body.
How can they recognize Krang without his body
if they've never seen him without his body?
These lizard creatures,
which are implied to be Krang's original form,
look very different than the mushy pink blob
that stands before them.
So how do they make the connection
that the gelatinous form of Krang
is the same as their fearless leader?
- What if we're going about this the wrong way?
What if when Krang is referring to his body,
he doesn't mean a body in the traditional sense
the way that you and I have bodies?
We've been assuming
that there's more to Krang's natural form
than a wrinkly glob,
but what if that's not the case?
What if this is all there ever was to Krang's natural form,
and the body he keeps referring to,
the body he once had but lost when he was banished to Earth,
is simply a robotic exosuit of some kind?
Think about it.
The robosuits have clear glass fronts,
meaning the Rock Soldiers would be able to recognize
Krang's blob form both in and out of it.
The only other members of Krang's species that we see
have them and nothing else,
no other natural body that we know of.
They just are that way.
Like the Utrom!
- Sorry, the who trom?
- Okay, so David Wise, who developed the series
and created the character of Krang,
said in an interview that he looked to the comics
for inspiration for the villain.
He found it in issue three of the original run
by Ninja Turtles creators, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird,
in the form of the Utrom.
The inspiration was in the form of the Utrom.
Eastman and Laird were presumably human.
Now the Utrom looked pretty much exactly like Krang.
They even controlled android bodies like Krang does.
The Utrom, however, don't look the way they do
because they were stripped of their original bodies.
No, no, no, these are their original bodies.
They are naturally squishy and small.
In the comics, at least in the IDW run,
Krang is unequivocally an Utrom.
It's a part of his back story, is an Utrom prince.
There's even a 2003 series
which takes place in a completely different universe
than the classic cartoon,
I'm aware they crossed over before,
you don't have to write it in the comments,
but that universe's version of Krang
makes a very brief cameo appearance as an Utrom.
So in those universes of the Ninja Turtles,
Krang's original body is the body that we see.
He was never altered into a brain-like state.
That's simply how he always was.
- Okay, this all sounds really great,
but it doesn't really explain the Krangozoid clones.
How come they mutated into lizard monsters?
Doesn't this prove that their species
definitely resembles reptilian beasts?
- Maybe, but maybe not.
- Okay, you're losing me, Scott.
- Okay, hear me out.
You know how in Jurassic Park they take dino DNA
found in a fossilized mosquito, clone it,
and make new baby dinos?
Well, in real life, most likely the only DNA you'd get
from that process, if anything,
would be from the mosquito itself.
However, paleontologist Jack Horner proposed
that the simplest solution to building dinosaurs
would instead be to genetically modify the dinos
we already have, birds.
In biology, there are these things called atavisms.
Think of them like dormant genetic sequences,
things in our genome that our animal ancestors used to have
but kinda got phased out through evolution.
We still have the blueprints for them inside of us,
but they never, or at least rarely ever, get activated.
And when they do through a mutation,
that's when you get things like dolphins with extra fins,
whales with hind legs, that one is really weird to me,
and in the case of the dinosaurs,
chickens with alligator-like teeth.
- Ooh!
Baxter Stockman actually talked about that
in the Ninja Turtles sequel,
talking about how Bebop and Rocksteady
turned into a warthog and rhinoceros, respectively.
They just had that DNA buried into their genome,
though they exaggerated it greatly.
But hey, we are talking about a giant brain creature
from another dimension, so I think we can suspend disbelief
just a little bit.
- And it's through selective atavism activation
that some, like Jack Horner,
are hoping to further modify these toothy chickens
to resemble their ancient dino ancestors,
stimulate or repress certain sequences of genetic code
found in birds until we have creatures
with sharp teeth, long tails, claws instead of wings,
and an inevitable friendship with Chris Pratt,
all by manipulating genetic instructions
that are already there.
- So what you're saying is the Krangozoids
didn't grow back into their original bodies,
but more so reverted back
into what Krang's ancient ancestors may have looked like?
- Hey, like Donny said, the clones have that genetic code
in their DNA.
The cloning process must've also been
kind of a atavism activation,
causing the clones to devolve.
- [Ricky] That would explain why the clones
started freaking out when they started growing hands.
They don't have hands in modern times.
- But their lizard ancestors did,
and they must've retained the code for it in their genome.
Good sir, I think we found the solution.
- I believe so.
Krang has always looked like a chewed up piece of bubblegum
with tentacle arms.
That's what his species naturally is,
much like the Utrom that he's based off of,
even though it's never been explicitly stated
in the cartoon that that is what he is.
- The body he lost when he was banished from Dimension X
was not a natural body but a mechanical one
like the bubble walkers we see
other members of his species using.
And the reason the clones grew into reptilian monsters
is because the cloning process
activated dormant genetic sequences
carried over from their supposed lizard-like ancestors.
Case closed!
- Huh.
That's kinda anti-climactic.
We just spent 10 minutes talking
about how Krang looks like Krang.
- Yeah.
- Also, why are you titling this Comic Theory
even though we talked about cartoon the whole time?
- Uh, what did you guys think?
Was Krang's original body of the large, lizardy sort,
or was it referring more to a robotic exosuit
like that of the Utrom from which he was inspired?
Leave your thoughts in the comments
or on our NerdSync Subreddit.
Links in the description below.
Ricky, thanks so much for being here
teaching everyone about the Ninja Turtles.
Where can people find more of you and your hat?
- They can find more of this hat and face
over on YouTube.com/stewdippin
and you can find more of this voice talking about movies
over on the Flashback Flicks Retro Movie Podcast.
It can be found on iTunes and Soundcloud,
or wherever else RSS feeds go for their retro movie nights.
- Fantastic!
Also, I just wanted to update you guys on my move to Texas.
I'm finally, actually moving next week.
I know we've been talking about it forever,
but it's really happening now,
so we'll probably not have a video next Wednesday,
but we will be at VidCon at the end of this month,
so if you're also there or just in the area, come say, "Hi."
If you like these theory videos,
we've got a whole playlist of 'em.
Some of my favorites include this one
about how Superman may have died
before his famous fight with Doomsday,
and this one, about how Stan Lee
may be playing a secret comic book character
in all of his cameo appearances!
You can click right there or the links in the description
to go binge watch the whole playlist.
And make sure you hit that big sexy "Subscribe" button
so you don't miss out on all the new videos we make for you
every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
to explore the history, science, art, and philosophy
behind your favorite comic book superheroes.
My name is Scott,
reminding you to read between the panels
and grow smarter through comics.
See ya.