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!

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.

The lovable ghost just wants to make friends, 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 the Friendly Ghost has silently persisted for decades even though literally nobody can remember ever watching the show.

"I don't know what that is."

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.

Casper kind of sucks at being a ghost.

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 win lifelong companions 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!

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 Candy Kong and Yoshi has ... Birdo.

It's all the same in the dark. Right?

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 .

"Bowser likes to pee on women because it makes him feel dominant -- is that bad?! Press B to breathe fire!"

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 shits 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.

The exact quote from the game: "It always wears the skull of its dead mother, so no one has any idea what its hidden face looks like." Originally, the game designers were going to name the creature "Orphan," but they wisely went with "Cubone" instead because it sounds like "cute" and "bone" and these kids -- they're not exactly discerning critics who want to appreciate the subtle lessons that tragedy teaches us, OK?

Although the video games and cartoon never explain why the mother of every single Cubone suddenly dies, it is accepted that it's a specieswide event. On the downside, that leaves a lot of worrisome, unanswered questions. On the upside, at least we're spared having to watch the darling little Cubone wrest the skull from its own mother's corpse.