 In 1999 I briefly got into a storyarc on the daytime soap opera General Hospital in which the son of Luke and Laura Spencer got kidnapped and his loved ones thought he had perished in a fire. Drawn into this show with little knowledge of what had happened prior, I decided to write a story where Lucky's original kidnappers traded him to Big Louie who gets ahold of the transmogrifier to swap Lucky's mind with Donatello who has come down with a case of amnesia. Baxter Stockman also played a role in this as well and somehow it went from a brain swap story into a time travel scene where Stockman went back to 1988 in an attempt to prevent the events that lead to him being transformed into a fly, but Michaelangelo managed to stop him. In the end I realized I was more invested in the TMNT characters than the GH characters, so I scrapped the whole thing. Another time I wrote a story titled "Bizarre Conjunction" in which Leonardo and Raphael get fused together while having a feud. I sort of stole the idea from an old episode of Quack Pack where something similar happened to Huey and Dewey. Interestingly, years later Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had an episode where all four of the TMNT were stuck together via some type of bonding agent created by Donatello. Not all of my stories have involved the original cartoon interpretation of the TMNT. Around the time the 2003 series aired its season 3 finale, I decided to write a story in which the 4Kids Ninja Turtles meet Goku as he was depicted in Dragonball GT. For some reason I decided to throw in a B-story where a modified version of Professor Honeycutt's menta-wave helmet switched Donatello and Casey Jone's brains into each other's bodies. Shortly after writing this story, the fourth season of the series premiere, and when I realized Leonardo's emotional issues and the Turtles recovering from their injuries would drastically contradict what I had written, I decided to erase the story. However, before making that decision a friend on DeviantArt made this adorable fan art of my story. On very rare occasions I'll write stories that have absolutely nothing to do with the TMNT, like a Harry Potter fan fiction I once came up with where the famed boy wizard goes missing in New York City after getting shrunk by a miniaturizing charm, so his best friends Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger go looking for him. It was a fun story to write, though I kind of got caught up in having it center around Ron and Hermione's budding relationship... and what most young people like to do when they're madly in love!  When I first developed the Jephaelverse series, I decided to put my cousin Amy and some of my co-workers at Wendy's into a story, as well as the Mirage comic book TMNT. This was basically the first multiverse cross-over I came up with, as there were two of me and two Raphaels, but the real problem this particular story was I was going through a dark phase where I liked using strong language. Some people at work who I showed the story to found it rather alarming. I didn't get in trouble or anything, but I'm sure they were a little concerned about my emotional stability (I used to throw a lot of temper tantrums back then).  Every now and then I get the idea to do a follow-up story about the 2012 TMNT getting visited by their 1987 counterparts. Initially I had the idea that just 1987 Raphael and Donatello go to the CGI universe, while 2012 Leonardo and Michelangelo take their place in the 2D world. Later I would monkey with the idea that the 1987 TMNT all show up in the 2012 reality along with their Master Splinter who had heard of his counterpart's demise and wished to offer his condolences to the 2012 TMNT and then they would all sit around using Dimension X tech to view other alternate realities. Seeing as how I already did a huge cross-over like this in my Jephaelverse, I figured this idea is better off left to my imagination.  Around my early 20s I was going to do an homage to the late Saturday Night Live alum Chris Farley by writing his character Haru from Beverly Hills Ninja into a cross-over story with the live action film TMNT that would have also involved the spirits of Hamato Yoshi and Teng Shen, though a friend I was chatting with online said that felt kind of disrespectful to the memory of Chris Farley. Shortly after I had another bad idea for a cross-over where the TMNT would save the girl who went skinny dipping at the beginning of Jaws; interestingly the same friend who talked me out of the aforementioned cross-over story talked me out of that one as well!  About two decades later I came up with what could possibly be the darkest idea I've ever had, and it doesn't even involve the Ninja Turtles (atleast not directly). It was about some nameless obsessive fan of the old 1970's sitcom Three's Company. I imagined somewhere out there was this clinically depressed individual with a shrine dedicated to the original cast of the hit TV series, who to this day is very distraught over how we never got to see the late John Ritter reunite with Joyce DeWitt and the also late Suzanne Somers to reprise their roles as the lovable trio of roommates living it up in Santa Monica. I can't recall how or why this sort of idea popped into my head, but sufficed to say, it was meant to be a cautionary tale of how getting too wrapped up in fictional characters and universes could drive a person into total madness if not kept in check. Upon realizing how creepy and unsettling this story could've gotten, I dropped it completely! There are some rabbit holes you just shouldn't go into, plus once more it could be seen as disrespectful to the memory of the actors that have passed on. |