Before Mutant Mayhem delivered a colorful, playfully stylized riff on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the big screen, we’d already had a recent contender doing something similar on TV: Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which delivered a zany, cartoony take on the TMNT that radically overhauled their world. That overhaul wasn’t always to diehard TMNT fans’ tastes, which is why Rise came to an end after a couple of years and had its story wrapped up in a more warmly received Netflix movie a few years after that. But a new look back celebrating the series has revealed that if the show had gone on, Leo, Donny, Raph, and Mikey would’ve had a few more siblings to deal with.
According to the upcoming Art of the Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Colin Stein, being published by IDW this week (via Polygon), series creators Andy Suriano and Ant Ward revealed that future plans for the show, before it was curtailed for the movie sendoff, would’ve seen the show go back to the Turtles’ mutated origins and reveal that two other turtles were also part of the experiments that created them.
In Rise‘s version of the TMNT origin, their mutation comes about at the hands of a supernatural villain named Baron Draxum, who splices the turtles with the DNA of Hamato Yoshi (in this continuity a washed-out kung fu movie star with the alias “Lou Jitsu,” who of course still transforms into Master Splinter) and mutagenic ooze to transform them into the first members of Draxum’s mutate army. But when fans briefly got to see flashbacks to that origin late in the first season of Rise, the device containing Yoshi and the young turtles actually had six turtle vessels on it, not just four.
A new interview with Suriano in the book confirms, as fans had long theorized, that those pods contained two long-missing extra turtles, who would’ve become part of the story if Rise hadn’t been cut short. The first, according to Suriano, would’ve been a “no-nonsense eldest brother” meant to upend the sibling dynamic between Rise‘s version of Raphael and Leo, who had the typically inversed roles of Raph being the Rise team leader and Leo more of a cocky, comic support second-in-command.
The second, according to Suriano, would’ve answered another mystery that fans already briefly glimpsed: one of Rise‘s other villains, the spider-demon Big Mama, had a suspiciously turtle-esque masked guard, who would’ve been revealed as the turtles’ separated sister. “The payoff of Big Mama’s assistant would reveal that she would indeed be another turtle sibling, and we would get to see what being raised by a spider mama would do to a teenaged mutant vs. the warmth of Splinter,” Suriano added.
This sisterly reveal did actually make it into official material eventually: during a Rise of the TMNT short story in IDW’s 40th anniversary anthology back in 2024, a panel briefly saw a time-strewn Leonardo witness his brothers (and a future self) encountering the unmasked sister. Creatives associated with the show have since confirmed that the sister would’ve been a riff on Venus de Milo (who’s gone on to appear in IDW’s own main TMNT continuity herself, alongside the other female member of the team, Jennika) but wouldn’t have been named as such, instead opting for another artistic influence—the name Frida, after Frida Kahlo, has since been embraced by fans.
But beyond that, it wasn’t meant to be. Rise‘s story largely got wrapped up in the 2022 Netflix movie that sent the series off instead, seeing Leonardo step into his more traditional leadership role in the process and the team transform into less goofy siblings, beginning to look more like the classic heroes fans knew and loved—with extra turtle family members left unfound. Maybe now that it’s all out in the open thanks to the new artbook, maybe we can get a Rise comic book that introduces them into its continuity properly.
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