Dream Beaver

Dream Beavers are four oversized mutant North American beaver monsters, enemies the Turtles and new characters from Season 3 of the 2012 animated series. The Dream Beavers have the ability to infiltrate other people's dreams, according to the SDCC 2014 panel they will infiltrate the Turtles dreams in their debut.

Known Dream Beavers

 * Dark Beaver
 * Dave Beaver
 * Doom Beaver
 * Dread Beaver

History
Dream Beaver

Behind the Scenes

 * The Gary Wright song, "Dream Weaver" is credited by Wes Craven as an inspiration for A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film series where Robert Englund (voice of the Doom Beaver) played Freddy Krueger, a villain who killed people in their dreams.
 * They are a DIRECT RE-IMAGING to the Terror Bears role-playing characters from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness as created by Erick Wujcik.
 * The Dream Beavers resemble the Care Bears as both have symbols on their bellies; this is in part due to the original game characters being parodies of the Care Bears. The Beavers retain this particular characteristic of the horror-based "belly-badges" on their tummies as well as similar powers to the original Bear incarnations.
 * The Terror Bears were a reflection of the times. In 1985, around the time of their creation American Greetings's Care Bears franchise were a major hit on greeting cards, animated programs, clothing, music recordings, and a massively popular line of toys and plush animals aimed at children. While the characters have been re-launched a number of times over the decades, their popularity remains but may or may not be what at was in their original peak in the 1980s. The Terror Bears poked light-fun at the cute, friendly and charming Care Bear creatures by being the polar oposite of them. The Terrors were a small band of horrific, abused miscreant creations that hated humanity and were mostly xenophobic, violent and unstable. They tortured their human victims instead of reaching out like the large Care Bear family and touching the hearts of the humans.

Also during this time of the earliest TMNT comics from Mirage Studios; the Palladium Books Role-Playing games paralleled the darker Eastman & Laird comic-book Turtles that was more geared to a slightly older audience than say the later Turtles cartoon show of late 1980s. Bottom line; they weren't just "KID's STUFF" and were of a much more intense nature than what the Turtles would face in later media of the 80s and early 1990s.

The somewhat similar character-traits on the Terror Bears and their popular counterparts may have been an issue as to why the bears were recreated as Beavers. The sensitive nature that copyright issues are in the 21st century: four obscure characters from the TMNT's rich multimedia history being brought to the forefront worldwide on Nickelodeon's hit Turtle program may have presented legal problems.
 * The Beavers are a slightly "toned-down" version of the Terror Bears. The Bears original guise and character-actions within' the 1980s game would by some be considered to violent and frightening for children. Though the Beavers' horror-based voice actors and similar designs & powers to the Bears give nod to their more frightening roots.
 * They are the first Palladium Books based characters from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness and it's companion game books to be utilized for ANY TMNT based animation.T-bears_STARE.jpg
 * They, in part are based on works by pop-artist Tokka. In 2008 Tokka redesigned the Terror Bears that were created for the game by game-designer Erick Wujcik. Using the original Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird illustrations from the book as inspiration - Tokka played even more on the character traits of each individual bear to Erick had written. For example making Pain Bear more of a naive "bruiser" and punk character, and making Doom Bear an unstable xenophobe obsessed with the "END TIMES" and saving his brothers from the destruction of the world by destroying humanity. Although embellished and slightly exaggerated to identify each bear even more distinctly, their initial character traits as written by Erick were retained.

The initial designs were also made by Tokka as a loving tribute to Erick who had recently passed away.

The designs were presented to Steve Murphy but would not be utilized by Mirage as Steve didn't know what to do with them. Palladium had given up the rights to the TMNT games in the late 1990s and the late aughts had ZERO official Turtle Role-Playing game campaigns. Most of that RPG material was relegated to what had already been published years prior. Tokka, however did use the designs in his own personal projects.

Nickelodeon was presented the designs in 2013 after Tokka revisited the Terror Bear characters. While the story and final design revisions into the Dream Beaver characters were done post Tokka's presentation - - he did "plant the seed" for Ciro Nieli and his animation team to get the mutant villains introduced into the show. Thus allowing Tokka's tribute to Erick Wujcik to come to a full circle and would be his first major contribution, tho' small to the Ninja Turtles franchise.