Board Thread:New on TMNTPedia/@comment-27896416-20161207160823/@comment-995426-20190930013942

I'll try not to rehash too much, but we already discussed this in great detail in another thread: Thread:89076

There were a lot of easter eggs involved in Mikey and Leatherhead's scenes. Not quite as heavily as with Warren and Hypno, but a lot which I was diligent to capture as GIFs. Come to your own conclusions what you want about to think about Mikey and Leatherhead as a pairing, but the show played with it too heavily for it to be dismissable out of hand. It seems they may have seriously considered it, at least earlier in the series' run.

But yeah, age was always going to be a weird issue with Leatherhead. He was almost certainly born on Earth less than a year before meeting the Turtles, and aged in Dimension X an undetermined amount of time. He lacks the social experience to have grown up like kids do, or even the way the Turtles did, so whatever age Leatherhead was, he was still being introduced to all of it for the first time. Since the Turtles themselves had also only recently been allowed to go out and meet people in the world, but still had their experiences growing up with each other, this effectively made them more mature than him. Leatherhead was deeply in touch with his own feelings and earthy wisdom, but so was Mikey, and Mikey was certainly otherwise pretty dumb and immature. Being an alligator, Leatherhead was already going to be very big as soon as he hit puberty, and every animated version I can remember also had a deep voice. It is entirely plausible he could have been as young as a teenager already deep into puberty. In any event, it was clear that green Leatherhead was to be seen as "young" Leatherhead, just as grey Leatherhead was certainly much, much older.

Even after Leatherhead aged an additional many decades, Leatherhead's memories and bond with Mikey aged for just as long. Likewise, to Mikey, Leatherhead had only disappeared a year or so ago, so his memories of Leatherhead were still young. Though they had very different physical ages by then, each of their memories of the other had aged appropriately along with themselves, so they could still effectively be peers. And it wasn't like Leatherhead was going to get any more of a social development in Dimension X anyway.

Then come the...ahem...legal aspects. In the first two seasons, I assumed the characters on Earth aged one year per season. Since Mikey by season 3 would have been turning 17, he would have actually been becoming legal by then no matter how old Leatherhead was physically. (Though if you went by Leatherhead's Earth age, he was the one who still wouldn't be legal for another decade and a half.) But then they revealed none of the Turtles had aged since season 1, even after two seasons, the changing seasons, and mentions of the Technodrome incident "last year" (referring to "Showdown").

Annoying. It's just one of many reasons season 3 took a huge nosedive in my opinion and the series never subsequently recovered. It rendered all meaningful questions about Mikey and Leatherhead moot, because the entire continuity was increasingly breaking itself. My joke at the end of season 3 was that Splinter was murdered, but it was everyone else who was already dying on screen. In comparison, IDW has done a much, much better job at maintaining meaningful continuity over years of publication; TMNT comic readers tend to have longer memories than TMNT television target audiences, so comic writers have to keep well-studied or readers will notice.