donkey kong

the teenage mutant ninja turtles were inspired by a dream about fighting a turtle. kevin eastman was punching it and grappling it for what felt like hours but never got anywhere. it absorbed all his attacks and seemed to grow larger and larger. finally it enfolded him in its arms (the turtle had arms in the dream). the last feeling he had before waking up was tasting the briny cold sweat on the turtle's bicep as it slowly and implacably began to choke him out. when he woke he felt no sense of relief. he called his friend peter laird who had previously disclosed his own intensely sexual series of dreams about fighting turtles. they met up and spent several hours drawing grimacing, menacing faces until they were agreed that this was what the turtle looked like. eastman declared that if a man could attain the "aspect of the turtle" then that man would be unstoppable in all of his business, philosophical and physical endeavours. exploring the concept through a self published black and white miniseries seemed to confirm the truth of this idea. many people were terrifically enthused about the turtles. "in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." however laird despised the turtle and wanted no share of its power, claiming the destiny of men is to reign over beasts. in the popular cartoon he contrived a series of horrible animalistic men who would mistreat and brutalize the turtles in order to diminish their psychic power, yet somehow all of these plans came to naught. increasingly perturbed by a series of unsuccessful collaborations, vanilla ice etc, which seemed to prove the turtle in the dream was taking action in the physical plane to frustrate his ambitions, he announced his new plan to become a kind of human turtle, or turtle man, first enclosing himself in a metal suit covered in spikes and then later creating a large mechanical baby to ride around in the stomach of as a grotesque travesty of a homunculus. rumours of his plans circulated in garbled form and were obliquely referenced in the dana carvey movie master of disguise. eastman trained for several years until he could do the snarling turtle mouth. he can sometimes be seen in the back yard of his house in california, firing a rifle into the sea.