December 3, 2023:
I was halfway to letting this sit in my drafts forever and never publishing it, and then that new YT video on plagiarism came out and got my juices flowing on it again. My story here is, to my defeatist belief, a story of possible plagiarism or maybe some ideaspace lifting of my public ideas, but I've decided to leave everything but my side of it in the past. I'm no Harlan Ellison by the longest shot. What this experience did to me, however, was to create a level of mistrust and an unhealthy practice of guarding my ideas so heavily that I allowed myself to lose faith in doing anything with them altogether. I didn't trust anyone to look at my ideas and accept them, I didn't trust anyone to hear my ideas and credit me for them, and I didn't trust myself enough to believe that any of my ideas were worth hearing or writing down because a writer is their own worst critic. This practice also led me to keep all my eggs in one basket, or on one floppy disk or CD-ROM or hard drive, and that behavior of storing a lot of my writing in just one place led to me losing a great deal of it in hardware or software failures. Those ideas never could meet my expectations attempting to write them down a second time, and I gave up trying to do it. Now, I keep multiple copies of writing drafts in multiple places just in case, but I still have not made any new progress on any of it in at least three years. I'm just not in a good place right now for writing and have not been for some time, and I don't see that getting any better anytime soon. My writing now is probably loaded with improper mixed tense and passive voice errors that betray my literature degree, and I chalk all of that up to depression and fatigue. Devoting the time I have to this post alone has been too much. The story written below originally on November 14, 2023, took about eight hours out of my day and left me with a nasty tension headache. Then I just dumped it in drafts and let it sit there more than once because I get tension headaches very easily now from staring at a text screen for long periods. I let myself forget about it and came to an understanding that the tweet thread that inspired it had more truth than I thought: I really am over it. Still, I can't get away from considering myself a storyteller. I want to tell the story. It's not a story with a savory ending to it. I was never good at endings, but I can say with certainty that this, at least, is entirely my story, even if the plot suggests that someone else might have written a few parts of it.
November 14, 2023:
I realize now that I have rehashed the same "I'm over it" speech at least a couple of times in the past few years without even remembering I did it. Every time I do, I either leave it intentionally vague or end up deleting the parts that are entirely open about it because, until now, I wasn't really over it. I've developed an annoying habit in my personal life recently to become Johnny Two-Times, repeating myself so much because doing so is necessary in my work as a primary caregiver to family members with progressive dementia. A day after letting it out again and thinking I was over it, I lost a lot of sleep realizing a hint of it still remained, specifically the social anxiety and fear that someone inevitably thinks I want attention for some outlandish claim to get my fifteen minutes, so I ended up deleting a crucial chunk of it again. This time, however, it was more because I didn't like the way I worded it. It was borderline haphazard and petty, pushing it away from myself without really letting it go. I still wanted to tell that story and have it out there once and for all, but the sour taste in my mouth and the anxiety aren't there anymore, thankfully. There is a lot going on in this world to such a degree that this story has never mattered less in the grand scheme of things, but I feel prepared to tell it anyway. I'm going to tell you about Charlie and Mondo.
When I was 10 years old, my family moved to Florida, and it was there that I began to develop pretty much all of the deepest aspects of my personality. I was already an animal lover, and the natural exotic wildlife of Florida was miles above what I knew from my home state of Texas. Shortly after moving there, I saw a chameleon in a mall pet store cage one day and fell in love. The price was $45, and I was heartbroken to find it was sold to someone else before I got the money together. Looking around the store, I discovered the consolation prize that would alter my life: a cage full of large blue lizards with red spots, half the price of the chameleon. I had never seen a Tokay gecko outside of television, particularly remembering one was used as a baby dinosaur in the 1960s version of The Lost World. Despite this species being defensively aggressive and something only to be admired from the other side of the glass, I instantly fell for the look of these lizards and took one home with me. I called him Gary, and I'd barely settled on his name before I discovered he was very sick. Because he came from a mall pet store, obviously. He only lived for maybe two months in my care, and I thought that was the end of it because life was sweeping in another new direction. My family had barely settled into our new house before the landlord changed their mind and wanted to sell the house we were renting, accusing my family of pre-existing damage to the house to rob us of much-needed rent safety deposit money. We moved, and the second Florida rental house quickly became the closest thing I've ever felt to having a home. Shortly after, returning to that same pet store for fish food for my mother's gouramis that were older than I was, a pet store worker asked me how my gecko was. With a lowered head, I said he'd died. She was shocked because I'd barely had Gary. It turned out they had one Tokay left. I wasn't prepared or planning to get another gecko, but she gave him to me for free. I still remember him squirming around in her hands and biting her fingers as lizards do, proving how healthy he was, and I decided to give him the name I would have given to the chameleon I had first intended to take home. I named him Charlie.
The greatest obsession of my preteens would turn out to be the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I found the toys first, marveling over Genghis Frog and Leatherhead, and it would shock me to turn on the TV one morning and see just the last few minutes of Genghis and his brothers on an animated Turtles series I didn't know existed until that very moment. Walking through the grocery store one day, I would see Leatherhead gracing the cover of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #6, and this began my long descent into collecting comics. Charlie spent a carefree life in a luxury aquarium for the entirety of my time in Florida, never really knowing just how much of my life and identity I had attached to him. He passed away just a few short months before my family moved back to Texas, the true end of my life in Florida. I gave him a funeral. I gave him a eulogy behind heavy tears. I buried him in a fancy jewelry box with handmade trading card drawings of him. Everyone laughed at me for that. My mother thought I was being silly. I couldn't really take him out and hold him as a pet because he didn't like that, but I cared for him and admired him so much that I hyperfixated all of my other joys onto him. I was barely coming upon eleven years old, and it was the Turtles, the comics, and Charlie that made me want nothing more in that moment than to be a writer. I tried to draw and did some very rough sketches, but writing came so much easier. I found an outlet that worked. I played with my toys behind my locked bedroom door and expanded upon that play to a written format, creating new characters to share the world with them and giving them adventures with the limitless potential of my imagination. Those toys and stories were my real friends and the escape from my tortured life, and no one else understood. Then, one day, I thought, what if Charlie got mutated?
That was the name of the story. "Oh, No! Charlie Got Mutated!" If I had a decent imagination for stories, it was less so for pet names and story titles. It put me in the biggest position to try to draw, but it still didn't come out well. Nevertheless, I gave birth on the page to an anthropomorphic Tokay gecko who struggled with his fashion sense just as much as I always did. He simply wore an orange t-shirt with his name across the front of it, and this shirt had become tattered from his scaly skin and mutant growth. He also wore a simple brown straw hat and some matching brown boots. I don't know why he wore a straw hat. I just put a straw hat on him, and it stuck. He also had a gun, but this was no ordinary gun. It was a grappling gun with a little mechanical Tokay gecko head on it like a grabbing shark puppet. It turned out that Charlie's mutation also made him a genius inventor, and his mutation in this fan fiction story led him to run away from home and meet the Ninja Turtles, discovering that he shared a lot of personality and brains with Donatello. Charlie would bring a different mutant philosophy to the lore because he did not prefer to be a mutant. The Turtles had a fear of their mutation being reversed, but Charlie enjoyed the simple life of being a regular gecko. He wanted to go back home. He liked the peace and quiet, so he put his genius brain toward the best of both worlds: he discovered the means to reverse his mutation whenever he wished, letting him live incognito in his little glass cage with his owner (me) never knowing that a secret wall behind his aquarium led to a basement lab where he did all of his experiments while I slept. This was the fantasy world I had created for myself in my own bedroom. In the stories that followed, I was finding a way to deal with my own life. It was my diary with superheroes. Everyone around me was a character in my stories. Everyone had their turn at being a superhero in my world. An old doghouse in my backyard was a secret entrance to an underground tunnel. A large pine tree was secretly a crashed alien spacecraft. The pile of toys in my closet concealed the entrance to a massive underground base. I was in the happiest time of my life, and any conflict or dysfunction in the real world could be explored in my stories with some fantastic added elements.
The TMNT Adventures comic made me open up, and I wanted to share my stories. That's what I thought it was to be a writer: to spread that joy of imagination. For the first time in my life, I began writing fan letters, thanking the creators of this comic for their inspiration and telling them about my own stories. I told them about Charlie, my beloved childhood pet that I wove into fan fiction, and my childhood obsession for Charlie became so strong that I even wrote fan letters to Playmates Toys suggesting that he would be a great idea for an action figure. I even included blueprint pictures of my terrible drawings with a handful of little potential accessories. I put a lot of thought into it. What I did not put a lot of thought into were my rights as a creator, which I freely gave away just for the thought in my own mind that I could contribute in some way to this franchise that had inspired me so much. I didn't get a response initially from any of those letters nor were any of them ever printed in the letters column of the comics, but I was almost in a state of shock some time later when a new wave of toys started appearing on the shelves. I looked on the back of one of them to see the entire new line of characters available, and anyone that collected Turtles toys will remember those tiny thumbnail figure images. My jaw dropped when I saw Mondo Gecko. Who was this? How? I was flabbergasted that a gecko had joined the Turtles. The image was so tiny that you couldn't see much detail. Mind you, geckos were not media darlings at this time. I was obsessed with geckos at the time because I had one as a pet. Mondo Gecko was years before the Geico gecko, and my beloved Charlie came before them all.
It's at this point where the ultimate truth could be decided but has always been missing: an actual timeline. It is entirely possible that this is a huge coincidence and that Mondo Gecko was on a drawing board before any of my letters were written and mailed in. I've always felt like there was ample time for Charlie to have inspired Mondo, but Mondo was, of course, very far removed from my original mutant gecko character. As I said, Charlie was a Donatello-type genius. Mondo was and is to this day more a Michelangelo type. Charlie was a blue Tokay with the red spots while Mondo was clearly the same generic green Madagascar day gecko species as the Geico gecko. When I finally got the Mondo Gecko action figure, however, I couldn't help but notice so many black and white similarities between the two. Mondo had a backwards cap that looked a lot like the hat my Charlie wore. The bumpy scaly skin pattern was almost identical despite being a different color, a pattern more in tune with a Tokay than a day gecko, the raised scale bumps being too close to where Charlie's red spots were. The first Mondo figure released also had slit pupils like Charlie. Day geckos have round pupils. The comics version had round pupils. You can only tell a true first wave release of Mondo by the painted slit pupils, similar to the first wave Turtles having hollow vinyl heads. But the most glaring similarity was the tattered clothing. Charlie's clothes were tattered from his mutation while Mondo's clothes were shredded for a skateboarder style, but the tatter patterns were almost identical in their Hulk-like ripping. Childhood delusion or budding observation skills, call it what you will, but I got the impression that I was looking at Charlie in a new form, an unpainted prototype altered just enough to be a new character but with a few winks that I could not deny.
When Mondo Gecko debuted in the comics, it didn't help my suspicions because his origin was a generic young man with a pet gecko. Was it a stretch to think this was maybe a subtle wink at me personally? Could have been. Had I inspired this character through my fan letters about Charlie? Some of you might ask or argue if anyone read any of my fan letters at all, but I have proof of that, too. Some time after Mondo Gecko debuted, I received an autographed postcard in the mail from creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird thanking me for writing. Maybe they sent these postcards to a lot of fans... but the timing of everything is still weird in terms of coincidence. That postcard, to me, was the piece of evidence I needed to convince me that the spirit of Charlie was somehow in Mondo Gecko. It was at least proof that someone else had seen my idea of a mutated gecko from at least one fan letter. Maybe the TMNT Adventures writer and credited creator of Mondo never read my fan letters himself and has no clue I ever existed. Maybe the letters to Playmates were tossed in the trash as opportunistic foolishness. Were I to learn that this was the case, it wouldn't devastate my life by dispelling some grand illusion, but the coincidence alone has kept the story alive in me.
Mondo Gecko became a pivotal character in the TMNT Adventures series, one of the staple original characters from that run's first three years that would give rise to a brand new hero team called the Mighty Mutanimals. I was there for every moment of it, seeing Mondo Gecko as a new beloved character regardless of any personal attachment he may or may likely not have had to my Charlie. As the 90s progressed, so did the stories, and this series created a rich universe I loved to explore. My continuing fan fiction included them both as two distinctly different characters. The supporting cast was the heart of the Archie series, not the stars in a half shell, and many attempts were made to give the Mutanimals the spotlight. None of those attempts were very fruitful. Their own series was short-lived, and all of the hype in the letters columns about the ideas for their own animated series and toy line never came to be. The Turtles Adventures series was coming up on its tenth anniversary at this time. I'd gone from the age of ten to twenty over the course of this run, expanding my love of comics and my love of writing out into so many new areas. After the big event story involving the time traveling future shark Armaggon, I hated to admit that I did not feel the spirit of the writing in the TMNT Adventures comics was there anymore. They'd tried to do what Marvel and DC did all the time, and the real mess of it was how hard it was for me as a young collector just to keep up with every part of the story spread out over multiple issues and titles. The Infinity Gauntlet, the Infinity War, the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Archie's TMNT dabbled in big event stories. They tried a bunch of spinoff mini-series ideas that were all over the map, but the Mutanimals themselves were eventually sent back to the regular series for a back-up story. Behind the scenes, as it came to light later, book sales were obviously falling while comics were slowly becoming harder to find on grocery store and convenience store shelves, the way I'd always been forced to collect them because I didn't have access to comic shops. Then it happened. After being unable to even find the Turtles comics for a few months, missing most of the Mutanimals back-up story and filling in the gaps of the Four Horsemen story long after the fact at a flea market comic shop, I finally found the end of it. There, splashed on the final page, I witnessed the Mighty Mutanimals brutally gunned down by a group of time-traveling hitmen. Mondo, Leatherhead, and all their friends and companions were dead. I'd just been handed my first "murdered childhood" moment. I didn't even buy the issue. I stood there in the store and read it, put it back on the shelf in shock, and staggered away. Later, I intended to go back for it, but it was gone.
I didn't want to believe it. I was devastated. After killing off the Mutanimals, the TMNT Adventures series also killed off their letters column. They weren't printing any fan letters in response to this. Very shortly after, the big reveal came with even more death. Of course the very first adversary of the Mutanimals, Maligna, was responsible, having allied herself with Armaggon to alter the future. Slash, upon discovering the truth about the murder of his Mutanimal friends, destroyed the core of Maligna's hiveworld. "Terracide." Slash stayed behind to offer his surviving friends their escape, sacrificing his life as Maligna's entire hiveworld lost control and plunged into the sun. The future Turtles themselves made it clear that things were not supposed to have happened this way, and this was after the events of the Infinity Gauntlet and the Death of Superman taught me that death in comics was never permanent. I thought to myself that there had to be some plot planned for the story to correct time and restore the Mutanimals to life. There were so many clues to that, but it never happened as sales continued to dwindle. The TMNT Adventures series let the Mutanimals stay dead, replacing the final page of one issue (where the letters column used to be) with a group photo of the Mutanimals walking toward the great beyond with halos over their heads. It felt so callous to me, watching this series rebrand itself and fizzle completely away in the process of killing off everything and everyone that made it successful. It was an even greater insult to see promotional images for upcoming stories that would bring other dead series characters like Scumbug and Wyrm back to life and also involve time travel, only for the series to be canceled before any of those stories were published. The original writer of the series Ryan Brown felt that they were better off dead, and perhaps he was right. Still, what a traumatic mess it was for me at the time, not knowing his real feelings or intent, what he was going through as this universe he'd built up began to run its course in a franchise that refuses to die and keeps rebranding itself over and over, watching him tear it all down with his bare hands. For so many years, it felt like shock value to me, but now I think I see the raw emotion that was attached to it.
You'll notice that my emotional response to this story is a lot stronger than where we started. It really had less to do with the idea that one of these characters might have been based off an original creation of my own. I was more concerned about how disrespected and defeated the end of TMNT Adventures left me. I had to move on. I thought that was the end of it. When the second animated series had its crossover movie with the first animated series, Turtles Forever, that was when I said goodbye to the Turtles. I didn't, couldn't, follow them any longer. Despite devoting a big part of my childhood to them, I was no longer their audience. They'd brought in the popular and now-overused multiverse plotline, but the TMNT Adventures Mutanimals universe was still left mostly out of it save for a few tiny hints. Turtles Forever proved to me that the franchise refused to die and would keep rebranding itself over and over. That's not Johnny Two-Times talking. I repeated that one on purpose. I'll probably repeat it a couple more times before this is over. As an adult, still very much a child at heart, my world shifted. I'd moved on to hardcore collecting import Transformers and Godzilla toys, my first true loves reignited after my obsession with the Turtles had faded. I became a shopaholic as soon as I began earning an honest living, buying toys and comics with every spare penny I had as a means of escapism. It helps in writing this now to realize I've been doing that again recently, and I'm trying to move in a more practical direction with my current budget. My surviving Turtles toys, most of them broken and worn from heavy play, and most of my comics, bagged but worn from multiple readings, were all put up in storage, and I turned my eye away from the franchise as a whole. Many years later there was word that the unpublished Adventures stories might finally see print. Some closure after so many years. That, too, never came to be because the sale to Nickelodeon prevented those old stories from being told at all. There never was any closure.
When yet a third animated series debuted, I took no part in it. It was only through my nephew that I learned that this series had a new incarnation of the Mutanimals. On the store shelves, old wounds scraped open when I saw a new Mondo Gecko, this time a leopard gecko. He looked even more like Charlie than the original green Mondo did. I wasn't a starry-eyed child anymore. I was an adult seeing the Mutanimals simply reimagined instead of their original story having a fitting end to it, and here was this character still being used that may or may not have been based on my idea. Whether or not it was, it was just as much an alteration of the Adventures Mutanimals away from Ryan Brown's intent. I didn't want anything to do with the Turtles anymore, but they were still everywhere. They were always going to be everywhere, so I just had to fine-tune my aversion to ignoring them as much as possible. Truth be told, it wasn't even the only time I had suspicions of a story idea being lifted from me. The second time came with a Dark Horse Godzilla story. Dark Horse claimed they were not allowed to take submissions for stories based on major licenses, but I did not learn that until after submitting a story idea to them and asking them for advice on how to break into comics. They were the nicest people about it and sent me a script template package that became my bible for many years, but a few years after that, they published an arc in their Godzilla series that felt too familiar to me. You see, the story I'd submitted to them was a Godzilla vs. Predator crossover, and suddenly here was a Godzilla story with aliens hunting Godzilla. Another coincidence, probably, but it's the same coincidence all over again. Another idea I had shared, and the exact same people with whom I'd shared it had put out a very similar story some time later. It was around that same time that I had a lot of Godzilla fan fiction going on (unfinished chapters are here in old blog posts), and one of those ideas was a Dark Horse Biollante comic series. I wrote a letter to Toho about that idea, and they threatened to sue me for copyright infringement. For fan fiction. That I wanted to submit to Dark Horse. Which had a legal publishing license at the time. Because I was an honorable and honest person and knew these characters belonged to someone else. I know I didn't write a very professionally letter, but I know I made it pretty clear I didn't want my ideas to bypass any legal channels. Apparently, it's copyright infringement even to think about a story idea for a character you don't own, so I guess we're all going to jail. Anyway, I moved away from the comic and just settled on fan fiction to continue the movies and purely satisfy myself... and to torture a college creative writing class with all of it.
But I digress. Ignoring the Turtles outright became impossible when another new movie was announced for 2023. Again, I paid no real attention to the news of this, but then I saw a poster image that sent a jolt down my spine. "Paul Rudd is Mondo Gecko." A Tokay gecko. With an orange shirt. And what looked an awful lot like a straw hat but maybe was some blonde hair underneath a skater cap? I was looking directly at Charlie. This wasn't Mondo Gecko. This was Charlie. My Charlie. I tried to laugh it off, thinking there was no way my original crude notebook paper sketches of Charlie could have led to this. This had to be the biggest cosmic coincidence of all time that two Tokay gecko characters were wearing an orange shirt. Orange and blue are colors used together a lot. My high school band uniform was orange and blue, but I didn't first lay eyes on that uniform until after Charlie died. It had to be impossible. There couldn't possibly be a copy still on file in an office somewhere of my Charlie action figure blueprint. I wouldn't dream of accusing the designer of this Tokay Mondo of plagiarism, and I'm not being sarcastic when I say that. But how?
I suffered from a deep depression after seeing that image. As of this writing, that was four months ago, July 2023. In my heart, there was no doubt in my mind that this never was a coincidence. Even if it was a coincidence, it couldn't be. This was the stream of consciousness that tumbled through my head trying to convince myself that this was maybe not what it appeared to be, even though it had to be, and even if it had to be, I wouldn't and couldn't do anything about it anyway. If Geoffrey T. Williams couldn't get anything from a lawsuit against Jurassic Park, then what chance did a little nobody like me have trying to make the same case? Not to mention the fact that I still cherished my unspoiled childhood memories of Charlie and wanted to keep them as they were. They were all I really had left of that time in my life. I didn't want recognition or compensation or attention. I still don't, regardless of any attention telling the story might bring. The spirit was more important to me than this story, but this was still my story.
When nostalgia marketing started giving us new Turtles figures based on the old cartoons, video games and comics, my emotional connection to them slowly died off. I had no attraction to these figures, especially with their high collector price tags, but something in me sort of snapped when I saw a new Slash figure based on the Adventures comics. He brought tears to my eyes because I never forgot that last comic panel showing the tears in his eyes. Why shouldn't I feel this way? Why shouldn't any old fan of the Mutanimals and the Adventures series feel a little insulted by this marketing? It's only gotten worse with further releases of Mutanimals figures that don't look appealing to me at all. From NECA, a company known for some of the best figures out there, no less. The Mutanimals figures they are marketing are all cartoonish yet appear to be trying to do the same thing the series seemed to try years ago: follow the inspiration of other franchises to get sales up. Suddenly we have Mutanimals figures that look like an amalgam of the original cartoon-based art with some edgy black streaks of light and shadow like they're trying to be Todd McFarlane toys. Of course, no young fan would look at these figures and think their story ended with them all being murdered in a hail of gunfire, and I don't see how any adult fan would even want these reminders of a hurtful past. No decent parent would admit to their child that the cute Jamaican werewolf with the big Wile E. Coyote eyes was gunned down by robot bikers from the future or that the cute little angry fish guy caught a stray bullet from wildlife poachers. Who came up with the bright idea to market these figures at all when their own writer wanted to leave them dead and buried? No, really. What were you thinking?
I think it was seeing those figures after the Tokay Mondo promotional poster that ultimately absolved me of all these feelings I've had for so many years. Seeing Wingnut and Screwloose on a store shelf made my childhood heart hurt, but Dreadmon's big cartoon eyes gave me a guttural belly laugh. It showed me that the disrespect to these characters as marketing gimmicks for twenty-five years was never going away. The franchise refuses to die and keeps rebranding itself over and over, so I just had to let it go and not let it consume me or take over my whole identity... which is basically why the Adventures writer decided to kill them all off in the first place. Unhealthy social media fandom and global events had a lot to do with it, too. It just didn't matter anymore. Frankly, I already crossed that unhealthy road in my early twenties. At the same time as the Mutanimals were lying dead in a pool of blood, I was trying to cope with violent domestic abuse in my family, and I should have been in therapy. Writing was my therapy, and my superhero stories took some dramatic turns that probably would have made a good novel. I'll never forget what I tried to do with my primary superhero character in high school to steer him away from the Turtles inspiration and make him all my own. Unfortunately, it didn't get any less derivative because the character was just an alien reptile Captain Marvel: a kid in an adult superhero body, granted powers on the outside that concealed his youth and inexperience with the world. Just like me because he was me, trying to cope with serious adult issues as a child because most of the adults in my life behaved like children. I'd shifted my writing to a lot of prose, and I spent a lot of time on a scene in which my young teen superhero came upon a domestic abuse situation that he wasn't equipped to handle mentally. A man had beaten a woman nearly to death in this scene, leaving her bloody and naked on their living room floor, and my superhero character stumbled upon the scene after the fact, nearly suffering a complete breakdown from it because it was too heavy for him. This scene was almost biographical. After I wrote it, the family abuser went into my writing folder and read it without my permission. He seemed... affected by it, seeing the implications that it stemmed from sins he himself had committed already, but barely one year later, he almost strangled me to death when I finally built up the courage to try to stop his abuse, leaving me bloody and almost naked on our living room floor before he was arrested. Perhaps you can better imagine now how much it impacted me to watch the Mutanimals die just a few years later in such a brutal fashion. They were fiction, true, but they spoke to a part of my reality.
My dreams of becoming a writer slowly faded with the realization that I wasn't meant to be a teacher, either. The years I spent in college toward that felt wasted as the stars in the universe of my imagination went dark one by one. I tried to write new stories outside the realm of fan fiction, deciding that the gritty autobiographical stuff was not for me and that I truly just wanted to entertain children. I still wanted Charlie to be at the center of that for a time with children's books as well as an idea for an educational children's puppet show. I never finished or pursued any of those ideas, and I lost the entirety of the puppet show-- nearly a hundred pages of full character details, bios and episode scripts-- in a hard drive failure. I couldn't begin to remember most of the characters. It's all a blur. A radio DJ who was a Cyclops. A giant flying dragon fish that carried a circus on its back through inter-dimensional wormholes, based on a dragon fish I had as a pet at the time. A chaotic little furry critter that was a cross between a rabbit and a squirrel or something, and it had an obsession with collecting cherries that lent to math stories. And Charlie. Always with his orange shirt and his little brown hat, this time managing a traveling space carnival on a children's puppet show that, in my mind, probably would have been on The Sci-Fi Channel on a Sunday morning. No matter where I put him, his look never changed. My poor dragon fish eventually knocked the protective cover off the tank filter and wedged itself inside the filter hose, and I didn't get to it in time. The Geico gecko eventually came along, and I convinced myself from a marketability standpoint that Charlie's time had passed and that my little gecko universe ideas, were they to be pursued for any publication, were never going to be seen as anything less than derivative despite being born many years earlier. From Charlie in that little glass aquarium in the corner of my bedroom. He was dead and buried, and so, too, were his stories.
If Charlie inspired Mondo, then did Mondo in turn make geckos more noticeable in media than they'd been before, leading perhaps to the Geico gecko? I'm not making that connection. That's crazy. I'd no sooner take credit to that outrageous extreme for inventing geckos, or else I'd be huddled in the corner of a white room right now instead of writing this. Over the years, however, several people in my personal life have heard Charlie's story from me, and every one of them came to the conclusion that Mondo was too similar to Charlie for it to be a mere coincidence. Maybe it was the most enormous coincidence and they and I were both wrong. It's been thirty-five years since Charlie and the Turtles both came into my life, and I'm not that person anymore. That lore was dead and buried twenty-five years ago, and I finally came around to agreeing that it was better that way. The last few tiny shreds of that fell off like shedding gecko skin, and despite figuratively digging up Charlie's grave and burying him again several times over the last several years, I'm over it. I want to let it rest, but these franchises keep reanimating piecemeal Frankenstein monsters with their characters, many containing only fragments of the spirit of their originals or no fragments at all. This may come off as an insult to some of the new writers or voice talents involved in these new iterations of the characters, and that's not my intent. I have a lot of love and respect for their work and understand the love they themselves have individually for the characters, but I'm talking about this from the perspective of commercial franchising as a whole, its past, present and future. No matter how much love you put into these characters, someone else ultimately owns and controls them, and they are forcing you to fragment the spirit of these characters whether you see it that way or not. To keep the franchise going and to keep making a profit from it. They don't care nearly as much about the soul of these characters as you or I do, and we've already seen it happen before. Seeing Mondo depicted as a Tokay with an orange shirt makes me tilt my head in some obvious level of astonishment, but that's all it does now. I'm too tired now for even the possibilities to needle me anymore. None of it ever really mattered and especially doesn't matter now, and I feel free of it. Sadly, a lot of creators involved in large media franchise work are not and never will be free of the exploitation they suffer. I'm a nobody and a never-was. I was just a fan who wrote a bunch of letters and never truly pursued the craft. There are real victims out there with more important stories. Somehow, I've been able to sit down and write this biographical tale without feeling what I used to feel. It didn't need to be told. I'm mainly sitting here writing this because it's the only thing taking my mind off greater cruelties happening in the world. I was going to be more specific, but I'm not trying to draw even more attention to this story with any topical buzz words. I don't expect anyone to read this any more than I expect anyone to listen to or read anything else I've ever had to say, but I wanted to say it because I've never felt more capable of saying it than I do now. Maybe there is still more to say, but for now this is where I feel this story ends for me. I don't know what I'm opening myself up to here. I'm not trying to fire shots at any fandoms or creators, nor am I trying to stake any absolute claims one way or the other. This is just my story the way I saw it, with all the information I had at my fingertips, and a few memories contained herein might have been blurred and skewed with time and lack of citation research. If anyone can glean anything positive from it to apply to their lives, then I'm happy for that. If anyone wants to dismiss it all as childish foolishness, honestly I'm fine with that, too. It was worth the tension headaches either way.
