Has anyone heard of the alleged 'lost' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode?
Its name was 'Dawn of the Dread' and was one of the early season two episodes. There's no official reference to it and evidence of its existence is quite scant, but accounts that can be found seem consistent in their detail.
Leonardo wakes up and looks around him before getting out of bed. The picture quality is quite poor and the animation is jittery. There is no background music and the only sound you can hear is a ticking clock. Leonardo then mutters something to himself, but his voice seems muffled and it's difficult to make out what he is saying.
Suddenly, a male voice can be heard in the background, though the voice isn't recognizable and doesn't seem to belong to any of the show's regular characters; "Are you up yet," is all it says. It is difficult to tell if Leonardo responds to the strange voice or not, but he leaves his room and heads to the living area of the lair.
The lair seems empty; neither Splinter nor the other turtle are anywhere to be found and the living area is quite messy. He finds a pizza box on the kitchen table, but upon opening it finds a very old and moldy pizza with hundreds of insect carcasses on it. At this point, Leonardo decides to leave the lair and goes looking for his coat.
The picture suddenly switches to black for about ten seconds, as if for advertisements; some say a very faint whispering can be heard if the volume is turned up high. The scene then switches back to Leonardo walking through the sewers. The picture quality is now very poor; the backgrounds look rushed in their design and don't loop properly in their repetition.
What follows is a scene with Leonardo standing and looking into a sewer stream. He is not moving and the only animation is the slow movement of the water, with what sounds like a dripping noise playing in the background. After a few seconds, Michelangelo suddenly drifts into frame; he is otherwise motionless. He just seems to be slowly drifting by, face up with his eyes wide open in a vacant stare. His tone is sickly green and his face is slightly sunken. Leonardo stoically watches Michelangelo's clearly lifeless body drift by before slowly moving on.
Leonardo is now walking the streets. It is somewhat dark; there is no one around and none of the businesses seem to be open, with many seeming abandoned and derelict. He doesn't seem to be going anywhere, just wandering aimlessly as there is nowhere to go. He passes the channel six building; it is clearly vacant. He decides to rest on a street bench and begins testing his turtle com, but there is no reply to any of his calls and he angrily thrusts the device on the ground, smashing it.
Suddenly, the unidentified male voice reiterates, "Are you up yet," to which Leonardo doesn't seem to respond, instead just sitting and staring at his broken turtle-com; "They're gone," the voice quietly utters, followed by an extremely loud tearing scream, "THEY'RE GONE! GONE! GONE," after which Leonardo starts cringing in wild agony, screaming in pain and furiously punching himself in the head.
Loud banging and high-pitched scraping sounds now fill the scene. Strange moving black shapes start forming around Leonardo and circling him, some appearing to rush towards him in a violent manner before suddenly disappearing, their victim too afraid to look at them.
The picture goes to loud static for several minutes until it suddenly ends.
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