[Meeting…] Krang

Today I am going to talk about Krang, a character well known to everyone because he was one of the main enemies of the Ninja Turtles in the animated series of the late 80s. Despite this, this evil brain has a somewhat curious origin, which only those who have been interested in the original Ninja Turtles comics will know.

As happened with Bebop and Rocksteady, Krang did not appear in those comics, however the concept of his origin does come from them and that is why to get to know Krang a little better we have to start talking about the Utroms.

What is a Utrom?

The Utroms are small aliens with a face, but without a body or limbs (except for some small tentacles) who are trapped on Earth and have to live camouflaged among humans, for which they use robots with a humanoid shape that they disguise until they look completely human and thus do not raise suspicions.

Despite its appearance Utroms are kind and intelligent and the only thing they want is to return to their planet, for which they try to build a teleporter that will indirectly be the cause of the origin of the Ninja Turtles, since the substance that mutated them (the Mutagen) is waste from the Utrom experiments.

The master and lord of Dimension

The design of the Utroms is quite scary and perhaps that is why the creators of the television series decided to invent their own similar looking evil alien, giving rise to Krang. The idea of ​​teleportation and space travel was also taken into account, but this time to relate it to Krang's place of origin: Dimension X.

Krang is an evil and ambitious being who enjoys making everyone suffer. It is very intelligent and has very advanced technology, but Because it's just a pink brain with tentacles, it needs allies to achieve its goals., which makes him long for his past, where he had a body and was the master of Dimension X, which he subjected and controlled with an iron fist until he was expelled and stripped of his body.

Precisely having lost his body makes Krang ally with Shredder to build him a new one, this being his priority, to the point that he is capable of sabotaging his ally's plans only for him to fail and so on. is forced to build a body for him.

The body that Krang obtained was simply a rather comical-looking robot, but with incredible abilities such as transforming his hands into different weapons, becoming giant or flying. The fact that Krang considers a robot as his body always made me doubt whether before being banished Krang had a different form or lived in a robotic body, since for many chapters we were never told anything about his original appearance.

Fortunately, the creators of the series settled that doubt with the viewers in the episode known as “Attack of the Krangazoids” where Krang, after seeing his allies fail for the umpteenth time, despairs and regrets that he cannot count on others as intelligent and capable as himself (for Krang, self-criticism does not exist, if something goes wrong it is the fault of others).

That crazy idea will lead him to clone himself and create a group made up of several Krangs. As it could not be otherwise, the first thing the clones tried was to take the leader's position, but our cruel brain had already thought of it and subdued them. As the chapter progressed, Krang's clones began to mutate, slowly recovering their original appearance, since they had not been denied the use of his body, so We finally discovered what Krang should look like. before being a pink brain.

Although there are many followers of Krang in Dimension Considering that being cruel for no reason is one of Krang's hobbies, it's no wonder that many seek revenge on him now that he's just a mostly harmless brain. One such case was Drakus (also known as Berserko), who was the chief engineer of the Technodrome (Krang's unique, spherical high-tech fortress) and who was rewarded for his hard work with forced exile and the destruction of his planet.

Other versions of Krang

In 2003, the Ninja Turtles returned to television with a new animated series, whose first seasons were inspired by the original comics, which meant that Krang did not exist, but the Utrom did.

At one point in the series, we are shown the main villain, an evil Utrom named Ch'rell who wants to destroy his fellow humans and his home planet. Ch'rell was created as a response or nod to Krang, but the truth is that at no time was he called Krang (not even when Ch'rell mentions the different names he has used in his long career) so it is worth making it clear, Ch'rell is not Krang, but he is based on him, in the same way that Krang is not a Utrom but is based on them.

As a final joke, in one of the episodes of that series two Utroms appeared walking on their tentacles on the ground and one lamented saying "I wish I had a big and strong body and didn't have to walk on these tentacles" to which his partner told him "shut up now, Krang." This cameo did not go any further, that Utrom called Krang was never mentioned again, it was simply a nod to fans of the previous series.

After finishing that television series, the Ninja Turtles remained silent until they returned in multiple ways, on the one hand we had the IDW comics (which reused many characters and ideas from comics and animated series) and on the other the return of the turtles to the small screen under the hand of Nickelodeon.

In the IDW comics it didn't take them long to rescue Krang as a character, although due to their seriousness, this version of the character was much more fearsome and less prone to making a fool of himself.

For its part, the Nickelodeon television series once again played with the concept of aliens who live hidden on Earth using robotic bodies to impersonate humans, although this time they are not Utroms, they are Kraangs and they have very bad intentions. The mastermind behind that extraterrestrial army was Kraang Prime, which we could consider the current version of the Krang we met in the 80s.

Conclusion and Recommendations

Despite representing an evil being with a past full of cruelty, Krang is an adorable character, partly thanks to the fact that the animated series that saw him born was very childish and that caused this evil mastermind to suffer many humiliating and crazy situations.

The relationship between Krang and Shredder was more similar to that of a couple who, after decades together, cannot live without each other, but do not stop despising each other and reminding each other of mutual failures in order to humiliate each other. And that is precisely what made the character endearing, plus the fact that he was a presumably intelligent being and had to suffer the humiliation of being a pink brain totally dependent on other people or gadgets to be functional, also had its charm.

Lo mejor del Krang clásico lo podréis encontrar en la serie de animación original de las Tortugas Ninja, así como en los cómics TMNT Adventures publicados por Archie Comics (donde se le mostraba algo más malvado y manipulador). También me parece muy recomendable el visionado de Turtles Forever, donde veremos a los personajes de las dos primeras series de animación juntos, lo cual significa que Krang conocerá a Ch’rell, el Utrom malvado.

Si os interesan las otras versiones de Krang, podéis echar un vistazo a la nueva serie de Nickelodeon (donde gracias a los crossovers con la serie de animación de los 80 podréis ver también al Krang clásico), los cómics de IDW y la película TMNT Out of the Shadows.