The Toxic Turtles: WWE's One-Night TMNT Tag Team That Got Booed

On March 9, 1993, just under one month before WrestleMania IX, the World Wrestling Federation rolled into the Augusta-Richmond County Coliseum in Augusta, Georgia, for a taping of WWF Wrestling Challenge. The show featured multiple previews of WrestleMania matches, including a WWF Championship match between Bret Hart and Yokozuna, The Undertaker vs. Giant Gonzalez and, of course, Crush vs. Doink The Clown. Hulk Hogan was also in action, teaming with Brutus Beefcake to defeat The Beverly Brothers.

While time has forgotten about the matches actually taped for television, a dark match has gone down in pro wrestling history for featuring knock-off versions of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, namely Tommy Turtle and Terry Turtle of The Toxic Turtles, as they faced off against WWF jobbers Tommy Stevenson & Ron Preston. 

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the brainchild of young friends and comic book authors Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, with the idea first coalescing after Eastman doodled a masked turtle armed with nunchucks to make Laird laugh. Laird then established the “Teenage Mutant” element and, taking inspiration mainly from Daredevil, Teen Titans, and X-Men, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came into existence for the first time. 

Instead of TMNT simply remaining a doodle, though, Eastman and Laird founded Mirage Studios in March 1984, with the name being inspired by the fact they were just creating the comic book from Laird’s home as opposed to an actual office. Using money from a tax refund and a loan from Kevin Eastman’s uncle, the duo published the first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with an initial 3,000-copy print run. The comic book, with more of an adult flavour than what would make TMNT famous, was quickly a success, with the first print run selling out within three weeks.

This was just the beginning, though, and TMNT boomed in popularity as the 1980s progressed. Eastman and Laird licensed the characters to Playmates Toys and over $1 billion worth of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures were sold between 1988 and 1992, with the turtles taking pop culture by storm when the kid-friendly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon hit the airwaves in 1987. A TMNT video game followed in 1989, while the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film was released in 1990. The franchise was a legitimate pop culture phenomenon. 

Duane Gill and Barry Hardy

The resident jobber WWF tag team in the early 1990s, Barry Hardy and Duane Gill were long-time friends due to living in the same apartment complex in Maryland, with Gill and Hardy watching pro wrestling matches together. 

While Hardy did not care much about pro wrestling, he was eventually recruited by the World Wrestling Federation and wrestled for the company for the first time in February 1989. When Gill spotted his friend when tuning into the latest WWF show on his television, he promptly called Hardy, and Gill began his pro wrestling training with Hardy that day.

Six months into Gill’s training, they had their first match as a tag team in Maryland Championship Wrestling and they began teaming together on the indies as Agony and Pain of The Lords of Darkness. 

An invite to wrestle as an enhancement tag team for the World Wrestling Federation was soon extended, but their Lords of Darkness gimmick was shot down as the Legion of Doom were due to debut for the WWF, so Gill and Hardy wrestled as themselves during their early WWF appearances, working their first match at a June 1990 taping of Wrestling Challenge against Demolition. 

While they couldn’t be another LOD in WWF, Gill and Hardy used a darker gimmick in the company as The Executioners, and they soon began to work matches as both themselves and under a mask in order to wrestle as many matches as possible and earn a bigger payday. Gill revealed to Rolling Stone in 2015 this did upset WWF’s Vince McMahon at one point, who exclaimed one evening, "This is not the damn Duane Gill hour. Somebody else wrestle, please!"

The team also received bookings on the US independent wrestling scene in the early 1990s, where they would don Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costumes and wrestle as The Toxic Turtles. 

How The Toxic Turtles Ended Up Wrestling In The WWF

By early 1993, Duane Gill and Barry Hardy were splitting their time between working on the indies and serving as WWF jobbers, still wrestling multiple times per night, and they would take the Toxic Turtles costumes to WWF tapings across a several-month stretch just in case they were needed to wrestle multiple times in one night yet again. 

This included at the March 9, 1993, taping of WWF Wrestling Challenge in the Peach State, and Duane Gill revealed on Wrestling Then and Now that he and Hardy, yet again, had the Toxic Turtles costumes in a “big ass bag”, but Barry Hardy had decided this would be the last night he was going to carry around the heavy costume. This confession spurred Gill into action, and he decided, “Screw it then, I’m putting it on.” 

When Hardy headed to the ring to work one of his scheduled matches which, based on Cagematch, looks to have been a two-minute squash match loss to “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, Gill put his Toxic Turtles outfit on and started dancing around the WWF locker room, much to the delight of the other wrestlers sitting backstage. 

Doing his best TMNT II: Secret of the Ooze dance, with no Vanilla Ice unfortunately, Gill ended up on the locker room floor very much in a “paint me like one of your French girls” pose when he noticed a pair of shoes next to his head. Those shoes, however, happened to belong to Vince McMahon.

"When I stop I was like this laying on the floor and there was a pair of shoes right here and I went, ‘Oh no.’ Because you could tell they were Vince’s. I stood right up and he’s laughing his ass off. He goes, ‘Who’s under there?’ I pulled the mask off, I said, ‘Hi Mr. McMahon.’  He goes, ‘I should have known. You got another one?’ I said, ‘Yes sir, we do.’ He said, ‘You and you are wrestling the Turtles next.’ I go, ‘Mr. McMahon we can’t. Barry’s in the ring.’ He goes, ‘I suggest he dress fast,'" Gill recalled on Wrestling Then and Now.

When Barry Hardy came back to the locker room following his match while covered in sweat, he found out he would have to put on a heavy TMNT costume. This ultimately proved difficult for the damp Hardy, with Gill recalling him and other WWF wrestlers picking up Hardy to try and force the costume on while he was “sweating like a pig.” This was the reason, Gill explained, why he ended up working the majority of the match. 

Once the costumes were on, though, Gill and Hardy headed to the squared circle to wrestle fellow jobbers Tommy Stevenson and Ron Preston in a dark match purely to entertain the live crowd, although those in attendance wouldn't end up being very sports entertained.

The Match

Billed from Tarrytown, Texas, Tommy (Barry Hardy) and Terry (Duane Gill) of The Toxic Turtles charged rambunctiously to the ring, with Terry donning a Michelangelo mask, while Barry Hardy was representing Donatello.

The song they used to make their entrance was just generic sounding but it would be used over and over again by the World Wrestling Federation in the 1990s and early 2000s, including for the likes of Luna Vachon, Negro Casas, Max Moon, and Brian Kendrick. 

Once the bell rang, Terry rolled straight out of the way on multiple occasions as he awkwardly shouted, “I love being a turtle” in Duane Gill’s voice as the crowd remained pretty quiet, all things considered. A double dropkick followed to more silence, with Tommy getting stuck on his back because of the sheer weight of his shell, requiring Terry to enter the ring and help him up. 

A collar-and-elbow tie-up followed as the crowd actually started loudly booing when the Toxic Turtles hit some double elbows and a spinning heel kick, as one fan even began shouting “boring” before more boos followed. 

The turtles just really weren’t over, and the match ended seconds later following a shell-assisted senton from the apron into the ring for the win, with precisely zero ninjutsu moves taking place during the two-minute match. The turtles then quickly made their way up the ramp never to be seen again in WWF or WWE.

The explanation for why they never resurfaced was quite simple. They were a blatant rip-off of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Bruce Prichard explained on Something to Wrestle: "That was a gimmick that Duane Gill and Barry Hardy did on the independents. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were a big thing and it was a gimmick they just did. Something you could never do on the national level. Certainly wasn’t anything we were going to do on TV because of the trademark. It was a blatant rip-off but, look, they had the costumes and all that. So for a dark match to entertain the crowd one night we did it. It was never considered for anything beyond that. It was just to have some fun in the dark match one night."

Decades Later…

At the time, little was known about the match, with Dave Meltzer mentioning it in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter as a “boxing Turtles tag team” having a try-out on the same night as the likes of Mr. Hughes and Mike Shaw. 

Fans would be able to officially watch the match in 2017, though, as WWE Home Video released the WWE Unreleased 1986-1995 DVD that featured 45 never-before-seen matches, including Ric Flair vs. Hulk Hogan, Taz’s WWE tryout, and Hulk Hogan saving Shawn Michaels from a beatdown. In the final match of disc two, fans could end their watch along with the Toxic Turtles. 

For the shell-based tag team, they would never wrestle again in the World Wrestling Federation. That wouldn't be the end of Duane Gill and Barry Hardy in the promotion, however. Gill and Hardy would continue teaming together as WWF jobbers into 1995 under their real-life names and as The Executioners. 

Duane Gill would ultimately become a full-time WWE talent, though, as he was brought back to the company in November 1998 as Mankind’s opponent in the first round of the Deadly Game tournament to crown a new WWF Champion at Survivor Series. 

While he would lose to Mankind in 30 seconds, WWF would continue booking Duane Gill and he would capture the WWF Light Heavyweight Championship soon after and be given the gimmick that made him famous in pro wrestling and has allowed him to continue making money to this day in Gillberg, a parody of WCW’s Goldberg. While he would finish up with the WWF in 2001, Gillberg continued to make sporadic appearances across WWE TV until 2021. 

Barry Hardy, meanwhile, would have a few jobber matches for WCW and ECW elsewhere in the 1990s before his time with any major pro wrestling company came to an end. He continued to wrestle on the independent wrestling scene until 2017.

WWE & TMNT Today

It would turn out that Duane Gill and Barry Hardy were trendsetters in terms of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles appearing on WWE programming. 

To promote the Shell in a Cell episode of Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series in September 2018, costumed versions of Leonardo and Donatello were taught how to make a pro wrestling entrance by AJ Styles, who was amidst his second WWE Title run at the time. In Shell in a Cell, Leonardo’s Primetime pro wrestling persona was heavily inspired by John Cena, while Raphael’s Red Reign was essentially Kane.

One week later, Styles would have a vignette with Raphael as he taught the turtle some of his moves ahead of coming up against the John Cena-voiced Baron Draxum in the TMNT series. 

This all came after Nickelodeon and WWE worked together with Playmates Toys in 2017 to produce a line of TMNT action figures which included Leonardo as John Cena, Raphael as Sting, Donatello as The Undertaker, and Michelangelo as Randy Savage. More TMNT-WWE action figures would be produced by Mattel in 2024 with the roles reversed, with Seth Rollins, Xavier Woods, Kofi Kingston, and Rey Mysterio as the turtles, while Cody Rhodes was Casey Jones and Roman Reigns was Shredder.