color coded brothers guide

written april 15, 2024 after a friend mentioned having trouble remembering which duck was dewey and which one was louie. originally posted to twitter.

as a Color Coded Brother enthusiast, i take to learning the colors, names, and age orders of new sets pretty quickly, and made this guide for a friend. it was meant to be helpful but... unsure if it actually was, lol.

click each image to view it on its own/in full. text in the images will be compiled under each slide.

here's a quick guide to my color-coded boys :)

i’ll be going over names, age order, and colors - everything else is your prerogative. i’ll also recommend how best to memorize 👍

ducktales

let’s start with the latest fixation, the duck triplets - they are the simplest bc they are only three and their names are pretty easy.

for these guys, i recommend learning age order first, before colors.

this is bc it’s easy: most of us know ducktales from childhood, so we already know the order in which to say the names. it’s been said many times. (no one ever says "dewey louie and huey". just sounds wrong.)

if you remember how to say it, you know the age order! it goes huey, dewey, and louie.

• PS take note that they’re all spelled differently!!
• one way to remember the spelling is to shorten the hyoo/doo/loo sounds to the words that closest resemble that sound (hue/dew/lou)
• i guess you could make the doo sound into the word “do” but doey just looks wrong, and looks too much like huey. you’d know to self-correct

you might also notice as we go through my color coded boys that red tends to go first, then blue. not always, of course, but it applies to the ducks!

their colors are red, blue, and green.

• huey is red (red first - it’s also first in the rainbow)
• dewey is blue (blue second - also if you know dewey’s name, you can associate dew = dewdrop = water = blue)
• louie is green (whatever color’s left. also L for Leaf green?)

osomatsu-san

why would i do the matsunos next, even if they’re SO MANY and they have difficult names??

why because they follow the red-blue-green order already, so you’re already part of the way there!

i recommend learning ages + colors together before tackling names. you can also chunk them into two sets of 3, bc you already know the first half.

red, blue, green: this is the 1st set. you know this order from the duck triplets

• purple: first color in the 2nd set is a combo of the first two in the 1st set.
• yellow: putting this in the middle makes the 2nd set a nice palindrome (PYP)
• pink: pink is baby. that's it

as for the names... i cannot help you. they all end in -matsu, at least, so all you have to recall r the first halves of the name. still, it can be an ordeal!

• oso: red first, and O = one.
• kara: blue second. K in sign language is (not counting thumb) 2 fingers up
• choro: chlorophyll... leaf... green????
• ichi: ichi = 1 = 1st in this set of three. also, 4 letters in "ichi" = 4th brother.
• jyushi: i dont know about this one. you’re on your own.
• todo: i dont know about this one either. you’re on your own.

tmnt: rise

wow that sure was an ordeal!!! let’s go back to western media.

the tricky thing about the turtles is:

1. age order is not consistent across iterations. (you’ll see this when we get to the mume turts.) AND
2. they have crazy long italian names, except for one of them

but the good thing is that the names match the colors in each iteration, so no matter what version of the turtles you get, you’ll always know which one is which one :)

so for now, let’s learn names and colors before we tackle age order.

• raph (raphael) is red: this one’s easy bc R = R!
• leo (leonardo) is blue
• donnie (donatello) is purple
• mikey (michelangelo) is orange
• not super sure how to make mnemonics for these three. i’m hoping putting the names in the colors is helpful...

a note about the rise turts and age order:

1. we know for sure that in this iteration, raph is the eldest and mikey is the youngest.
2. HOWEVER! there is nothing in canon in the show that states who is older between leo and donnie.
• but my personal headcanon (and confirmed by one of the directors, though on twitter only) for the rise turts, aligning with the color rule that red is first and blue second, is that leo is second then donnie is third.
• so let's go with that.

tmnt: mume

(Please see bolded edit below.)

now that you’ve presumably mastered the rise turts’ names, ages, and colors, THROW AWAY YOUR NOTES!!!!!!!

mume is complicated bc there isn’t a consistent canon age order — the nick.com articles with purported age order got deleted, AND there’s conflicting info. nick.com stated that the age order was leo -> raph -> donnie -> mikey. BUT the artbook states that donnie is the youngest, and makes no mention of the others’ age order. what goes on??

EDIT 241021: it turns out mikey is the youngest in this iteration as well. it's implied in the newest game (Mutants Unleashed) that he is the baby of the family. (link.) so the only ones who've flipped orders are leo and raph.

since you already know the colors, a bit of context:

mume is a rare group (in my study of four color coded brother sets lmfao) where blue goes first and red goes second.

HOWEVER this is actually more aligned with classic TMNT. most iterations of TMNT usually have leo as the eldest or at least the leader.

• you can then make the mnemonic "leo = L = leader" :)

rise was actually a pretty Fresh take on the turtles - they made raph eldest and leader (at least in the beginning). that’s all... just wanted to share........ maybe it is helpful...

cheat sheet!

i am not transcribing this, i'm sorry... please just see the slide... (EDIT 241021) also please remember that mikey is the youngest in both...