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chuckroThis week, I've managed to catch up on some of my cartoon-watching, which included Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light, Star Trek: The Animated Series, Thundercats, and selected episodes of Reboot.
Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light is a show that, while severely merchandise driven, had a good concept and didn't get a fair shake. The backstory is that on the planet Prismos, the age of science has ended and a new age of magic has begun, so two groups of knights are given the power to transform into totem animals, to use one-shot power staves with various effects, and to activate magical vehicles. They set up competing kingdoms and most of the episodes are either about a scheme the Darkling Lords come up with to conquer the Spectral Knights, or about a magical disaster that affects both teams and they need to work together to stop it. The plots are pretty typical for cartoon shows of the era (or later eras--at least one was recycled as a Beast Wars plot). They occasionally snuck in something a little subversive: For one, as the characters all wear armor, they'd occasionally get to hit each other with their weapons! And in my favorite scene, the good guy's Smurfette ("Galadria"), having been forced to work as a slave to spoiled formerly-rich folks, reveals that she doesn't know how to sew (she's a knight, after all) but the team's big bruiser Cryotek does. The show's biggest problem is that almost all of the characters are 30-ish white guys who are all drawn alike (the bad guys all have nearly identical facial hair; all but one of the good guys are clean-shaven with crew cuts) so you have a really hard time telling who is who. And apparently, had they gotten a second season, they were planning to add more characters!
Also, there's some bias because even though I only saw two or three episodes when they first aired (and I have two issues of the six-issue comic, the last two of which were never published), I have almost all of the toys, which use holograms for the totem animals and power staves. And they're awesome.
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Star Trek is normally on the softer side of sci-fi, but Star Trek: The Animated Series pushes that up to 11. There's a reason official canon ignores most of these episodes--force field belts, psionic powers galore, and 50-foot-tall clones of Spock. But the episode that killed me was "The Magics of Megas-Tu", in which the Enterprise goes to the center of the Universe, where matter is stil being created, where they find a portal to another dimension where physical laws are different and apparently concentrating hard enough lets anyone do magic. They meet a Pan-like figure called Lucien (later revealed to be Lucifer), and his people apparently came to Earth for centuries to teach and do magic and left just after the Salem witch trials.
There's also a mini-game you can play while watching, trying to figure out how many of the characters are being voice by James Doohan (Scotty and at least one alien per episode) or Nichelle Nichols (Uhura and pretty much every other female character). According to Doohan's autobiography, the rule was they had to pay you double if you voiced four or more characters in an episode, so he was constantly trying to get cast in as many roles, recurring or otherwise, as he could.
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Thundercats was, like many 80s cartoons, toy-driven and limited in what they could do. The Sword of Omens couldn't actually be used to hurt anyone (though Lion-o occasionally cuts vines or ropes with it, or digs it into a cliff face to stop from falling), the bad guys are seriously incompetant, there's a moral at the end of every episode, and you're pretty sure that they were ready to make a toy out of every new character or vehicle that appeared. Oh, and I'd forgotten how bad some of the voice acting was--at times it sounds like they're seeing the script for the first time.
Thing is, though, you can tell that the writers and animators actually cared, even if the producers didn't. (Xannoside tells me the animators went on to found Studio Gibli, and it shows, as even on a small budget with a lot of stock footage, the animation is quite good for the era. And it improves after the first season.) The episodes are each a story unto themselves, usually relatively short and simple, but even in the first season there was an ongoing plotline and development of events that becomes clear watching the series in order.
Among other things, as the series went on, Lion-o became less of an idiot. On one hand, it's annoying to see the leader of the Thundercats constantly be the one holding the idiot ball, but on the other hand, the premise is that he's a 12-year-old in an adult body and that it's a hereditary position, so it actually makes a decent amount of sense that he'd be impulsive and lack foresight and the rest of the team had no choice by to follow him and periodically bail him out.
I only have two discs of the first season right now; I'll probably try to get more.
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And speaking of shows with plotlines that developed and got better and more complex as the seasons went on, we have Reboot. I culled myself a little "best of" set from the first two seasons, and it's pretty clear where the show was going (darker, grittier) as you got out of the episodic and goofy first season into the serious, scarier second. They get much deeper into the mythology of the setting and the origins of some of the characters and squeeze a lot into ten episodes. Again with the sentiment of hunting down the later seasons (which I think are actually available on DVD).
Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light is a show that, while severely merchandise driven, had a good concept and didn't get a fair shake. The backstory is that on the planet Prismos, the age of science has ended and a new age of magic has begun, so two groups of knights are given the power to transform into totem animals, to use one-shot power staves with various effects, and to activate magical vehicles. They set up competing kingdoms and most of the episodes are either about a scheme the Darkling Lords come up with to conquer the Spectral Knights, or about a magical disaster that affects both teams and they need to work together to stop it. The plots are pretty typical for cartoon shows of the era (or later eras--at least one was recycled as a Beast Wars plot). They occasionally snuck in something a little subversive: For one, as the characters all wear armor, they'd occasionally get to hit each other with their weapons! And in my favorite scene, the good guy's Smurfette ("Galadria"), having been forced to work as a slave to spoiled formerly-rich folks, reveals that she doesn't know how to sew (she's a knight, after all) but the team's big bruiser Cryotek does. The show's biggest problem is that almost all of the characters are 30-ish white guys who are all drawn alike (the bad guys all have nearly identical facial hair; all but one of the good guys are clean-shaven with crew cuts) so you have a really hard time telling who is who. And apparently, had they gotten a second season, they were planning to add more characters!
Also, there's some bias because even though I only saw two or three episodes when they first aired (and I have two issues of the six-issue comic, the last two of which were never published), I have almost all of the toys, which use holograms for the totem animals and power staves. And they're awesome.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Star Trek is normally on the softer side of sci-fi, but Star Trek: The Animated Series pushes that up to 11. There's a reason official canon ignores most of these episodes--force field belts, psionic powers galore, and 50-foot-tall clones of Spock. But the episode that killed me was "The Magics of Megas-Tu", in which the Enterprise goes to the center of the Universe, where matter is stil being created, where they find a portal to another dimension where physical laws are different and apparently concentrating hard enough lets anyone do magic. They meet a Pan-like figure called Lucien (later revealed to be Lucifer), and his people apparently came to Earth for centuries to teach and do magic and left just after the Salem witch trials.
There's also a mini-game you can play while watching, trying to figure out how many of the characters are being voice by James Doohan (Scotty and at least one alien per episode) or Nichelle Nichols (Uhura and pretty much every other female character). According to Doohan's autobiography, the rule was they had to pay you double if you voiced four or more characters in an episode, so he was constantly trying to get cast in as many roles, recurring or otherwise, as he could.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thundercats was, like many 80s cartoons, toy-driven and limited in what they could do. The Sword of Omens couldn't actually be used to hurt anyone (though Lion-o occasionally cuts vines or ropes with it, or digs it into a cliff face to stop from falling), the bad guys are seriously incompetant, there's a moral at the end of every episode, and you're pretty sure that they were ready to make a toy out of every new character or vehicle that appeared. Oh, and I'd forgotten how bad some of the voice acting was--at times it sounds like they're seeing the script for the first time.
Thing is, though, you can tell that the writers and animators actually cared, even if the producers didn't. (Xannoside tells me the animators went on to found Studio Gibli, and it shows, as even on a small budget with a lot of stock footage, the animation is quite good for the era. And it improves after the first season.) The episodes are each a story unto themselves, usually relatively short and simple, but even in the first season there was an ongoing plotline and development of events that becomes clear watching the series in order.
Among other things, as the series went on, Lion-o became less of an idiot. On one hand, it's annoying to see the leader of the Thundercats constantly be the one holding the idiot ball, but on the other hand, the premise is that he's a 12-year-old in an adult body and that it's a hereditary position, so it actually makes a decent amount of sense that he'd be impulsive and lack foresight and the rest of the team had no choice by to follow him and periodically bail him out.
I only have two discs of the first season right now; I'll probably try to get more.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And speaking of shows with plotlines that developed and got better and more complex as the seasons went on, we have Reboot. I culled myself a little "best of" set from the first two seasons, and it's pretty clear where the show was going (darker, grittier) as you got out of the episodic and goofy first season into the serious, scarier second. They get much deeper into the mythology of the setting and the origins of some of the characters and squeeze a lot into ten episodes. Again with the sentiment of hunting down the later seasons (which I think are actually available on DVD).
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Date: 2010-06-22 03:40 pm (UTC)