Peeking In On The ThunderCats

I can’t tell you why I was looking up ThunderCats episodes, not without being ashamed. But there was a time when I was like thirteen when the show was really extremely kind-of important-ish to me and I wouldn’t miss an episode. It was a good show for not missing an episode. It centered centering on a small band of cat-people refugees on a planet the show could never quite decide was or wasn’t Earth. They’d have adventures in seeing whose voice actor could most awkwardly place the stresses in their line readings. Also there was the episode which made it clear the ThunderCats, and galactic society at large, had lost the technology of “soap”. This suffices to explain why they never went to restaurants. There’s no way Galaxy County’s Board of Health would allow anyone to prepare food under those conditions. It makes me wonder where people go to have awkward parties after business hours with co-workers.

I don’t remember anymore why I stopped watching the show. I don’t think I lost interest in the basic premise. I mean, it’s cat-people refugees who manage to talk the local cyborg teddy bears into building an impractically large cat-shaped fortress for them. That’s the sort of thing everybody wants to see. And they go on to build a high-speed tank and, later, a spaceship. These are things to admire. If I were one of a half-dozen refugees of humanity thrown onto an alien planet I’d be hard-pressed to finish building a vacuum-based pasta extrusion machine. These guys would extrude one without even calling on the guy whose legs are rotary drills that I’m pretty sure I didn’t just imagine. I must have just got busy what with progressing in age to like fifteen and being very busy keeping everybody out of my room.

I kind of knew they kept making the show even after I stopped watching. I should have written to tell them they didn’t need to bother. Maybe they would’ve anyway; they had got the hang of making these episodes. I seem to have wandered off from the show sometime in its second season. They finished out that season and made two more after that. They kept adding new characters, and new toys, and at one point they even gave the characters a whole new planet to putter around in. Two whole planets seems like a lot for a dozen cat-people to share, but I understand the logic. Planets were popular back then. You maybe remember how for Christmas 1986 people were lining up for days in the hopes Toys R Us would have even a measly Kuiper Belt Object on the shelves.

“Shoo! Get Out!” Toys R Us store managers, dressed as giraffes, would say as they came in to face a line of shoppers in the morning. “We’re selling Amigas this year, if Commodore can ship any that aren’t on fire!” But they wouldn’t listen. It would be madness to ignore that sort of demand. So everybody just bought a Teddy Ruxpin, and tried to make that cyborg teddy bear build them an impractically large cat-shaped fortress, and lost it (the teddy bear).

One of the episodes I never saw has its start, says the overwritten-yet-uncommunicative Wikipedia episode guide, when “Vultureman escapes from exile by hijacking a bookmobile”. And now I have a new favorite episode summary for anything. I assume Vultureman snuck into the Exiles Bookmobile by disguising himself as a 75-cent pocket book of crossword puzzles. If he didn’t, I don’t want to know.

It can be heartbreaking to go back to the dumb stuff you loved as a kid. They’re the crushes of youth. They’re best left as the occasional mysterious smile until you’re remote enough. When the shaky animation, the many stock shots, and the nearly fourteen bars of background music are about you instead of the show then you can watch. But bear in mind, the episode guide says there’s one where annoying nephew Snarfer gets Mexican takeout from the cyborg teddy bears.

That bookmobile episode was written by Matthew Malach. The Internet Movie Database credits him for writing the 1993 or possibly 1996 cartoon Stone Protectors. This was a series about how buff troll dolls use magic alien crystals to become a competent rock band and, um, samurai wrestlers or something. This might not sound like much, but many of its episodes did get released on videotape. I hope it brings someone joy to know that.

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