So I see! The other week I did watch the first season, that opening 5-parter, mainly because I’d never seen it before. Then I watched “Return Of The Shredder”, the first regular episode I saw (well, not the first one I ever saw technically, that “honour” goes to something a little later, I forget which, but you know what I mean), and thought, “uh-oh”!
That’s why it can be a good thing some shows only run for one or two seasons then finish.
I like the old TMNT show and I seen far more TMNT episodes than Defenders of the Earth when I was young, bet none of the episodes or storylines really stand out in my mind or interested me as much as episodes of DOTE, Thundercats and Bravestarr etc.
Again, I know what you mean. I can remember a few basic storylines, and a few details, and I’m sure if I do watch it over, it’ll all come flooding back, as it did with King Arthur And The Knights Of Justice and also Pirates Of Dark Water. But it hasn’t left as firm an imprint on me as DotE/Visionaries/Thundercats, maybe because when I saw a few episodes 12yrs ago, I just cringed, and felt disgusted with myself for ever having loved it as a kid!
That’s why I was a little wary about watching that first mini-season. I’d never seen it, but it was kind of an important set of episodes! It was OK, but like I say, that first episode of season 2 put me right off.
BBC2 showed repeats of TMNT every week day morning in 2000/2001 when I was in my last year in High School. I liked TMNT and I made it my point to watch as much of it before I had to leave for school. But I recall saying to my Mum and Dad one morning I wish they would show other cartoons like Thundercats or Bravestarr as well.
A friend gave me some copies of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors a few years ago. That was a show I remember liking as a child but just doesn’t interest me now. It really wasn’t as good as I remembered it. I only managed one or two episodes then stopped. Oddly enough the friend that gave me the Jayce DVDs I gave copies of the Centurions DVDs and that was another show I only managed a few episodes of before stopping.
That was when I was just starting at university, and I didn’t have a telly in my first year.
A friend gave me some copies of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors a few years ago. That was a show I remember liking as a child but just doesn’t interest me now. It really wasn’t as good as I remembered it. I only managed one or two episodes then stopped. Oddly enough the friend that gave me the Jayce DVDs I gave copies of the Centurions DVDs and that was another show I only managed a few episodes of before stopping.
Again, I know EXACTLY what you mean! One point last year, I looked up the first episode on youtube and watched it. It didn’t grab me in the slightest. I didn’t bother watching a second episode. Shame, I remember getting up at 0600 to watch it on channel 4 weekday mornings, and the theme song was something a bit special. Oh well . . .
I have just finished watching the first 6 episodes of DotE - that’s the first six as listed in my continuity order:
- Escape From Mongo
- The Creation Of Monitor
- Bits ‘N’ Chips
- Hall Of Wisdom
- The Mind Warriors I
- The Mind Warriors II
For a moment I was a little unsure whether “The Mind Warriors” should be the first episode in this order to feature the Battle Simulation Room, as Ming already knows of its existence, then I remembered in “Hall Of Wisdom”, Ming’s Molecular Disruptor Beam is brand new, and the Defenders know about that. Also, thinking of the other early episodes to feature the Battle Simulation room, there’s problems:
Cold War - the location of Ice Station Earth is known, so that’s out (and it mentions those cave slugs that we see in “Battleground”, so it must also follow that episode)
Sleeper Awakes - needs to come after the Doctor Dark episodes (although there’s no other major continuity points that I can think of)
The Lost Jewels Of Tibet - OK, there’s no continuity notes on this one. Possible I suppose . . .
I’ll go through the rest of the series, if I decide to put anything before The Mind Warriors, I’ll let you know. For the moment, 1-6 are still as above.
What did you think of the ‘Dracula’s Potion’ episode? I seen it a couple months ago when I had a trial of Amazon Prime. I thought it started good but I wasn’t to keen on the rest of the episode.
It’s a strange one. It’s all right I guess, could have been better, but it’s an interesting tangent. It’s one of the better episodes written by Chris Bunch & Allan Cole - the partnership that I regard as the weak link in the series. Together, they gave us:
Dracula’s Potion
The Carnival Of Doctor Kalihari (weakest of the Book Of Enigmas episodes)
The Drowning World (very dodgy)
The Thunder Lizards Of Ming (one of the dodgiest in the whole series, probably in bottom five)
Flash Times Four (the exception to the rule, this one is really good!)
100 Proof Highway (a strange episode, difficult to review fairly, you’ll see why)
This partnership wrote more episodes than anyone else apart from David Wise, who wrote 13, including parts 1 and 5 of the Book Of Enigmas (parts 2 and 3 were by Richard Merwin), and parts 2-5 of the Prince Kro-Tan movie (part 1 was written by Bryce Malek and Dick Robbins, who also teamed up for “Escape From Mongo”, and “Bits ‘N’ Chips”, the latter with Mark Zaslove, who co-wrote the whole Necklace Of Oros movie with Mark Edens - so Zaslove’s name is on six episodes, but five of them are part of the same adventure, so it doesn’t quite count).
This is why I pay attention to the writer credits!
David Wise wrote 13, mostly good
Bunch & Cole wrote 6, many dodgy
Francis Moss wrote 4, two good two iffy
Chuck Lorre wrote 4, again half-and-half
Mel Gilden wrote 3, pretty good
Bryce Malek & Dick Robbins wrote 3, pretty good
Evelyn Gabai wrote 3 (a two-parter and a stand-alone), mainly iffy
Mark Zaslove and Mark Edens wrote The Necklace Of Oros together, Zaslove also co-wrote Bits ‘N’ Chips with Malek and Robbins.
No other name appears on more than two episode writing credits.
Of course, these statistics are assuming there are no pseudonyms at work here!
I never really thought about it before but the Battle Simulation Room is a lot like the X-Men’s (War Room?) simulation room.
It’s interesting the different quality of episodes writers write for cartoons. So can be absolutely brilliant then others can be so bad. I wonder though how much of them get tidied up/edited though by the head writer.
Or even the Holodecks in Star Trek. I know they had something similar in Spiral Zone too.
The question of how much tweaking the script editor has to do to some episodes is interesting. I remember listening to the audio interviews on this site with the cast and writers; I forget which of the writers it was, either Peter Lawrence or Stephen Perry, who said there wasn’t a whole lot of re-writing and re-writing on individual scripts; you’d submit a first draft, it would come back with notes (including the moral lesson to work into the episode!), you’d do a second, and then a “polish”. How much of that polish was done by the original writer and how much by the editor, I don’t know.
Begs the question what did “Ming’s Household Help” the first draft look like? Likewise “The Panther Peril” and “The Thunder Lizards Of Ming”.
I watched the next four episodes in my continuity order last night: “Root Of Evil”, “A Demon In His Pocket”, “A House Divided” and “Family Reunion”. So far so good. The continuity threads for this show are much tinier than Thundercats; there’s fewer recurring themes to mark it with.
Watching the title sequence got me thinking - it’s one of those title sequences that can be as brilliant or as annoying as the episode you’ve just watched. When I picked up that first VHS in 2007, I found the title sequence difficult to stomach, as well as the episodes themselves. When I’m watching good episodes however, it’s great, and I’m singing along.
Also on the title sequence - I don’t know if you’ve noticed, in Mandrake’s verse, the line “enemies grumble in fear and confusion”, we see shots of things going wrong for Ming, but none of those things were actually caused by Mandrake! We see Mongor going mental and smashing the weather machine in “Cold War”, that was Jedda’s doing, and then we see the power plant collapsing in “Bits ‘N’ Chips”, which was brought about by Flash!
I recall reading in ‘Hear the Roar’ that writer Danny Peary said that they changed all his dialogue in the Thundercats episode ‘The Mountain’.
Which is probably why he only wrote the one episode (unless he wrote more in season 2).
No, ‘The Mountain’ is his only Thundercats credit. In fact he didn’t do an awful lot of writing according to IMDB.
It’s interesting that Chuck Lore went on to have a lot of success. I will have to look up and see what some of the other writers of DOTE have been working on.
Interesting indeed. David Wise went onto TMNT of course; and he also wrote an episode of the animated Star Trek series. He also co-wrote an episode of Spiral Zone, although not a very good one (it’s one of the dodgiest in the whole series).
Francis Moss also wrote some episodes of Spiral Zone, 4, same as he did for DotE, again a mixed bag. Likewise, David Schwartz, who wrote the very iffy “Ming’s Household Help” wrote an episode, “Overlord’s Mystery Woman”, which was OK. Paul Davids also wrote an episode or two on both shows. The main writer on the show was Mark Edens, who co-wrote The Necklace Of Oros.
Writing credits on Spiral Zone include Gerry Conway (his name has graced the comic series of Visionaries, and also I believe Thundercats), Buzz Dixon (three episodes of Visionaries) and Brooks Wachtel (Prince Valiant); and also the pilot (episode 4 remember) was written by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski (under the pseudonym Fettes Gray).
Speaking of B5, Kathryn Drennan, who wrote DotE’s “The Men Of Frost” wrote the B5 tie-in novels.
I believe some people from B5 also worked on Galaxy Rangers.
David Wise also wrote some episodes of Starcom. He is included in the writing credits for episode 12 ‘[B]Flash Moskowitz, Space Cadet[/B]’. This episode in particular validates peoples opinions that these type of cartoons were basically 20 minute toy commercials. In the opening scene, a wanna be space cadet (Flash) receives a gift from his mother which is a model of one of the main Starcom ships, the Starmax Bomber. He then goes on to explain to two other cadets how cool the model is and list it’s various features which coincidently enough are exactly the sae as the actual toy. I had the Starmax Bomber, very cool toy lthough I didn’t see this episode growing up I only ever saw one episode of Starcom as a child.
Only one? That’s one more than I ever saw! I only ever saw the title sequence, on the back of those videos I mentioned before.
“Flash Moskowitz, Space Cadet”? Is that guy a slight parody of Flash Gordon by any chance?
Yeah the one episode I seen/had was a bought VHS. It only contained one episode, the first episode of the series ‘Nantucket Sleighride’. Of all the 80’s cartoons this is by far one of the oddest choices for an opening episode to a series. It’s not a bad episode by any means, it just doesn’t follow the basic blue print of opening episodes of 80’s cartoons, showing all the good guys and villains and all their skills and all the toys available etc. The heroes have little screen time and mainly focuses on four other characters. In my opinion it is a good sci-fi show episode. In fact I think you should watch it and see what you think of it, it would be interesting to hear your opinion on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsNkW0S9c-w
To be honest I haven’t finished watching the episode yet, after the toy commercial at the beginning I said, ‘‘I will finish it later’’. Perhaps ‘Flash’ was a tribute to Flash Gordon by David Wise. Although upon further reading I believe he only adapted the story and didn’t write the main story.
OK, I’ll give it a whirl; I might leave it until after I’ve tried the whole DotE continuity order. And I didn’t get any further with that last night, after getting hammered on the snooker table I made three trips up to the flat to bring more stuff down. I was on a bit of a downer after that result, and I’m only just getting back to normal - I think. I don’t think this is a depression attack (they last about 4-5 days).
How is the move going man, do you still have a lot more to take to the house? I haven’t had much chance to watch DOTE either but I am hoping to get chance tonight or this week. I must say I have never played Snooker or Pool. I used to get beat quite a lot playing darts LOL.
Most of the stuff is down now, just a few clothes, some kitchenware, and the last of the CDs. Everything else is just tat and will be thrown out. Then I need to get the place done up so I can rent it out. When it’ll be sorted by, I have no idea!
I am still in the process of selling off some stuff from various lines I no longer collect or have interest in. It’s just all the hassle of having to list it on EBay. I’m hoping some friends who are going to be selling stuff at conventions over the summer buy it from me outside of EBay.