I’ve talked about it a few times here in the forums, but its a gaping plot hole in Thundercats that has bothered me for years.
So in “The Terror of Hammerhand”, Hammerhand & his crew are trapped on their sinking ship.
In “Spitting Image”, it is revealed that Hammerhand did in fact die. In cartoons, I am willing to accept that somebody can survive a plane crash or a ship sinking. Heck, it happened to The Mutants plenty of times, and if there is no body or confirmation of death, then I’ll accept that they aren’t dead unless they say so. But here, we have it confirmed that Hammerhand is dead and is a disembodied spirit that wants revenge on the Thundercats. The episode ends with his ghost tearing up Mumm-Ra’s lab, vowing revenge. Cool.
But in “Thundercats Ho!”, Hammerhand is alive and well and has a new crew. Huh?!?!?! What happened??? And the Thundercats & Mumm-Ra don’t seem at all stunned that Hammerhand is alive.
Either there was a serious disconnect among the writers or they just decided to ignore it completely.
I was hoping that maybe this inconsistency would be cleared up in the “Hammerhand’s Revenge” Wildstorm comic…but it wasn’t. If anything, they just ignored “Spitting Image” all together.
So does anybody have an explanation for this? In one of the Wildstorm comics, Mumm-Ra did resurrect Grune the Destroyer completely to flesh & blood. But even that required using the power of the Sword of Omens, and it seemed to indicate that this method could only be used to save a Thundarian.
Does anybody have any ideas that could make sense out of it, because I’m stumped?
I’ve had this question myself too because “The terror of Hammerhand” and “Spitting Image” are very close in episode order. We have seen enemies defeated and stopped but later on resurfacing without much explanation whether they are robot enemies, like the Plundarian War-Robot(Return to Thundera), The Techno-pede(Turmagar the Tuska) or the Giant Insect(Return of the Driller) or not, like The Driller and the Enflamer(who appeared again as an obstacle in the Trial of evil inside the Doom River).However, they all returned in their original shape unlike Hammerhand who came back in “Spitting Image” as an evil spirit to wreak havoc in Third Earth. Indeed we listen to Mumm-Ra summoning Hammerhand from the sea by saying “raise from your grave and enter the body of my thundercat clone” apparently implying ressurection. This concept was very innovative for that time and judging by the small ritual and the way Mumm-ra brought him back, preety scary in my opinion. Now i can’t guess why and how did he return normally in Thundercats ho!,throught the series there isn’t any explanation given but in cartoon and comics you don’t have to answer all the questions and cover faithfully every possibility. For instance, in Spiderman i don’t even remember how many times the Green Goblin appeared after being clearly dead,each time from scratch. In our case i agree with you it is somehow strange especially for the Thundercats-kids oriented- cartoon to mess with dead spirits and occult revivals but on the whole what it counts is the quality of this episode. As far as the Wildstorms comics are concerned as in the previous Thundercats titles they don’t follow a strict line with the animation episodes.
I always thought that once his spirit had been freed in Spitting Images he returned to his body, reclaiming it from the depths and with it his crew who weren’t as dead as he was or at least three of them aren’t. He updates his tech and insists that the others do the same.
I also have wondered if he reclaimed another similar body thus had to have the tech fitted over again.
Gotta agree with Purrsia. In one ep I remember the Thundercats going to Sky Tomb to free some slaves, but after they win the fight with the Lunatacs they leave without rescuing anyone!
I think it’s Mumm-Ra Lives part 2 or 3??
Also vaguely remember an ep where someone travels to the Black Pyramid on the Thunderclaw, but at the end travels home in the Thundertank with the other Thundercats! lol
Not to mention the voice mix up with Willa and Nayda in The Mask of Gorgon, right at the end of the episode (along with Willa apparently being frozen by Chilla in the episode when she wasn’t!)
Yeah there were always plot holes & inconsistencies, but the one with Hammerhand was so painfully glaring. Alot of the other ones occurred within the same episode which could be chalked up by the viewers as a simple mistake…but when you establish something in one episode as clear as day and then the next time that character shows up, its completely different, its like “Huh???”
That wasn’t the only glaring plot hole or contradiction that spanned over more than one ep. Tcats is full of this stuff. I chalk it up to what, hmm I think maybe Peter Lawrence, said in one of the interviews - that nobody really referred back too much to earlier things established in prior eps. They had Starr’s bible for basic characters and concepts and then some writers, like Overgard, liked to create their own characters too.
And then when you get different writers on these things (as is true for Terror of Hammerhand vs the Thundercats Ho! series), this is what you get. I’m sure they didn’t plan on 25 years later adult fans watching the series eps back to back and analyzing it/remembering this stuff! Back when the series aired, it could have been weeks or even months between viewing something like Terror and Tcats Ho for us…may not have stood out for many of us as any big deal back in the day.
As a kid, I definitely saw “Together We Stand” well before “The Terror of Hammerhand” (or “Spitting Image” for that matter), so my four-year-old reaction was backwards. Even today, the Season 1 Hammerhand looks weird to me.
As for the plot hole, I can suspend my disbelief that, his ghost freed, he found or fashioned a new body for himself. What I can’t buy is that he could round up a crew of three other similarly mechanical shipmates. It could be that Leonard Starr took issue with the Berserkers’ depiction in “The Terror of Hammerhand” and took the opportunity to rewrite them in “Ho!” as he had envisioned them (they are on his map, after all).
