Wow. These two episodes were both pretty good.
Recipe For Disaster - this has several obvious nods to the original show. The most obvious being in the fight scene where both music and animation sequences from the original were recreated faithfully, (to absolutely awesome effect!) but there’s more - Ponzie for one, clearly the same Wollo that we saw most frequently in the original series, and was a sort of spokesperson for the race - although he never got a name back then. Part of me suddenly wants to call him “the Ponz”. Also, at the start of the episode, the music in Mumm-Ra’s pyramid/crashed ship is evocative of his theme in the original show. Elsewhere, there’s again a James Horner-Star Trek feel to the music (no bad thing!).
The storyline was fairly obvious and generic, all the cliches right where you’d expect them, the dodgy “snake oil seller” Ponzie’s “Miracle Elixir” saving the day, the caterpillar turning into a butterfly. For a moment I thought they were trying to recreate the Diamond Fly from the original “Queen Of 8 Legs”, but not really. Oh well, doesn’t matter. Tygra taking the love potion is a bit silly, but not too bad. Makes you wonder if would even have worked on Pumyra at all! And speaking of Pumyra, her face just goes back to normal with no explanation! Meaning the MacGuffin was a little iffy . . .
That said, Mumm-Ra as Syccorax was pretty amazing. Paved the way for some more interesting transformations in the second season, if they’d had one. Also, Panthro had some great lines here - “same Mumm-Ra, bigger bull’s eye”, you could imagine him saying that in the original. Or, in another of my favourite cartoons growing up, Defenders Of The Earth, you can imagine Flash Gordon saying something similar about Ming The Merciless.
The Soul Sever is a much more interesting episode. It continues this series’ repeated device of presenting classic characters from famous 19th century literature. We’ve had Captain Ahab from Moby Dick in the form of Cornelius Tuna, and Fagin from Oliver Twist as Tookit. The Soul Sever himself is basically Dr Frankenstein. His angle is actually one we can sympathise with, even if it got a little warped, and developed into an Ahab-like obsession.
It’s also an excellent morality question, about playing god, life and death etc. It’s one of those questions with no easy answer, but of course had to be resolved this way for the sake of the younger viewers, rather like one of the best episodes of yet another of my favourite cartoons in the 80s, Visionaries - the episode “Horn Of Unicorn, Claw Of Dragon”.
I was wracking my brains over Soul Sever’s voice, then saw at the end, Jeffrey Combs, a name very familiar to Star Trek fans, as he played numerous different alien roles on the show, most notably Weyoun and Brunt in DS9 and Shran on Enterprise. It’s the Weyoun voice that is closest to this character, at a guess - obviously Soul Sever’s voice was put through a computerising effect.
One other point - does anyone else think the Necromechers in their original form looked like Jar Jar Binks?
As for the notion of having this episode earlier in the season and it not having anything to do with the main story arc - sorry Mark, but it does do a lot of setting up for the finale, although obviously we can’t talk too much about that here because of spoilers. Sufficing to say, after intervening episodes have been focusing on the Sword Of Plundarr, this gets us back to the Book Of Omens and the stones, and the fact that the book is pointing up (of which there’s been no mention since the initial one in The Trials Of Lion-O).
Overall, two pretty good episodes. No real surprises in the storyline, but it’s a good setup for the finale . . .