The ’80s Cartoon Glory of THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/80s-cartoon-glory-thundarr-barbarian-145144552.html
Kyle Andersonshare
Mon, May 3, 2021, 7:51 AM
The 1980 series Thundarr the Barbarian is good. It’s really good, and it has no business being so. No offense to any of the artists who made them, but the state of American cartoons in the late ‘70s was complete butt. Just a horrible mess of tired retreads of earlier hits combined with short-lived series you’ve never heard of. I mean, it’s not like The Super Globetrotters or What’s New Mr. Magoo weren’t good or anything, but… Japan was absolutely destroying us; Gatchaman, Space Battleship Yamato, and Mobile Suit Gundam all premiered in the last three years of the decade. For comparison, 1979 was the year Scrappy-Doo made his debut. America was hosed.
Or at least it should have been. Animation was very expensive and before President Reagan allowed toy companies to effectively advertise directly to children in the form of cartoons, shows were lucky to get 20 episodes. Hanna-Barbera had revolutionized the TV cartoon in the ’60s using its patented limited movement style; generally the characters would only perform one motion at a time in a stationary background. It looks very stagnant by today’s standards, but it allowed for dozens of cartoon shows to reach the TV. Many of those shows, like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and Super Friends, were so popular they’d get retooled and relaunched time and again.
Thundarr the Barbarian is very similar to the old Hanna-Barbera shows, but it isn’t one. The series actually hit screens from Ruby-Spears Productions. Joe Ruby and Ken Spears were longtime Hanna-Barbera writers of shows like Space Ghost, The Herculoids, and Scooby-Doo. By 1979, the pair had branched off to create their own studio; their first series was the highly Scooby-derivative Fangface. They followed that with The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show and Heathcliff and Dingbat.
In all of those first few cases, the Ruby-Spears shows held to that light comedic tone that had plagued—yes, I said plagued!—the American cartoon landscape for so much of the 1970s. Not that they were all bad by any means; they were just all so painfully the same. Even the DC Comics series Plastic Man was more comedic than adventure. In order to bring action cartoons back, Ruby-Spears turned to a comic book legend. Steve Gerber.
Gerber began writing for Marvel Comics in 1972, with a whopping four titles in which he wrote or co-wrote hitting stands in December of that year. On top of runs on big superhero series like Iron Man, Daredevil, and Sub-Mariner, he hit his stride with more offbeat names. His signature series was a run on Man-Thing, and he’s one of the co-creators of cult favorite Howard the Duck. And his idea for an action cartoon was just as high-concept.
As the opening narration tells us, in the year 1994 (our old future), a rogue planet hurtled through Earth’s atmosphere, cracking the moon in half and setting off natural disasters that destroyed civilization. 2,000 years later, the radiation has created strange mutations and ushered in an age of “savagery, super-science, and sorcery.” Our hero, the titular Thundarr, is a former slave (probably a forced gladiator) who breaks his bonds and sets out on a series of globetrotting adventures along with his two sidekicks. First is Princess Ariel, a young sorceress with a great knowledge of “Old Earth” customs and geography. The second is Ookla, a giant bear-and-lion beast from the species Mok.
The general idea is a really wild one. It mixes high-fantasy with tech-based science fiction; most of the villains are “wizards,” who usually take the form of organic-machine hybrids who have harnessed some kind of super-science. For instance, Mindok the Mind Menace, a scientist who lost his body in the cataclysm 2000 years earlier but whose brain has remained alive thanks to artificial means. In addition to wizards, Thundarr and company also take on a tribe of werewolves; a vampire alien; amphibious amazon warriors; and evolved ape-men.