Saturday Morning Sorcery

For myself, and I suspect many others of my generation, a interest in fantasy was formed long before discovering Howard, Tolkien, or Leiber. Comic books played a part, but a lot of it was born in the ritual of Saturday morning cartoons. Before the rise of anime, before cartoons were slick, 30 minute commercials (even the toy tie-ins), there were a number of cheaply animated, sketchly plotted works of fantasy that captured our imaginations.

The first and maybe of the best of these was Thundarr the Barbarian. Airing originally on ABC from October 1980 to September 1982, Thundarr told the story of the titular barbarian in his battle against evil in a world 3000 years post-cataclysm--"a world of savagery, super-science, and sorcery"--as the narrator told us. Thundarr relies on his strength, his almost insane recklessness, and his lightsaber-esque sunsword to combat bizaare Jack Kirby designed wizards with nonsensical plans of pure evil. He also hung out with a sorceress, Ariel, and the humanoid, Ookla the Mok. Thundarr gets a lot of love of on the internet, and justifiably so. It's like Kamandi plus Conan with all the slow parts taken out for short child-like attention spans.

In 1981, Filmation brought Blackstar to CBS. Blackstar had a sort of sword and planet thing going. It was the story of astronaut John Blackstar who gets sucked through a black hole and spit out into "an ancient alien universe." Stranded on the apparently rather sparsely populated planet Sagar. He pulls on a fur skirt, jumps astride a winged, dragon horse, and swings the crystalline starsword in the fight for freedom. Fighting for freedom against the Overlord turns out mostly to entail hanging with the comic relief Trobbits--who are best described as part Seven Dwarfs and part Keebler Elves--and waiting for danger to find him. The cheap animation on Blackstar made Thundarr look like a Disney feature film, and the plots were thinner, if that's possible, but the exotic creatures and situations did have an appeal if you were 8 years old, which I was. Still, Blackstar only lasted one season.

Filmation struck again with a similar concept, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, in 1983. Masters of the Universe was, of course, a pre-existing toy line, but Filmation made some changes or additions for their animated version--which included adding a secret identity and making it generally more superheroish than the Donald Glut penned mini-comics that had originally described a more barbaric (dare I say, Thundarrish?) world. I was ambivalent about the changes as a kid, and my resentment has only grown over the years due to the relatively greater popularity of the cartoon with its pink-vested Prince Adam and comic relief Orko.

That same year--the same month, in fact--CBS gave us Dungeons & Dragons. TSR and Marvel Productions conspired to bring this to the small screen. It featured a group of kids transported to a fantasyland by one hell of a roller coaster ride (I assume their parents sued the amusement park). They promptly gained the accouterments and abilities of various D&D classes, a cryptic Yoda-esque mentor, and an evil nemesis. Tiamat appeared quite a lot, too, which was cool. I would suspect the cartoon helped get kids into gaming, but I've never met anyone that identified it as their gateway into the hobby, so I can't be sure. I know it influenced some of the adventures and early characters of my friends and myself, though.

There's kind of a lull in fantasy cartoons for the next few years until Visionaries, which was a toy tie-in and was in the era when that really began to matter. It was syndicated (like He-Man had been) and came on Sunday mornings not Saturdays in my market. Visionaries had an interesting backstory, though. It took place on an advanced world, where the age of magic suddenly returned and technology failed. As one would expect in such a situation, people immediately get divied up into heroic and villainous knights and start acting into a pseudo-Arthurian manner.

The era's last flourish was in 1991 with Pirates of Darkwater. Too old for Saturday Morning kids TV (well, at least until college restored that ritual), I missed out on it when it originally aired, but have since come to appreciate it. The story was a seafaring, fantasy adventure on an alien world. A young prince sets out to save his kingdom from an intelligent (and evil) liquid ("Dark Water") which was trying to tke over the planet. Pirates was clever in its use of alien exclaimations (and possibly expletives) mixed into its dialogue. It's really too bad it hasn't had a DVD release.

In the age before there were whole channels devoted to kids' programming, and before network Saturday mornings were given over to tweener programming and kid reality shows, gems like these--even the ones of lesser value--were things to be treasured. I can't claim they were of higher quality than what has come after--indeed, in many cases I'd agree they come up short in that regard--but there was a crazy inventiveness to some that slicker productions seem to have lost.

Fantasy Treks

In the vein of my previous post on movie inspired adventure seeds, I thought I'd turn to the small screen, and see what sort of fantasy rpg adventure fodder might be found in episodes of Star Trek The Original Series.


SPOILERS follow if you haven't seen the forty year-old TV series...

"The Cage"
The Plot: The Enterprise crew follow a distress signal to Talos IV, but find that they've been duped by telepathic aliens who take Captain Pike captive.
The Adventure: Make the distress call a village seeking aid, replace the Talosians with Mind-Flayers, and put the whole thing in a dungeon. Easy.

"Shore Leave"
The Plot: Captain Kirk orders shore leave for the Enterprise crew on a seemingly uninhabited planet. The landing parties begin to see strange sights drawn from their thoughts--including a White Rabbit, samurai, Don Juan, and people from their past.
The Adventure: An island that's basically a thought-responsive amusement park for a long vanished race, is exactly the sort of thing Gary Gygax would've put in an adventure.

"Mirror, Mirror"
The Plot: A transporter accident sends Kirk and companions to a parallel universe, where the Federation is a barbaric empire, and everyone has an "evil" counterpart.
The Adventure: Evil duplicates of the party (or maybe good ones?) running around sullying their good (bad) names, or competing with them would add an interesting wrinkle to any campaign.

"I, Mudd"
The Plot: The Enterprise is commandeered by an impostor crewman who takes it to an uncharted planet. There the crew find the con man, Harry Mudd, who has set himself up as the king of the planet of androids.
The Adventure: A lost city full of androids (or magical simulacra, if you like) who desperately want to serve--and protect adventurers from their dangerous lifestyle--certainly has humorous possibilities.

"The Way to Eden"
The Plot: The Enterprise is hijacked by a criminal scientist and his space hippie followers who are looking for a paradise planet.
The Adventure: Well...uh...hippies...umm--elves, maybe? Yeah, I got nothing here. Sorry.

Warlord Wednesday: War Gods of Skartaris

Continuing my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"War Gods of Skartaris"
Warlord (vol. 1) #3 (October-November 1976)

Written and Illustrated by Mike Grell

Synopsis: Morgan and his band of former gladiators liberate a village from the soldiers of Thera, and Morgan offers the somewhat dubious villagers the opportunity to join his cause. Morgan and Machiste disagree on the goals of their enterprise--Machiste wants gold, and the fewer to share it with, the better. He reminds Morgan that despite all his talk of freedom, he's really out to get Tara back. Morgan reiterates his desire to bring freedom to Skartaris, but admits that he's come to love the thrill of battle.

The two are pulled out of conversation when Morgan sights a unicorn and wants to capture it. He makes a bet with Machiste he'll catch it and gives chase. Focused on his prize, he's ambushed by a group of lizardmen, and knocked unconscious.

Morgan awakens in the ruins of an ancient city.  He's a tied sacrifice to the god of the lizardmen--which ironically turns out to be his crashed SR-71 Blackbird. Morgan fights, but is only saved by the appearance of the lizardmen's old god--a giant snake-like creature. The snake eats the lizardman priest, and turns its attention to Morgan, who's saved by timely arrival of Machiste, who cuts him free. While Machiste battles the snake creature, Morgan pulls his survival kit from his plane with its .44 Magnum and spare ammo. The creature proves impervious to bullets, but not to the ejector seat from the plane shooting through its skull. Morgan and Machiste briefly explore the ruins, wondering at who might have built them. They leave to resume their quest but we see what they barely missed--a console with a screen showing a map of what appears to be a somewhat altered outer earth with a continent in the middle of what is now the Atlantic Ocean.

Things to Notice:

• Morgan has donned his trademark winged helmet for the first time.
• There's a long recap this issue, due no doubt to the length of time since the last issue--since it was coming back after cancellation.  The "He's Back!" on the cover also alludes to this delay.
• A unicorn will cause trouble for Morgan in a future Warlord storyline (issues #72-73).

Where It Comes From:
The title of this issue may be inspired by the 1962 Italian historical drama War Gods of Babylon (Italian title: Le Sette Folgori di Assur, "The Seven Flames of Assur"), or by American International Pictures 1965 science fiction film, War Gods of the Deep. Given the influence sword and sandal films seem to have on the Warlord saga, I would suspect the former, if indeed the similar titles are anything more than coincidence.

The basic plot of the story relies on the "cargo cult" trope. Real world cargo cults have sprang up when tribal societies have interacted with more technologically advanced cultures--most famously in the Pacific in the World War II era.

Lizardmen are a fixture of pulp fiction and comic books. The use of lizardmen to represent human degeneration (as will be made explicit in issue 5) goes back at least to Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal" (1895) wherein Welsh stories of elves and fairies are shown to have their horrific origins in a degenerate, hidden race with reptilian characteristics. Robert E. Howard picked up this idea and used it in several stories, most famously in "Worms of the Earth." The appearance of the Skartarian lizardmen seems inspired by Steve Ditko's design for the Spider-Man villain, the Lizard.

Morgan quotes a sentiment he says he read "on a barracks' wall in Saigon":

“You have never lived until you've almost died! For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the protected will never know.”

The quote is apparently anonymous, but often said to arise from the Vietnam War, and a context similar to the one Grell relates.  I have seen it attributed several times to Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech given in Paris on April 23, 1910, but the text of the entire speech available online doesn't seem to have the lines--particularly in the place I often see people insert them in supposed brief quotations from the speech. 

"Metaxa," the name the lizardmen give Morgan's plane, is the name of a Greek liquor invented in 1888, but perhaps Grell coined the name independently.

Grell's use of an "epilogue" in this issue, and subsequent ones, shows an evolution of his storytelling sophistication perhaps, or at least experimentation with style.  What they resemble most are the "tags" common to hour long TV drama where there's a brief scene after the primary plot is wrapped up.  Fans of the original Star Trek series will recall these as scenes with Kirk, McCoy, and Spock bantering on the bridge before the end credits, often emphasizing the "lesson" of the episode.