Ho!

Mike and I have been reliving our childhoods and watching Thundercats every night. We've only got the first six-disc volume of the first season (there are three more six-disc sets that make up the rest of the series) and now only four or five more episodes until we need to get the next set. It's an awesome show: surreal and imaginative and often unintentionally hilarious. The writing is totally bizarre; the action is totally bizarre (e.g. Panthro laughing, holding Snarf up in the air and doing a weird-ass jig while Snarf protests... sounds fairly normal until you see it). Nevertheless, it's so much more off-the-wall and entertaining than I remember it -- which is not at all. I only have an abstract notion of watching and liking Thundercats. Mike has all the action figures. I keep on forgetting to ask him to dig them out of the closet so we can play. The animation is sort of run-of-the-mill Japanese animation of 80s American cartoon fare, and sometimes Lion-O just looks really weird (like when he looks up... yowza those are some nostrils), but mostly nothing sticks out at you. Except when this kind of thing happens.... The episode "Thunder-Cutter" features the warrior maidens, one of the many groups and tribes on Third Earth who befriend the Thundercats. Below is a screen shot of one of these warrior maidens as she talks to Lion-O near the end of the episode. As she finishes her spiel, just before it cuts back to Lion-O, something awful happens: KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT! When it happened, I paused the DVD, turned it back, advanced it frame-by-frame... and there it was. I got chills. In other Thundercats news, I've already managed to identify what one of the famous outtakes should have been, in episode "Feliner - Part 2." Suffice it to say there's no swearing in the original. And listening to those outtakes brings me back to freshman year of college, when we'd listen to them and laugh and laugh and laugh. --------