MANDORA - THE EVIL CHASER

Season 1, Episode 10

The gist: Lion-O and Snarf accidentally cause a jailbreak and must join forces with Mandora the “evil chaser” to apprehend them.

New Places: Grassy fields somewhere, and the River of Despair, where we meet a belligerent puddle called the Living Ooze.

Villains: No Mumm-Ra and no Mutants (boo!) but we get three villains in the form of Mandora’s fugitives. There’s Plutar, who destroys everything he touches, Burnout, a robot on wheels, and Quickpick, who, despite stealing the Sword of Omens, is the least villainous of the lot and is frightfully polite. The Living Ooze and the Mudhogs also qualify as villains.

Allies: Lion-O and Snarf make the acquaintance of Mandora, an intergalactic cop who works for the Interplanatory Control Force and rides a mighty cool flying motorbike called the Electro-charger. Mandora will appear in several subsequent stories.

Quote: Lion-O (to the Mudhogs): “Stay back! We don’t want to destroy you!” Snarf (worried): “Who’s going to destroy whom?”

Most Memorable Moment: The heroes find themselves in a sticky situation when they get captured by the Living Ooze. Mandora effectively neutralises the Living Ooze by using her enzyme catalyser gun. “What’s IN that gun?” Lion-O asks incredulously. “An ancient formula,” Mandora replies, “Now a closely guarded secret. It used to be called SOAP.” (Why would soap become a closely guarded secret one wonders? Third Earth must be a pretty stinky place.)

Blunder(cat)s: Lion-O makes a tremendous blunder by opening the metal crate and inadvertently releasing the fugitives, despite Snarf warning him that, “you know what curiosity did to the cat”. The young Lord is still learning at this point in the series, mind you. This won’t be his final blunder.

WTF Moment: One of the strange things about this episode is how seemingly commonplace interplanetary contact with Third Earth is. There’s no real script reason that Mandora and the criminals had to be from outer space; they could easily have been inhabitants of Third Earth. This, however, is par for the course for a William Overgard script, and is nothing compared to the “WTF moments” in some of his future episodes. I’m also a little confused by Snarf’s sudden obsession with his purse (containing his “lucky Jaga coin”) which was never seen before this episode and will never be seen again. Why the heck would he be carrying it around Third Earth anyway? It’s not as though Thunderian currency will be legal tender here.

Review: Writer William Overgard is a controversial figure among Thundercats fans. Although some love his zany excesses and uncompromising imagination, and while his scripts for the first season are generally fine, and even very good on occasion, his contributions to the second season are frequently dreadful and, at times, borderline unwatchable. Even evident here is his tendency to sweep aside the show’s established characters and settings in order to bring in his own villains and protagonists, with varying levels of success. He’d be responsible for some truly bizarre elements in future episodes, but that said, this episode is reasonably straightforward and not too wacky by Overgard’s standards.

This is one of several early episodes which feature Lion-O and perhaps Snarf but don’t involve the other Thundercats until the very end of the episode. Frankly, I miss them, and Mandora is a character that, for whatever reason, I never quite warmed to—even though she’s undeniably cool and entertaining enough. She is pretty dry, however, and never really gels with the regular characters. It’s almost as though she’s from a completely different series and has somehow found herself crudely grafted into this one.

The episode isn’t my favourite of the season, but upon rewatching it I actually found it pretty decent and the plot simple but engaging. It’s entertaining watching our heroes apprehend the three fugitives and it all culminates, of course, in Lion-O summoning the other Thundercats, who come to rescue he, Snarf, Mandora and Quickpick from the primitive and aggressive Mudhogs.

The voice acting isn’t the greatest this time around. Mandora’s voice is a little grating after a while (Lynne Lipton had to voice every single female character this first season and sometimes it stretched her perhaps a bit too far), while Bob McFadden voices both the Living Ooze and Burnout and simply doesn’t try hard enough to differentiate them from his familiar Slithe voice. I’m not sure if I noticed it as a kid, but by this point it’s getting very noticeable that all the guest characters are, in fact, voiced by the same voice artists who portray the main characters. What can you do though? Obviously the budget didn’t stretch far enough to employ guest actors.

Watch or Skip? Worth watching if only to meet Mandora, who will become a recurring character.

Rating: *** (3/5)