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[Büge]

Eh.

NEW EPISODE TONIGHT

HOW NONSEQUITUR WILL IT BE?

IT WILL BE SO ABSTRACT THAT IT WILL BE A SECOND EPISODE OF CLONE WARS

[Thad]

Is there?

thetvdb says next new episode is Sunday.

Of course, it says the title is Old Friends, so it's obviously wrong on at least that much since that was the title of episode 5.

EDIT: And according to a DVD thread on Thundercatslair, "Omens, Parts 1 & 2" is the official title for the first two episodes of the series, not "Sword of Omens/Ancient Spirits of Evil" as previously given.  (Keep in mind that in their original airing there was no opening titles and, correspondingly, no title card.)  So yeah, looks like tvdb is all fucked up again.

[Thad]

New Jelenic interview.  Pumyra confirmed, Safari Joe teased, and also there's going to be an episode written by Peter Lawrence, the showrunner of TOS.

Also: Hear the Roar, the new book on the original series by David Crichton, has been released in the UK, and bookdepository.com has it for $24.23 with free international shipping.  I'd like to get a copy, if for no other reason than for more grist for my argument with the IMDb editors on the airdates.

Which they will presumably reject because the book has "unofficial and unauthorised" in the title, making it less reliable than their current system of "some guy filled in some airdates".

[Disposable Ninja]

You'll see Pumyra, with several episodes devoted to her, even if our take on her is not the same as in the original series.

The original series had a "take" on Pumyra? Like as an actual character? 'Cuz all I remember was that she was a token female character to go along with the far more interesting New Thundercat characters and that she had maybe six lines throughout the entire series.

That said I actually liked Pumyra more than Cheetara because she didn't sound like she had been smoking cigarettes for 40 years.

[Thad]

The sound effects guy has a blog!  It's interesting stuff.

[Envy]

This involves Thundercat's and yet I can't help but blame CN for doing this so quickly.
...And why?

[Thad]

Troll-Ra was funny but then I realized his name should -- obviously -- have been Meme-Ra.

[Thad]

Got my copy of Hear the Roar!

Have flipped through and it looks pretty damned amazing.  Ultimately I think I'll need to read it cover-to-cover just for the depth and breadth of the interviews.  If there's anybody who worked on Thundercats who wasn't interviewed for this book, he's probably dead and Crichton probably interviewed his kids.

For now, though, I of course went straight to the airdates so I could bludgeon IMDb with them.  Fucking IMDb.

[Brentai]

I've spent the last few years going to Wikipedia for the sort of information IMDb is supposed to be for.  Didn't even notice the shift.

[Thad]

Which would be great if everybody else weren't still fucking using IMDb as the definitive source.  Thundercats ran two seasons and ended in 1986, because IMDb says so.  I'm fairly confident that even Warner used IMDb as reference for its (poor) DVD releases.

IMDb is seen as more authoritative because it's moderated, and because the people who see it as authoritative have never actually tried to submit a goddamn correction.  In practice, while Wikipedia's let-anybody-submit-anything-and-trust-someone-will-correct-it-if-it's-wrong approach has its downsides, IMDb's approach, in practice, amounts to accepting absolutely any submission as fact and then making it a bitch to revise it once it's been added.  Basically it takes the old Twain quote about the time it takes the truth to put on its shoes, and breaks both truth's hands.  And one of its feet.  At that point, in most cases the truth's pretty much just gonna go "Fuck it, why do I even want to put on my shoes now?  Fine, whatever, James Lipton wrote the Thundercats theme."

[Thad]

The book is really quite fascinating.

I'm curious if the fact that the new series gave Lion-O an ancestor named Lion-El is a nod to the fact that that was his name in early drafts of the original series bible, or if it's just that "Lionel" is a really obvious name for a lion dude.  There's some other stuff in there, like the Thundercats seeking to unite the disparate peoples of Third Earth, that's certainly made it into the new show, so it wouldn't surprise me if they'd been looking through TOS bible for ideas that didn't quite make it to the screen.

It's interesting to look at the show as a push-pull between Starr and Overgard (the relatively straight mythology episodes and the batshit-fucking-insane anything-can-happen ones), and in fact that's pretty much what it was from the very beginning; they were the first two guys brought on as writers.  (And indeed wrote the first and last episode, respectively.)

Starr's pleasantly candid about where he got his ideas; every episode had to have a moral and so he flipped through old fables.  He remembers his favorite as "Better an honest enemy than a false friend", which he got from Aesop -- and man, he's right; the guy can spot a good turn of phrase.  I know exactly what episode that quote was used in and in what context; it really is a pithy line.

And one of my long-standing questions -- why Starr was clearly steering the ship in the early days but turned things over to Lawrence later on in the series -- has an unfortunately predictable answer: they stiffed Starr out of royalties.  He's the guy who wrote the series bible, wrote a story around Ted Wolf's character drawings, and pretty much built the whole show, but Rankin and Bass didn't give him a "Developed By" credit and the share in profits that would have gone with it.

(Lawrence, as you might expect, tells the story differently; in his version Starr was just not good at managing a team.  Which is probably true, but he doesn't make any reference whatsoever to Starr feeling cheated.  Whereas Steve Perry -- who, as we know, had some rather serious money troubles of his own -- corroborated that Len felt cheated and had a falling-out with Jules.)

(Adding: It probably also explains why Lion-O's Anointment was irritatingly split up in the production, original airing, and now, sadly, DVD order: Starr was basically sent off to work on the mythology-building stuff all by himself, so his scripts would likely have been trickling in individually in-between the other writers' work.  Given that the episodes were being produced in a mad dash and, in some cases, still being put together after the season had already started airing, it's understandable how the order didn't get corrected before broadcast, but it SURE as hell should have been corrected for the DVD release.)

There's an interesting bit with the show psychologist, too; on the whole it seems like the demand for more responsible children's programming was handled a lot less acrimoniously than, say, the comics debate in the 1950's.  I suspect this is partly because both sides were more reasonable and partly because, having seen what had happened with comics, producers of children's cartoons were ready out the gate to cover their asses.  It'd be interesting to do some research into the various "Think of the children!" movements over the years/decades/centuries and see what their commonalities and differences have been.

[Thad]

Man, the bit from Perry is bittersweet.

The first writer profiles, with Starr and Lawrence, are conversational in tone; I suspect they were from phone interviews.  Perry's, by contrast, is more of a long, uninterrupted story.  And he's a great storyteller; it's got a beginning, a middle, an end, a couple of laughs in-between, and has a little bit of Stan Lee flair to remind you that he learned to write from reading Fantastic Four.  What a talent.  And then add in the knowledge that he was in excruciating pain, barely able to work.

His profile (and, I suspect, the rest of the book) only devotes a single sentence to "a period of professional inactivity" and his death at 56; nothing in there about his cancer or murder.  I suspect it's a last-minute edit, that Crichton felt he needed to acknowledge it but also had a page count to maintain.  Any more detail in his description of Perry's final years would have warranted a couple more pages, and been a real downer besides.

[Thad]

My fondest memory was watching Earl Hammond portray Mumm-Ra, the demonic leader of the Mutants.  He visually became the animated character ... eyes blazing, arms uplifted, head reared back.  As he roared "Ancient Spirits of Evil..." he actually drooled and spat like his animated counterpart.  Anytime we got within a paragraph of that trademark Mumm-Ra line, every actor began backing away from Earl's microphone, until no-one was within ten feet of him.

(Ellipses in original text)

Seriously, guys, I am loving this book.  $25.32, free international shipping.

Meanwhile, in the twenty-first century: tonight's episode will introduce the Berbils.

[Büge]

So after a month and a half hiatus, they start off their show with reintroducing the second-most irritating race in the franchise.

[Thad]

I remember for Mandora, Bob McFadden said, "She looks like John Wayne."  Bob could give you a personality for wind.  He was a genius.  They would all start doing John Wayne impressions -- they would give it to me.  Bobby was very funny; he had this filing cabinet in his brain and would remember every voice he'd ever heard.  He'd say, "Put a little Joan Crawford into that."  [...]  I'd done some [voice work] for an animated film called The Little Red Pony, and for a few minutes, I was friends with [its star] Mia Farrow.  That's where Willa came from; Mia Farrow doing an impression of an English accent. [...]  I also remember that I was riding Doug Preis's back, as he voiced the Amok character.  Nayda was Katherine Hepburn and was suggested by the guys.  Earl Hammond would suggest some obscure things that were way before my time, like "Do Al Jolson."  I knew the name, but I'd be like, "What the hell did he sound like?"  And he'd do an impression.

(bracketed text in original; ellipses mine)

She also mentions that on multiple occasions, including the last episode, she brought in a camera and recorded the sessions.  This, like most things, makes me very angry about the complete half-assedness of the DVD releases.

She's still got at least some of the tapes; she mentions how valuable it is to her to be able to see Hammond and McFadden after their passing, and the book has a few stills from them in the photo section.  Seeing as Warner doesn't seem terribly damn interested in them, I'd really love to see them up on YouTube.  I know there are rights issues for the lines and the audio, but even just seeing a small sample of it with the audio would really be wonderful.

[Ziiro]

Thad, I'm going to ask this question and I don't want you to take it the wrong way or be insulted, I just want to understand:

What is it with you and Thundercats? Your interest in everything about the series, past present and future as well as everyone involved seems to borderline on obsession and I can't figure it out.

[Friday]

Everyone has a favorite show. I know pretty much everything there is to know about Firefly, and I managed to do it without becoming a creepy fangirl without letting anyone know I became a creepy fangirl.

tl;dr, Thad really likes Thundercats, is no more obsessive about it than your average Narutard, is in fact 500% less obsessive about it than your average Narutard

[Ziiro]

I disagree with that on the grounds that Narutards probably don't keep extensive spreadsheets on the writers for each episode in each season and fight with IMDB over air dates and writers.

Edit: Which I will say is quite a respectable service in honor of the show, it's writers, and people who worked on it, actually.

[Classic]

Ziiro, you know there's a continuum of fanboy-itude? Much like how there's a continuum of intelligence and/or ability to grasp patterns and concepts?

EDIT:
And in case you're wondering, fetishizing about characters in your show of obsession does in fact increase the obsessiveness by a factor of 6.

EDIT EDIT:
Always. Don't make me break out the proof.

[Thad]

I disagree with that on the grounds that Narutards probably don't keep extensive spreadsheets on the writers for each episode in each season and fight with IMDB over air dates and writers.

That's because there's no need to.  All that shit is well-documented in Naruto's case.  You can damn-well bet that if IMDB was missing writer credits on 75% of the Naruto episodes and said half of them aired years earlier than they actually did, somebody would have corrected it.

Now, if IMDB had rebuffed them, odds are they probably would have given up rather than come back a year later with proof.  ("Proof" here is "This guy made the same educated guesses I could have, but did it in a book.")  But that says more about my own tenacity and stubbornness than my approach to Thundercats in particular.

And while editing every single episode is pretty onerous and I've clearly put more effort into it than most, I'm not the only guy out there correcting erroneous information on IMDB.  Somebody appears to have corrected the record and stated that Bob McFadden, not Doug Preis, was the voice of Lynx-O (an understandable mistake as Preis joined the cast around the same time Lynx-O was added, and you wouldn't figure Lynx-O had the same voice as Snarf), and thankfully the site no longer says that James Lipton wrote the theme song.

Anyhow.  I like Thundercats.  It was the cartoon I glommed onto at an early age, moreso than its contemporaries like He-Man and Transformers.  It's the one I'd be late for school to watch, once they put it on at 7:30 in the morning.  I spent the next 5 years or so enjoying it with my brother and cousin on my extensive but incomplete VHS collection, and then recorded every episode off-the-air when it reran on Cartoon Network.

It was interesting watching it in my teens -- I can state definitively that, for the most part, the last two seasons sucked -- but when it was on it was on.  Starr and Lawrence did great mythology episodes, and while Overgard contributed some truly execrable excrement (Exile Isle, Circus Train), he was also responsible for some really great batshit insanity that really set the show apart from its peers (Sword in a Hole and the various Mandora eps -- yes, even the one where Snarfer gets captured on his way home with Mexican takeout).

And its relative obscurity among its peers is notable too -- He-Man and Transformers have had theatrical movies and multiple relaunches, while Thundercats got a half-assed DVD release and didn't get a relaunch until this past summer.  It hasn't gotten the attention or the care that those series have.

And that's probably where Perry's murder comes into it -- when he died and Bissette wanted a list of his credits, I thought it was a disgrace that you couldn't just punch his name into IMDB and find them.  And once I got started giving him an entry, and separating his existing credits from the other Stephen Perry, I just kept going.

I suspect I'm not done yet.  Crichton's book is fascinating as hell and has given me more than just airdates to correct -- for example, the other day I submitted an update to IMDb to note that Julian P Gardner is Jules Bass writing under an alias.