The curtain call on Leonard Starr’s introduction to the world of ThunderCats comes in the form of “The Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr,” a supposedly stand-alone episode that is in fact the neat ribbon on the parcel he’d been tying for the past three instalments. If the earlier episodes were the rehearsal, this is the gala performance — the showcase, the audition tape, the highlight reel. Starr is not so much telling a story as carefully displaying the contents of the toy box, but he does it with enough gusto to make us forget the exercise was compulsory.
It is worth remembering that being asked to launch ThunderCats was not an unalloyed honour. True, every hack in the cartoon stable would have killed for the chance. But the privilege came chained to a responsibility: this was a world-building job, not a freewheeling creative one. Starr couldn’t simply indulge himself. He had to erect Cats’ Lair, the heroes’ home, drop in Castle Plun-Darr, the baddies’ base, and explain — without actually saying so — that the ThunderCats were the sort of people who hired cheerful builders, whereas the Mutants had opted for the more traditional practice of slavery. (This, incidentally, remains the quickest way to tell good guys from bad guys in any children’s programme: if they employ forced labour, you can be fairly sure they’re not going to win the merchandising war.)
The episode opens with a chase sequence, with the ThunderKittens scampering through the forest as if pursued by the taxman. Then, one by one, the senior cats emerge to display their specialities. Cheetara runs very fast; Tygra dodges; Panthro flexes his muscles at Slithe. Even the ThunderTank is wheeled out, in case we had forgotten that the show also doubled as a catalogue for LJN. Bernard Hoffer’s score obligingly slaps a leitmotif onto each moment, reminding me which bit of music to hum when playing with the action figures in the bath back when I was six/seven years old.
The ThunderCats, needless to say, win. They always win. But there is just enough embroidery to keep the ritual from being empty. Panthro, for instance, fights Slithe barehanded, a reminder that ThunderCats embody a kind of moral rectitude that is both stirring and faintly priggish. And Lion-O, for once, doesn’t behave like the world’s tallest cub scout who has accidentally inherited the presidency. Instead, he shows something like authority, even if his final decision — standing his ground against the mutant-enslaved Brutemen — makes his colleagues scold him for rashness. The audience, being human, will notice the hypocrisy: every one of them has done the same thing at least once per episode. But hypocrisy is the luxury of leadership, and Starr is already sketching in the idea that Lion-O’s rashness will one day be indistinguishable from courage.
Cheetara: "Lion-O, pride can be a good thing, but pride carried too far is foolishness!"
The episode deliver one standout memorable visual coup. Lion-O asks the rhetorical question: “Will the Eye of Thundera penetrate even stone?” before taking a nervous deep breath as the resulting beam of energyt blasts through the warren-like guts of Castle Plun-Darr until it pops out of the roof like the world’s angriest television aerial. It is exactly the sort of scene that makes you forgive the clichés: a daft, dazzling spectacle worthy of the big screen. And Starr, with admirable restraint, keeps Mumm-Ra in his tomb this week. Sometimes the best use of a villain is to let him sulk offstage.
Less memorable to see is the what was left after the cuts made for the episode’s home video release. This came at a time when the Criminal Justice Act of 1988 would bring about censorship of nunchaku weapons from children’s television. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or “Hero” Turtles as it would known in the UK as a result of such censorship, is often seen as the prime example, but ThunderCats would have the honour of being the first. As for “The Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr”, such cuts would render the Panthro/Slithe battle a hand to hand only affair, with no nunchaku in sight. No such cuts remain on any releases since, thankfully, whereas TMNT would eventually remove Michaelangelo’s dual nunchakus as his weapon completely over time.
In the end, “The Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr” is less an episode than an exhibition match, but it succeeds because Starr understood the paradox of children’s television: you must hide the formula while parading it. The magic is not in what happens, but in the illusion that it might have happened differently.
Next time: “Pumm-Ra”
