One of the pleasures of revisiting ThunderCats—that Olympian epic of feline fortitude and shoulder-padded righteousness—is discovering how unreasonably good it often was. For a children’s cartoon that aired in the mid-1980s, its animation standards were closer to Kurosawa with whiskers than Saturday morning filler. When Lion-O roared, he did so against backdrops so lovingly painted you could almost smell the acrylic.
Which is what makes The Terror of Hammerhand feel rather like a paw placed squarely in a puddle. The episode has the unmistakable air of a production team still discovering which end of the Sword of Omens was which. Masaki Iizuka’s Pacific Animation Corporation—normally the ThunderCats’ own Mount Olympus—was, at this early stage, farming out work to studios scattered across Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea. The results were inevitably uneven. Some sequences gleam like polished armour; others wobble about as though the animators had been struck by Hammerhand himself. This could easily be mistaken, in production terms, as the pilot episode.
To be fair, all long-running series have their “finding their feet” phase. The difference is that in ThunderCats, even the feet are often exquisitely drawn. But in The Terror of Hammerhand, there are moments when Lion-O barely resembles himself, and the Berserkers appear to have wandered in from a different show entirely—possibly one about potatoes.
Yet even here, salvation comes from the background art, with hand-painted landscapes of Third Earth that remind us that someone, somewhere, was still taking this business of cartoon heroism very seriously indeed. The forests are lush, the pirate ship of the Berserkers brooding and magnificent. You could hang some of these frames on a gallery wall and wait confidently for the critics to nod.
The story, alas, does not always rise to the same level. The plot feels like it was assembled from the spare parts drawer labelled “ThunderCats, Generic.” We begin with Lion-O fighting a tree, for reasons the episode is too polite to explain, before he takes to the air on the back of a passing crow—an early example of the writers’ well-known struggle with physics. Hammerhand himself, a magnificent concept on paper (a pirate whose prosthetic limb doubles as an existential metaphor), arrives with suitable menace but is swiftly bogged down by narrative flotsam: unicorns, magic rings, and the distinct sense that nobody is quite sure what’s meant to happen next.
Even Snarf, usually the show’s resident squeak of comic relief, sounds oddly off-kilter, as though voice actor Bob McFadden had been told to make him more “relatable” and decided to try helium. And yet, for all its missteps, The Terror of Hammerhand remains oddly compelling. There’s a speech from the Unicorn Keeper—delivered with unexpected gravity—about how Third Earth has become more dangerous since the ThunderCats’ arrival. It’s the kind of line that sneaks past the toy tie-in cynicism and hints, briefly, at myth. And Hammerhand himself, courtesy of writer Ron Goulart’s imagination, would go on to become a recurring (and refurbished) welcome menace.
In the end, the episode’s greatest crime is not that it fails, but that it fails ambitiously. You can sense what it wanted to be: a high-seas morality play with claws and cosmic swords. That it ended up instead as a slightly confused menagerie of pirates and trees is, in a way, part of the charm. The eight-year-olds of 1985 never noticed the drop in standards—and perhaps that’s the final lesson. For all its artistic aspirations, ThunderCats was never meant to be flawless. It was meant to move. And in that, even its weaker episodes still had the grace of a cat that—though it stumbles—always lands on its feet.
Next time: “Trouble With Time”
J