Trouble with Time takes a premise so sharp it could open its own envelopes: the hunt for a power source to keep the ThunderTank from becoming a very large, very feline paperweight, or Cat’s Lair becoming the planet’s largest mechanical inanimate statue with bathrooms. At last, the writers have found a way to propel the Cats into trouble rather than leaving trouble to do all the legwork and find them. Following The Terror or Hammerhand - which remains the series’ worst of its 130 entries - this would be Ron Goulart’s second — and alas, final — contribution to the ThunderCats canon. It arrives like a writer suddenly remembering where he left his talent in comparison.
The early scenes of Lion-O inadvertently joyriding the ThunderTank are a delight, as if the writers had briefly surrendered the script to a 12-year-old with a sugar imbalance. His childlike enthusiasm is expertly executed by Larry Kenney, as if he had been given a jumbo bag of Skittles ahead of recording. The episode actually remembers that downtime can be entertaining before the inevitable heroics kick in. Even better, we get the debut of Willa and the Warrior Maidens — an Amazonian-like contingent shrewdly introduced to counterbalance a cast that, until now, has looked like the alumni reunion of an all-boys’ school. Their initial suspicion of the ThunderCats, an alien race from another planet, gives the story a welcome tension, and for once our heroes have to earn the friendship of their new neighbours rather than being greeted as the interstellar equivalent of the Rotary Club.
It’s finally time for Tygra to be dusted off and put to good use — a character treated in later episodes as background décor with stripes — giving him a moment of proper screen authority. He takes centre stage to his detriment, and it won’t be the first time, bless him. The team’s architect stumbles across a major source of much needed Thundrillium, which happens to be located in the Cave of Time, a landmark that transforms everyone’s favourite tiger into a frail old man in mere seconds. Credit is due to the designers and to Peter Newman, whose voice work makes the “aged” Tygra seem less like a gimmick and more like a genuine shift in the episode’s emotional weather.
The effects of both spectrums of age serve the episode’s given title perfectly. Lion-O’s impetuousness almost costing him both the tank and his life in the Thundercats own front yard appeals to the show’s child demographic, sending them the message that no matter how grown up you might be physically, its mental matureness that matters most. On the flip side, even a grown up can make errors in judgement based on lack of knowledge, or a determinism and curiousity that literally could have killed the cat. Trouble with Time indeed.
The the whole enterprise isn’t free of burrs, however. Monkian’s aside about Slithe being a “chauvinist reptile” has the strained air of a line included to reassure us that yes, even Mutants are familiar with 20th-century gender politics — albeit in their clumsier forms. In the original broadcasts in the UK, and the subsequent VHS releases, edits were made to remove any instance of Panthro’s weaponry, his nunchakus. And near the end at the geyser of life there is what feels like an odd cut off of a conversation into immediate battlecry as if a few seconds might be missing. For those familiar, while I don’t believe isn’t one of those cuts, as even the UK DVD sets are uncut, it sure looks and sounds like one. A rare moment of peculiar editing.
Overall, the show’s usual standard of animation — which, even on an austerity-level budget, routinely outshone its contemporaries — reasserts itself from last time out. Lion-O lifting the Sword at the geyser of life is the sort of shot that makes you forgive a great many sins. As many shots of Lion-O will do going forward. It shows the capability of an animation team, even with a television budget, that they were streets ahead what other studios struggled to achieve with a small nation’s GDP.
Next time: “Tower of Traps”
