Defenders of the Earth was one of those cartoons that never cooperated, and because of that, it was never something that I developed a strong nostalgic connection to.
What I mean by “cooperated” is that Defenders of the Earth was on at a weird time, on a weird station. It wasn’t one of the highly cooperative Saturday morning cartoons, nor was it shown on weekday afternoons. Instead, it made a brief appearance on Sunday mornings, right after (or was it before? I can’t remember…) Karate Kat, another random cartoon that popped up out of nowhere and disappeared just as fast. DotE was on a UHF station that was a cousin to the recently created Fox, but it didn’t quite have the wattage, so it was even fuzzier/grainier/snowier than the already not-quite-clear Fox station.
A Sunday morning cartoon suffered in that it wasn’t Saturday morning. Monday through Friday I got up early in order to go to (ugh) school. Saturday morning I was up at 6:55 on the dot without an alarm clock in order to watch cartoons. But Sunday…Sunday was the day I slept. I tried to get up and watch Defenders of the Earth. I managed to watch it a handful of times—enough for the highly catchy theme song to become permanently lodged in my head—but eventually Sunday morning sleepy time won out over a cartoon that wasn’t G.I. Joe, Transformers or Masters of the Universe.
But now we live in the technological wonderland of “the future,” and I’m able to go back and watch shows that I missed out on as a kid due to scheduling conflicts or all-important sleep. So I’m currently on a run through of Defenders of the Earth. And you know what? It’s not a bad cartoon at all. From a storytelling standpoint it’s fairly standard for 65 episode syndicated cartoons of the time, but that’s not a criticism: these creators knew their audience and knew what their job entailed.
It’s interesting in that it features a significant death in the first episode, something that rarely happened in syndicated kid’s cartoons of the time.
Not being able to truly “get into” the Defenders at the time, I never paid much attention to whether or not there was a toyline. A little research tells me there was a brief line by Galoob back in 1985 that synced up with the cartoon, but at that point there was no way I’d have been able to jump into another property with so much of my focus glued on other, larger properties. The toyline managed to squeak out all the main players and a handful of vehicles before dying out.
But now, as a toy-buying adult with all the disposable income that affords, I’d be all over a Defenders of the Earth line.
Defenders is an interesting premise, as it brings together several pulp-era King Features comic strip characters under one umbrella. It includes such recognizable icons as the Phantom, Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician and his assistant Lothar as they fight against Ming the Merciless. These are all long-standing characters that have transcended their original medium, and each is deserving of their own modern, fully articulated action figure.
The cartoon designs are, for the most part, either faithful to the basic designs of the characters (as in the Phantom’s case) or provide a decent design if there is no one strict “look” for the character (as in the case of Flash Gordon.” Lothar, whose original interpretations skewed towards racist at worst or cliché at best, was given a contemporary (for 1985) update that helped bring him more in line as an equal than an assistant.
Being a cartoon in the 80s, the children of the Defenders got ample screen time, but I don’t necessarily need figures of the kids. The original truncated toyline actually got it right: serve up the main heroes and the main villains.
In addition to Phantom, Mandrake, Flash Gordon and Lothar, the original toyline provided Ming the Merciless and his number one henchman, the robotic Garax. While remaining unmade in the original line, there are also the cannon-fodder-ready ice robots, provided so the Defenders have something to blast, punch, toss and destroy at whim. I could easily see army building them.
As soon as Garax popped up screen he immediately looked like something I would love to have in toy form. Some designs scream “play with me!!”
My default toy-collecting mode seems to be seeing something cool and immediately wanting action figures of it, so in that regard watching some of these old cartoons is a recipe for bankruptcy. I am the type that is in the market for any and all of those old pulp comic strips, and an updated Defenders of the Earth line would be a nice vehicle to get some of them. Likely? Probably not. But like so many things, it would be pretty cool.
