More than meets the eye

Thanks to zip.ca, lately I've been wallowing in a sea of geekery. Not the fantasy hockey kind, but the 80s cartoons kind. Good fun. Though undoubtedly my parents would just do lots of eye-rolling were they to see me. The most interesting thing is that the bulk of my cartoon-watching as a kid was done on a wee black and white TV. Yet oddly, I still somehow remember all of this in colour. An interesting thing, the imagination.

So He-Man was fantastic (probably because I got the best-of set shipped to me, and that meant watching ten episodes ranging from "Huh. Not bad." to "That's the ONLY episode of the series I remember watching from when I was five!" And from having downloaded The Secret of the Sword years ago, the show doesn't strike me as too cheesy. Can't wait for a bigger fix, in either the full season of He-Man, or any of She-ra, which I've zipped as well.

Thundercats I've been plowing through season one so far. I'm getting to the set of episodes (the five-parter I guess) that I remember from watching when I was little, which is Lion-O's coming-of-age. And the entire series is holding up surprisingly well, as long as I can ignore the fact that there's maybe about three different plotlines. And dreadful EVA scenes.

I am, however, vaguely disappointed with Transformers. I think it's the earnest educational nature of some of the plotlines, mixed with some incredibly terrible science. It's less forgiveable than in the other two shows since this is more science fiction than fantasy, and I'm less willing to suspend my sense of disbelief that completely (for science fiction, I have a minimal framework which they have to hang their worldbuilding onto. And they didn't do that). And maybe I had higher expectations.

Wow. I just had a fantastic idea, transposing the Third Earth in which Thundercats is set onto Gene Wolfe's Urth (all four vocabulary-extending volumes). Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.