SMCS Companion Piece #12: SilverHawks

I apologize for being so late, but between parents visiting over the weekend and looming final exams within the next week and a half I’ve been busy.

Anyway this (Past) week on the Saturday Morning Cartoon Show we watched SilverHawks, God help us.

I actually don’t have much to say on the subject since I never watched the show growing up. I watched my first episode about a week ago and I’m slightly less intelligent as a result. I saw a lot of toys all over the place though as a kid. They looked kind of cool. In any event SilverHawks was done by the same folk who made Thundercats and the two shows are very similar in tone and style...and also acting ability, mainly because they shared a lot of the same actors. The show was about some cyborg space cop named Stargazer as he recruits a team of other cyborgs to help him fight the threat of Mon*Star (Get it?) and his “space mob”. Specifically what happens was that Mon*Star was sitting in a cell on a space station/prison that apparently orbits a sun that, if shinned on him, turns him into a nigh unstoppable armored death machine. Why they locked him up in a place where he might be exposed to such a things is a neat question; why they graced his prison cell a damn window is a better one. So of course Mon*Star violently escapes and now Galaxy of Limbo is in serious peril which is a fate they deserve because they’re too incompetent to keep dangerous super-criminals away from their sources of power.

This is what should have happened to the Galaxy of Morons Limbo

In response to this unbelievable level of stupidity Stargazer sends a distress call to Earth, which is in another galaxy by the way, to send reinforcements to help him recapture Mon*Star. Well it turns out that this is a bad idea because the people of Earth are apparently not technologically advanced enough to send regular humans on long space voyages to other galaxies without converting them into silver robotic monstrosities and robbing them of their humanity. Awesome. Why the hell would you expect any sort of decent help in fighting a galactic level threat from a planet that can’t even build spaceships that can sustain non-robot life? That’d be like if the plot of the movie Avatar was about the United States recruiting the Na’vi to help them put a stop to nuclear war on Earth.

Shockingly the Na'vi people's spears and arrows did squat against nuclear fire

Since no one in the universe is trusted more than Earth, for some reason, everyone agrees that sending a team to aide Stargazer is a great idea. Made up of four volunteers, and one child from The Planet of the Mimes who clearly had no idea what was going on, the team had the majority of their bodies replaced with android parts which granted them the ability to fly through space and access to an array of weapons. In the episodes I saw none of them seemed distraught by the fact that they had given up being human for literally no sane reason. The team consisted of Quicksilver, the twins Steelheart and Steelwill, and Bluegrass who in addition of the insulting name (Guess which part of the country Bluegrass is from) also was the only member of the team who wasn’t given the ability to fly. I guess even in the far future the South is still paying for the Civil War. Rounding out the team is the Copper Kidd who, from what I can tell, is an alien orphan kidnapped from his home planet (Of the Mimes) by the Earth government and forcefully transformed into a cyborg weapon for their use. That’s my best bet, anyway.

Possible Autobiography Tittle:

"Tears for a Copper Kidd: My Life in Chains"

Like I said this show is from the same makers of Thundercats and like that show it’s pretty terrible. Oh sure, nostalgia makes us fondly remember these shows from our childhoods but when we watch them as adults it’s brutal. In addition to the obvious logic problems the acting is terrible and the plots are as intelligent as a bag of rice. The one positive point I took was that the show’s premise was kind of cool. I mean, these people were called “volunteers” but how much of that is true? Why did they accept what is clearly a suicide mission? And how are they dealing with the fact that they will never be able to feel the touch of a loved one’s sin and so forth? Plus they’re fighting a space mafia! That just sounds cool! Alas nothing cool really happens here; it’s just that same 80s cartoon with big ideas but low estimations of their audiences’ intelligence.

Also why in the world would they, in Episode One, give me five minutes worth of exposition about the plot when immediately afterward we follow the plot proper, basically hearing everything we just learned like thirty seconds ago? Seriously, did I really need to know all those details about the SilverHawks fifteen minutes before they are even mentioned in the story? Show, don’t tell!

Pictured: Abominations of Science

For a less biased description of SilverHawks click here.

For the Saturday Morning Cartoon Show blog click here; for the podcast click here