First of my bit of housekeeping after my October Horror Movie Challenge; I covered the "movie" for the challenge, so I decided to watch the other episodes for this, and give my thoughts. Now this isn't one of the action figure based cartoons I saw as a kid, partially as it was a bit before my time, partially because, from what I could tell, it wasn't that big in the UK. That means I don't really have a lot of nostalgia for this one, I'm not going in with anything clouding my judgment like that. Speaking of nostalgia, for many years this DVD set was going for a stupid amount on eBay and the like, as it was out of print. I can only assume that the recent drop in price is because more people finally watched it, and realised that, as John Nathan-Turner once said, the Memory Cheats.
Let's cut to the chase, this show is pretty bad, even by the standards of the time it's pretty rough. However, in some ways the writing in some of these episodes was better than that in the first five episodes that formed the "movie", but that's probably a side effect of the format. See, each of those five episodes was originally three seven-minute sections of the Hasbro Super-Saturday/Sunday line, so effectively the movie was a re-edit of a re-edit. No wonder watching those in bulk the pacing seemed super-weird. Here though, these episodes were made with the usual American "half an hour if you include adverts" format in mind, although in an interesting touch there's still a lot more serialisation in these than in most other shows of the time.
The episodes themselves came about in a slightly weird way; now Hasbro hoped the line would be another GI Joe or Transformers level success, but the line never really got off the ground. This was probably because the stars of that line, the over-a-foot tall Inhumanoid figures, were too big for a lot of shops to display with the other action figures, and too expensive for most parents. So they didn't end up continuing the toys, but they had already signed paperwork and such, so the cartoon was something of a contractual obligation. This means that the writers had a lot of freedom, as long as they fulfilled that quota of episodes. Now when a writer has total freedom with a property, that can be a double edged sword; sometimes that means they can get to flex their muscles a lot, and produce some impressive stuff without having to worry about producer interference. The Real Ghostbusters cartoon did that a lot, they apparently had a lot of freedom, and came up with some surprisingly mature stories and gags, that show was a lot of fun. But then again, that also means there's no one to say "no, that's a bad idea", or it can mean the writer's don't try as they don't have to impress anyone, and things go straight to Hell. Do you want to guess which way Inhumanoids ended up going?
Well OK, it does go both ways in a bit. It certainly pushes the envelope in terms of what one of these cartoons could get away with, as the writer's lean very heavily on the horror/monster angle. It's Inhumanid D'Compose that's the main source of a lot of this, as his touch of undeath is used to full effect. There's an episode where he does this to a lot of people, and the character designs for the zombies he creates are pretty damn gruesome, straight out of an EC Comic, which does make they turning back to normal later, as per censorship of the time, somewhat laughable. Seriously, some of them seem to have entirely empty ribcages, so their organs just regrow in the sun? There's also one character actually melting in toxic waste, his skeletal remains get the D'Compose treatment, and the resulting creation, a truly twisted mess called Nightcrawler, shocks even him! Of course, that leads to a super weird moment when someone who knew his human self recognises him instantly; how?
It also seems to be trying for a bit of social satire; the character of Hector Ramirez for one is a blatant pisstake of Geraldo Rivera, and appears in a bunch of episodes for some attempted social satire. (Incidentally, this guy is the link between this show and a bunch more Hasbro properties like GI Joe and Jem) They even have a bit of a political dig by having an unseen Ronald Reagan show up. Incidentally, I love Alastair Beckett-King's take on 80s cartoons, but I wasn't prepared for how accurate it was by having the actual Soviets show up to cause trouble, even to a point of causing an enemy mine between Earth Corps and the Inhumanoids. Because in this tale of Lovecraftian (OK fine, more Derlethean!) horrors from the Earth's depths, the true enemy is Communism! Well, this is the same era that gave us in the Transformers the middle east country of "Carbomya", the thing that got Casey Kasem to quit that show.
On the less good writing side, the later episodes go completely insane, especially with the episode Primal Passion, where the Inhumanoids find... love. Including Metlar turning the Statue of Liberty into his bride, who then becomes a stereotypical nagging housewife. Yeah. The show is full of just plain nuts moments, where it's clear the writers have just decided to take the piss mercilessly, not caring, like the scene of the debate club bullies. I think also it's clear that they overstuffed several episodes, as there are shots where the characters talk really fast for exposition purposes, as they realised they episodes would overrun otherwise.
That brings me onto the big problem this one; the animation is really rough! Now I can forgive rough production values to a degree (again, classic Doctor Who fan), but if it's constant, and gets in the way of the storytelling, I can't do so. Lots of animation issues, like poor lip sync, awkward action geography, missing cells, it goes on and on. It also has inherited a big issue from the Transformers; inconsistent scales for giant characters. The Inhumanoids are basically kaiju, but their sizes vary a lot, and they're not the only ones with that issue, D'Compose's minions get that too. Sometimes they can be about fifty foot tall ish, sometimes double, sometimes it's only about twice a person's height. It's really distracting, and can cause all sorts of issues with the scene geography and action scenes. And that's not even the worst of the inconsistent animation, this cartoon is just plain ugly to look at. Seriously, Filmation's cartoons have aged better; stiffer animation, but more smoother and more consistently drawn.
What do I make of it all overall? Not much to be honest; whilst the idea of one of these cartoons with a lot of kaiju tropes is pretty good, and there is an interesting attempt at a deep backstory, it's just not quite there, especially since the most interesting of the Inhumanoids, D'Compose, doesn't get the limelight enough. The main heroes, the Earth Corps, are a dull bunch too, with the only real personality being the character of Auger... who is just kind of a dick. Even their armour and vehicles aren't that well designed, not memorable at all, especially compared to the monsters they're up against. I can't honestly say if child me would have gotten into this, as I watched some real crap as a kid, but honestly I'd say this has aged a lot worse than a lot of those ones. Now apparently there are some issues with the rights for the Inhumanoids, as they were meant to turn up in the recent IDW comics but had to be replaced last minute, so I doubt they are going to turn up in this proposed Hasbro Cinematic Universe. It's very likely we won't see much more of them going forward... but I don't think we're missing much to be honest. Want more toyetic monster action? Just watch some Ultraman instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment