Sugary Serials :: Comics for All Ages!

This will come as no surprise to you, but I feel most at home when watching or listening to the cartoons of my youth. I think the reason is the same as why I was first drawn to comics. Often the stories concern themselves with basic human struggles placed on a mythical arena, and the characters are so vibrant and diverse that you can play-act which one most represents your aspirations and foibles. My imagination is always most activated when these shows are on, and it always has been. Some of my fondest memories as a kid consist of lying on the living room floor and drawing my own characters, all the while listening to video tapes of shows I spent months meticulously recording (and editing the commercials out!).

My latest nostalgia trip has been with the Mighty Orbots. I spent last week listening to episodes of the show while drawing my latest pages. This was one of the first "giant combining robots" show I had ever seen. It would be a year or two before I’d be introduced to shows like Voltron, Defender of the Universe. What’s especially interesting about this show is how the robots are so much more anthropomorphized than in later robot cartoons. The characters faces and designs are much more "cartoony", giving them a lot more expression, more range of emotion. This fit well with the style of the writing. Each robot not only had a specific function in the group, their function figured a bit into their personality.

Bort, the Orbot with an uncanny ability to shape change into virtually any device he wished, was intellectually and emotionally all over the place. You can hear a bit of a Don Knotts and Lou Costello persona in his performance. Crunch, the power booster of the team, is a single-minded eating machine. He’s good natured and brave, but his main objective in life is food (fuel).

This brings me to another neat facet of the show. Each robot’s primary function added to the capabilities of their combined mode. Bort’s shape changing is distributed to the combined mode for use in battle. When they needed extra power Crunch could disengage to devour a bunch of fuel and re-link with the team to distribute that energy amongst them. Neat idea.

Probably first and foremost of what drew me to this show in the first place was the beautiful animation and killer soundtrack. I found a YouTube video of the opening of the show. I dare you to watch it and not feel like an 8-year-old again with too much energy to sit inside. The closing music was equally exciting.

If you’re interested in even more information about this truly awesome show, I found a neat primer site here.

This is the world as I wish it could be. Sigh.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 11:14 am and is filed under cartoons, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.