My Inspirations: Crappy 80s Cartoons, Part 2

Last time we dealt with my early inspiration cartoons, we covered Voltron, a classic anime that caught my attention and fired up my imagination last time. This time, we will discuss a show a few years newer. This one is a bit difference, because while it was the general style of anime and action cartoons that attracted me to Voltron, this second example had a few things that I liked specifically, things that arguably set my mind on mental paths for the rest of my life.

This is a very good thing, because the rest of the show kind of sucked.

The show in question is Silverhawks. You may remember it (but you probably don't) as a contemporary/rip off of Thundercats that took place IN SPACE! Instead of a band of proto-furries, however, the characters were all cyborgs, though less cool cyper-punky variants and more powered-armor superheroes. In fact, their faces were pretty much the only organic bits they had left, at least from the outside. This raises some obvious questions, but they didn't to my eight-year old mind, so let's not get into them here.

So the characters, five cyborgs of this sort plus an older leader with more usual "Human with metal limbs/plate on head" style cybernetics, fought against an evil alien despot. Said despot, when exposed to the light of a certain sun, transformed into a horrible monster via the same transformation sequence, complete with evil rant, every episode. If this reminds of you Mum-Ra from Thundercats, well, good job.

His minions were a more creative lot than the mutants, though. They included various robots, like a minotaur robot, a buzzsaw-using robot, a shape-shifting robot, a...casino-owning robot (odd, that one,) and the rare-non robot that couldn't be easily blasted apart without provoking the ire of the censors. There was a mechanical genius who built most of the group's weapons, a guy with a killer tuning fork, an evil 80s glam/punk rock singer, and a kid with a watch that stopped time. That last one seems a little overpowered, in retrospect.

A few years ago, when a discussion on a message board turned to the show, I had to come to the sad realization that the show sucked, often on a basic design level. Most importantly, of the five main heroes, four of them had the exact same abilities. Why? I suppose there is something to the idea that "mechanical" implies "uniformity in design," but this seems like a real flaw in designing a band of superheroes. Also weird was their weapon design. All of them had the same laser-based weaponry, but the weapons fired from the top of their shoulders. Since they also had the ability to fly, this made some sense; they could use the ability to attack while flying, making strafing attacks easier. This was great, but a weapon that normally only fired straight up wasn't exactly useful when you had to fight enemies while standing.

And then there were the weird things. The most obvious was the Copper Kid, who was another child star that I idolized, much like Pidge. The fact that he was a literal alien mime that only communicated via whistling was more surreal, however. I thrived on weirdness of this nature as a kid, but now I'm more than a little embarrassed by it all. Also strange was the fifth regular member of the team, a cyborg cowboy who couldn't fly but had a guitar that fired sonic blasts. Strange, yes, but outside of oddballs like these two, none of team had any personality. I can't even remember their names, let alone when they ever did anything interesting throughout the whole series. A quick wikipedia search could fix that, but it shouldn't have to.

So what did affect me? I think it was the concept of the characters themselves. This quite possibly could be the first time I ever saw cyborgs, or at least ones presented as heroic and regular characters. Cyborgs in general fascinate me, as they reflect one of the ways I feel humanity itself will end up evolving in the future. Sure, they probably won't turn themselves into hokey superheroes, but that aspect opened up possibilities about future civilization and culture that I take into my designs to this day. It also helps me identify more with the heroes. Unlike most heroes from this era, they weren't created from accidents, alien origins, or simple genetic mistakes. They made themselves into heroes. I certainly used accident and prophecy in my heroes quite often, but the self-created hero was a new alternative, and I learned it from this show. That's probably good, because all the space trivia I learned from their edutainment closings went one ear and out the other.