Lords of LIGHT!
I posted this on my RPG blog, might as well post it here, too. Mark Evanier has alerted everyone that there's now a DVD of Thundarr the Barbarian available; he also talks a little bit about his experience working on the cartoon series.
For those of you who had sheltered childhoods, the Thundarr cartoon was set in a post-apocalyptic world with lots of mutants and a psionic version of magic. Jack Kirby did the primary design, but during developement, execs demanded that the cartoon be made more like Star Wars, so Thundarr has a "sunsword" which works like a light sabre, and there's a beast-like sidekick and a princess (who uses magic, which is their stand-in for the Force.)
One of the cool things is that pretty much every episode is set in a real location, but it's not always stated openly where the location is. Sometimes, you just have to look for destroyed landmarks. Similarly, some of the "ancient" technology isn't always identified, so kids can have fun seeing how much they know that the characters don't know.
For those of you who had sheltered childhoods, the Thundarr cartoon was set in a post-apocalyptic world with lots of mutants and a psionic version of magic. Jack Kirby did the primary design, but during developement, execs demanded that the cartoon be made more like Star Wars, so Thundarr has a "sunsword" which works like a light sabre, and there's a beast-like sidekick and a princess (who uses magic, which is their stand-in for the Force.)
One of the cool things is that pretty much every episode is set in a real location, but it's not always stated openly where the location is. Sometimes, you just have to look for destroyed landmarks. Similarly, some of the "ancient" technology isn't always identified, so kids can have fun seeing how much they know that the characters don't know.