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MR T: The Mystery of the Disappearing Oasis (1984)

Friday, November 10, 2006 2:46:28 PM

,

In 1983 Ruby-Spears cashed in on Mr T's popularity and created the MR T animated series. In the series Mr T travels around with a gymnastics team and finds mysteries. In many ways Mr T is similar to BA Baracus, not just in appearance but in personality, both enjoy helping children, both have a fear of flying (although Mr T doesn't need to be knocked out) and both use the same catchphrases.

In this episode Mr T and his Gymnastics team fly to Egypt bringing the team bus along with them (why? I don't know and I don't know why Mr T needs a coach size bus for himself, Miss Brisby and five meddling kids and the Dog Dozer)

Anyway the whole team is in Egypt to meet Kim's penpal. The penpal is the daughter of an archeologist who has given her a ruby necklace - which turns out to be the key to a treasure and naturally bad guys are tring to steal it.

Oh I pity the poor fools who mess with T or the kids. Several of the kids are running around Egypt without telling anyone where they going and one by one the baddies capture them and it's up to Mr T to stop them. I wasn't aware but it appears that Mr T is quite the gymnast able to flip and vault as well as any member of his team (who frequently cartwheel out of danger)

Lest I forget each episode has a moral - This one "tell people where you'll be"

(another one had the moral of Don't Brag - "If you're great people will know it and you won't need to tell them. Just like I don't need to tell you" a live action Mr T informs us.

Think of this as A-Team very lite and it's not a bad show.

Brad

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Comments

Anonymous Saturday, November 11, 2006 5:29:55 PM

Glen Davis writes: I think the "every show has to have a moral" code is one of the reasons eighties animation doesn't last as well as the '40s-'60s cartoons.

Anonymous Saturday, November 11, 2006 10:39:49 PM

Matthew writes: They show the show on Adult Swim early Sunday mornings. It has ...um camp value. 80's cartoons were infamous because of the stringent guidelines parental groups put on them. I'm not necessarily against guidelines but these were even more tyrannical than the early comics code. It wasn't until they loosen up in the nineties that good shows like Batman: TAS and Gargoyles were produced.

Brad MengelAggressorBrad Sunday, November 12, 2006 4:11:33 AM

In Australia they show it on Boomerang - Cartoon Network's Classic toon Channel on T days (Tuesday and Thursday)

I wouldn't mind the moral except Mr T takes the Moral and pounds it over your head just so you don't miss it.

But as you say there were very rigid guidelines, I recall that Ninja Turtles could only beat up Foot soldiers because the Foot were robots.

Brad

Cleanclean Sunday, November 12, 2006 11:38:56 AM

Ahh ... just like the old Conan cartoon, where his sword merely sent bad guys back to the dimension from which they came, instead of slicing them into bloody chunks.

Brad MengelAggressorBrad Sunday, November 12, 2006 9:08:03 PM

Yep apparently there were plans for a Captain America Cartoon set in WWII, it hit a snag because you can't show Nazis on a cartoon.

Brad

Anonymous Sunday, November 12, 2006 10:04:46 PM

Matthew writes: The Captain America cartoon sounds cool. In Justice League when they travelled back in time to prevent Vandal Savage from changing the course of WWII, they altered the nazi symbol from a swatsika to something else. Hitler appears but isn't called by name. There was also an episode of gargoyles that involved time-travel to the Battle of Britain. Cartoon Network has slightly looser standards than most of television.

Cleanclean Monday, November 13, 2006 4:00:42 PM

Amazing, especially considering the fact that Captain America pretty much first appeared kicking the crap out of old Adolf.

Some symbols (particularly the swastika) just freak people out - even though they're legitimate (i.e., a symbol that had a long history before the Nazis perverted it and is still a part of history, however appalling what it now represents has now become).

Microsoft found that they had a swastika in their dictionary in a version of Office and issued a tool to remove it.

Odd thing was, they also removed the 'Star of David' symbol.

Pretty soon we won't have any symbols left ... especially in comics! I mean, after all, they're not showing the symbol for the Comics Code on the front of comics any more! wink

Brad MengelAggressorBrad Monday, November 13, 2006 9:29:43 PM

True for whatever reason Nazis aren't considered kiddie fodder - although HOGAN'S HEROES gives us a nicely sanitised version of them. I think that people fear that by showing Nazis we will be raising a new genration of Nazis, because Fascism is like a disease and highly contagious.

Brad

orinoco Saturday, April 7, 2007 9:57:34 AM

There was an episode of Dungeons & Dragons (season 3 episode 23, The Time Lost apparently) that had a Luftwaffe pilot who strayed into the Realm, Venger planned to send the pilot back with a superjet which would win the war for Germany which would stop the kids from being born. Fortunately the pilot was a good Nazi (or rather a good perszon & a bad Nazi) & used the jet to attack Venger (& getting it destroyed in the process)

I am such a geek.

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