Originally posted at the DL September 2015
Welcome to the Time Warp.
So this isn't the greatest show, but it's really very watchable. There's a clear sense that the writers were trying to write something better than a Saturday morning kid's show, and really wanted to have a story here. Despite being almost entirely episodic for the entire series, there's a clear sense throughout that the kids are in fact getting better and making small, gradual differences in the Realm. They don't seem to notice, but taking down dungeons and releasing old heroes definitely creates a less bleak setting as time goes on.
Probably the biggest factor in the show working is how well the main villain is handled. They set up even in the intro sequence, and back up in every episode he plays more than a perfunctory part in, that he's more powerful than the kids put together, and has strangled the Realm into obedience, but is not all powerful and has a clear reason to go after the kids even before they start making an actual dent against his tyranny. He's a villain that is 100% willing to say "Mmm, this could be a threat to me. I should probably take care of it." or "this artifact could give me the advantage I need to finally destroy the last pockets of resistance and ensure my reign is eternal" and take care of the matter with all available resources, including going himself if things aren't going well. Aside from being a bit prone to monologueing his weaknesses, he does an admirable job of being credible and competent throughout.
Which does lend to the idea that the unproduced finale was pretty much something they did from the start and just kept it under their hats a liiiiitttleee too long.
Best Episode- The Dragon's Graveyard. Going along with both the above, we have a latter episode where the heroes realize that they can accomplish their goal a dozen times over but it'll never mean anything because Venger is too savvy for them to get away when they do. So they decide to take care of him... over much objection from Dungeon Master (this is the most direct nod to the plot of the unproduced finale: Venger is his son, who sealed away his goodness for power. Two or three previous episodes also allude to a strong connection between them, but that's one of the appeals of the series: they clearly had a pretty detailed series bible the whole time, in particular the rough shape of the finale) and involving an especially daring and risky plan that quite likely might have gotten them killed if they had succeeded. It's got a distinct sense of "holy shit they got this to air?"
Weakest Episode- Beauty and the Bogbeast. In which one hero does something patently stupid and we all suffer for it. The whole thing feels very forced, in the Editorial Mandate sense.
The show also features Peter Cullen and Frank Welker, which leads into a larger point. This show was released in 1983, making it basically contemporary with The Transformers. Apart from sharing some headline actors, both shows also took creative direction from Marvel and was mostly animated by Toei.
Except Dungeons & Dragons just blows the other, better remembered show out of the water in terms of animation and VA quality. In the sense that it very clearly used a lot more in between frames, paid more attention to visual continuity and characters being off-model, and did no small amount of ADR and cleaned up voice quality quite a bit. Which of course is just animation speak for "this show had a WAY bigger budget". and that's the thing. Transformers exists because Hasbro had already made GI Joe and knew how to make this shit work. They had a clear expectation of how much money they could put into this and still make money. And no mistake, D&D was at this time a known thing, and there were definitely tie-ins in the actual game plus toys and shit. But the level of branding doesn't seem to have been there. There's no way it was making the sort of money Transformers was, but they were SPENDING a lot more of it.
In short, this show shouldn't exist. It's an anachronism, closer to the post-Batman era of the early 90s than when it was actually made. How they hell did they actually get the money for this thing?
And I think it's basically the first real example of American Anime (making it doubly anachronistic!). The show bears much more in common with stuff like Robotech (read: Super Dimension Fortress Macross) and Mobile Suit Gundam than what existed in american animation at the time, or for a few years immediately following. TRS and whoever else pitched this (probably to CBS from a brief glance at its broadcast history) were gambling that they could tap into the emerging anime market, and the crossover between that, the coming Fantasy boom of the 80s (for all the money THAT didn't make), and Dungeons & Dragons and its related markets. Basically the first show by nerds, for nerds.
Which kinda makes the year of broadcast fitting. I was born in 1983~
Rating: 6/10. But no mistake, this show is just endlessly fascinating in a weird way.
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