Thundarr the Barbarian was an ABC Saturday morning cartoon show I worked on at the beginning of the eighties. The series was a minor hit and would have run more than two seasons but for Garry Marshall. At the time, he had the three hottest prime-time shows on ABC — Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy — and he (or maybe Paramount) wanted animated versions of them on Saturday morn. At that moment, if Marshall had wanted all the ABC executives to dance naked on his front lawn, they would have. To make room for Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, they cancelled Thundarr. (The following year, there was a Laverne & Shirley cartoon show and the year after, Mork & Mindy. None of them did as well as the shows they displaced.) The 21 episodes enjoyed some minor syndication as part of a package of other short-term shows but basically, Thundarr the Barbarian disappeared into obscurity.
But not forever. As often seems to happen, a new generation catches on to a show and it comes back from the void in some form. Thundarr went off in 1982 and just two years later, if you'd suggested that some company issue action figures or other merchandise, you'd have been laughed out of Toy Fair. It was a dead, forgotten series that wasn't all that popular when it was on the air. And yet now, twenty years after the last Thundarr was made, action figures are coming out from a company called Toynami, and other goodies may be forthcoming. Those are the action figures below…
I really can't explain why the show is making a bit of a comeback. True, they've been rerun on Cartoon Network and more recently on Boomerang, but they didn't attract much attention there; about as much as their earlier syndication did. And also true, the kids who watched the show when it was originally on are now old enough to have kids of their own…but do youngsters ever watch a show because their parents liked it? I think the answer may be that it was just a neat idea — a good-looking character with a good name and premise. Since I only wrote one, I can also say that the scripts were generally pretty strong. My friend Steve Gerber was the story editor and he really made that end of the production work.
One thing it did not have was good animation. Alex Toth designed the three central characters, and Jack Kirby designed everything else. So you had a lot of terrific art that was then processed by the cheapest-possible animation house. When I see the shows now, I can't believe they put some of that stuff on the air, but they did. At the time, the "bar" for acceptable animation on TV was a lot lower than it is now.
Still, the show has its fans. Here's a link to one fan site where you can find news, images, an episode guide, and an interview with the producers, Ken Spears and Joe Ruby. There's also a petition to try and get Time-Warner — which now owns the show, as they will eventually own everything — to release the old shows on DVD. Since Time-Warner doesn't even want to put Bugs Bunny out on DVD, I doubt they'll do Thundarr, but odder things have happened. The mere fact that anyone remembers the show is pretty odd, all by itself.