A reader named "Chaz" asks a Thundarr question that others have wondered about…
I noticed when I watched Thundarr that the letters "XAM" kept appearing on walls and old billboards. In that show's post-Holocaust world, I always figured this was some sort of planted story point and we would someday meet Xam or find out that Xam was their God or something. Since this never happened, I wonder if maybe the guy who painted the backgrounds was named Max and he just signed his work with his name backwards. Can you inform me?
I can. Ruby-Spears Production — the company that brought you Thundarr — sub-contracted a lot of its animation work to a studio in Utah named Ahern-Marshall, or A-M Productions. At some point, a group of A-M employees broke off and formed their own animation company called "XAM!" (as in, "Ex-Ahern-Marshall"). The new operation also wound up animating a lot of Ruby-Spears shows, and someone there liked to slap the company's name into their output. It turns up in a lot of other studios' cartoon shows of the eighties, as well. Years ago, someone sent me a work of amateur fiction based on the premise that "Xam" was an alien Julius Caesar who had conquered the Earth in a scenario that linked together the worlds of Thundarr, G.I. Joe, Dungeons & Dragons, Spider-Man, Punky Brewster, and other disparate cartoon shows in which the author had noticed "XAM" signs. Quite a crossover.
Also: Someone wrote to ask if there was ever a Thundarr comic book. Well, sort of. Western Publishing contracted for the property in 1981. (You know Western better as Gold Key Comics, but by that time, they were changing the name of their line to Whitman Comics.) They had at least three issues written and drawn of a standard-sized comic book and also assembled one issue in a small, pocket-sized format with which they were then experimenting. Alas, Western was having distribution problems at the time. I'm told they actually published a small run of the pocket-sized issue, but I don't think I've ever seen a copy. They definitely did not get around to putting the regular-sized books out. Those were postponed several times and then, when Western learned the show was going off the air, they scrapped the comics altogether. At least one of the issues was written by John David Warner and drawn by Winslow Mortimer, and they may have done the other issues, as well — and no, I have no idea what became of that material. A Thundarr newspaper strip was proposed, and Jack Kirby drew up a couple of sample weeks, but that never went anywhere. Samples of that material were published in an old issue of The Jack Kirby Collector.