Thundercats and Mike Nomad

 

In 1954, William Overgard took over as the artist of the "Steve Roper" newspaper comic strip. Overgard had previously tried and failed to sell his own comic strip about Mike Nomad, a tough former commando who got the job done. Within a couple of years, Mike Nomad had joined forces with Steve Roper and became the foremost character in the comic, which was eventually renamed "Steve Roper and Mike Nomad".

Back in the fifties, William Overgard was sharing an artists' studio in New York with Leonard Starr, another talented artist and writer of comics. And thirty years later, when Leonard Starr got a very cool gig as head writer of the new Thundercats cartoon, William Overgard came on board to contribute some stories. He hadn't changed much in those three decades, it seems. Let's take a quick look at the six Thundercats episodes in the Overgard oeuvre...

Mandora - The Evil Chaser

This first episode spells out what William Overgard's approach to writing Thundercats is going to be. Lion-O and Snarf stumble across a big box dumped in the middle of a field, ignore the warning signs and open it to release three interplanetary criminals. Space police officer Mandora arrives and takes over the show, enlisting Lion-O as a sidekick to recapture the villains. One of them, the thief Quickpick, is a quirky rogue who joins forces with Mandora and Lion-O when they're all captured by Mudhogs. The rest of the Thundercats are completely absent from most of the episode, and just come along at the end for the final battle.

It's really different from what had been seen in Thundercats before (this was the first episode shown after the initial scene-setting nine stories by Leonard Starr and Jules Bass) but has a definite coolness to it that the series hadn't seen before. Mandora, with her no-nonsense attitude, cool space uniform and technology and flying motorbike ("the Electrocharger") is something very different. But it takes a while to get used to the minimal involvement of the Thundercats in what's supposed to be their cartoon...

The Fireballs of Plun-Darr

This is more of a traditional Thundercats story - probably the first one Overgard wrote, but since it followed on from Starr's "The Spaceship Beneath the Sands", Mandora probably ended up being produced first. It features the toy-based characters more prominently, as Tygra is captured by the Mutants and Lion-O has to come to his rescue along with non-toy-based but established supporting character Willa. The rest of the Thundercats are once more only in a cameo at the end.

William Overgard's knowledge of "Spaceship Beneath the Sands", incidentally, is clearly based on just knowing the episode would introduce the two new Mutant vehicles. Otherwise, he was just working from the earliest premise of the series - the Other Mutants appear in this one, having been dropped by the other writers after the pilot episode. S-S-Slithe and his minions are also very evil in this one, far from the usual comical bungling that became the norm!

Mandora and the Pirates

And this one is barely a Thundercats episode at all. It's an adventure for Mandora, tackling the space robot pirate Captain Cracker, who takes over the Grey Prison Planet and releases the evil creatures held there. Quickpick is among them, and joins forces with Mandora, ending the episode by officially becoming her sidekick.

Lion-O also comes along to help, playing a smaller supporting role. All the rest of the Thundercats (ie the toys who this cartoon is supposed to be advertising) make only the briefest of appearances, as usual coming along right at the end to help catch the villains. More than any other Overgard story, this one feels like a tale from a completely different universe, with a Thundercat hastily added into the mix.

Dr Dometone

This one's very similar, although Lion-O is joined here by Wilykat and Wilykit. They help Dr Dometone and his giant robot frog protect the Great Oceanic Plug from space villain Scrape and his giant robot electric eel. All these new characters, robots and settings aren't at all part of the usual Thundercats setup. And as usual, the rest of the team turn up late on to make a token contribution to sorting things out.

Mandora gets mentioned at the end - Lion-O says he's handed Scrape over to her - and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this was fully written and planned as a Mandora and Quickpick adventure before being modified for Thundercats.

The Thunder-Cutter

This episode is more toy-based than usual. It introduces Hachiman, who seems to have been already created as a toy rather than being one of William Overgard's inventions. And he's teamed with Lion-O and non-toy series regular Nayda, against Mumm-Ra and the Mutants. Throw in the usual cameo of the rest of the Thundercat team at the end of the episode, and you've got more toys in this one than any other Overgard!

It's still a bit strange to have a mediaeval samurai in Thundercats, but it's such a divergence from William Overgard's usual predilection for space robots, I don't think we can blame him for that.

Sword in a Hole

Mumm-Ra hires space mercenary Captain Shiner to throw the Sword of Omens into a black hole, and Lion-O and Panthro have to rescue it. A big part of the episode, though, is devoted to telling us all how very cool Captain Shiner is - and to be fair, he really is awesome. It's just that he's not very "Thundercats".

Captain Shiner did get made into a toy for the third range of action figures, when they were going through the cartoon episodes to find new characters. So did Captain Cracker, but I can't help thinking William Overgard would have preferred to see toys of Mandora and Quickpick.

The most distinctive feature of William Overgard's writing, apart from the minimal role of the Thundercats and the unique rigmarole they recite when rushing to save the day ("Tygra ready, ho! Cheetara ready, ho!" etc) is a love of outer space adventure and a galloping lack of understanding of how outer space is supposed to work. Words like 'galaxy' and 'light year' can mean anything. If your spaceship has inconveniently blown up, you can stand around in space and have a conversation waiting for someone to come and pick you up. Captain Cracker makes Lion-O walk the plank, in space, saying he'll fall a zillion miles. And then there's travel times - the Thundercats always drive from Cats' Lair to Lion-O's location at the end of the episode in a matter of seconds. Even when, as in "The Thunder-Cutter", he's somewhere explicitly several days' walk away.

But though you can laugh at his peculiarities, there's no denying that William Overgard was one of the very best writers of this generally excellent cartoon. His adventures are so much fun to watch that I can (and do) still get a kick out of putting them on again now, 38 years after watching them for the first time. If you've been unlucky enough not to watch Thundercats before (even despite all the times I've told you to watch it), you could do a lot worse than starting with the Overgards!