35 years ago today, the Thundercats episode "Berbils" had its first showing on British TV. It's the third in the series (or the second if you run the first two together into one big episode, like the BBC did), and it continues the gradual introduction of the characters and concepts - they build the Thundertank, meet some of the inhabitants of Third Earth, tangle with Mumm-Ra for the second time, and start to build the Cats' Lair.
The episode is cut down dramatically on the video version of "Exodus" that I blogged about before. The opening scenes are restructured - the previous episode "The Unholy Alliance" ends with a Mumm-Ra scene and "Berbils" starts with one, so when they're run together into one full-length animated film it starts with the scene of Lion-O and Snarf exploring the forest, then jumps back to Mumm-Ra and his attack on the Thundercats and their newly-constructed tank, then goes on to Lion-O meeting the Berbils for the first time. But then the video chops out a very large chunk of the episode, in which Lion-O defends the Berbils from Trollogs and Giantors, going straight to Mumm-Ra launching a final attack on Lion-O as a swarm of insects. Then it inserts a bit of the earlier Berbils scene from immediately before the Trollog attack, and then shows Mumm-Ra arriving and continues to the end of the original episode.
It's a strange decision to remove that plot entirely - it's a sequence that perhaps doesn't work quite right, since it basically involves Lion-O messing up the balance of co-existence among the races of Third Earth and not entirely learning the lesson that one shouldn't do that, but it's not a particularly bad part of the episode at all. You can chop it out without harming the narrative, but why did they need to?
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