ROCKS 7B: Star Wars Droids

WELCOME EVERYBODY TO THE SECOND DISCUSSION IN THE SEVENTH STRAND OF THE NEW CLUB "R.O.C.K.S." - REWATCHING OLD CLASSIC KIDS SHOWS!
A big thanks to everyone that are joining us through all of this.

Threads 7A through 7C will be doing a tie-in with Movie Club. Because we're doing the original Star Wars trilogy, and had talked about doing related cartoons, we figured we might as well combine them. So for each week we're watching a different cartoon adventure.

This week, we're watching a selection from the Droids cartoon from 1985. Specifically, the special feature-length adventure "The Great Heep" from 1986.

Just the usual friendly reminder to everyone that, whilst fans are obviously welcome to passionately discuss and give their views on these episodes, please remember to keep things on a friendly footing and respect your fellow posters.
Also, please do not post where or how to find the full episode online. And do not post asking others to PM it to you. You are however allowed to watch the show in whatever manner you want.

I sill recall seeing The Great Heep on TV. I was such a fan of Star Wars, even though I had missed about half of it I still instantly hit record to record it.
I liked the scene of Mungo escaping and him dressing as a droidfor him and C-3PO to sneeks R2-D2 onto Screed's ship.
I always thought there was too much silly and childish slap stick in the movie and series compared to a lot of the other popular cartoons of the time.

For what it is I think The Great Heep is okay I would give it a 5 maybe a 6 out of 10.

The Great Heep starts the last part of the Droids series when thy get their new Master Mungo Baobab. Design wise I thought he looked the best compared to their other sets of masters in the series. Sadly the damage was done however and the Mungo and Admiiral Screed action figures were never made.
In the series they have 4 episodes with a group of speeder racers as their masters, then five episodes with a another master then the movie and 4 episodes with Mungo.
You could watch any of these blocks of episodes in pretty much any order. Artoo and Threepio get a new master for a few episodes. Leave Master and in the next episode are on their way to a new master.
I am really baffled at how the animation studio and George Lucas made such odd decisions with the Droids cartoon.
How could the audience get to like these characters and want figures of them when they were only in the show briefly before being replaced and more to the point did very little in the episodes.
I recently watched the full series of Droids and while it does have some good scenes and ideas, there really isn't enough going on to relate it to the Star Wars universe.
For anyone wanting to check out the show I personally think The Great Heep and the Mungo episodes 10-13 are the best. Boba Fett makes an appearance in episode 5. IG-88 also shows up and there is a mention of some other characters and vehicles from the film.

The Ewoks cartoon is far superior in writing, characters, animation and theme song..at least the first season is. ;) The second season is a whole different story and show.

I've just this minute finished watching this movie - playing catchup on a lot of things at the moment. And I did enjoy it. As a standalone feature it was good, but I can imagine the series being wobbly. Four or five episodes with each master, that's sort of wrong on both levels. If you're going to chronicle the doings of C-3PO and R2-D2, either give them the same master for the whole series, or change masters every episode, depending on how serious or comical you want the show to be.

But the movie itself I did enjoy. It struck me that these two droids had an influence on a couple of British comedy classics:

1. Perhaps most obviously, there's a lot of 3P0 in Kryten from Red Dwarf. He can be a bit prissy at times, and if he had a little droid to moan to, you can bet he'd take full advantage of it.

2. Also, perhaps less obviously in terms of the basic situation, there was something of Wallace And Gromit about these characters. R2 is like Gromit in that, like their creator Nick Park once said in an interview, "he doesn't speak but he has all the best lines".

The storyline worked enough. The bit about Mungo doing a takeoff of C-3PO was very entertaining. R2's heroics were spot-on, his parachute made me think of "The Spy Who Loved Me" - the opening sequence with the Union Jack parachute is of course what I mean. The bit at the end where the R2 units all join forces to give the pink one a little bit of their energy was also well done. It was clear what was going on, what they were doing, even if they couldn't say it in English.

Nice to see there's a thread on here dedicated to the superb Droids cartoon from the 1980's (1985 - 1986). I'm a huge Star Wars fan, and remember watching this cartoon on Saturday mornings on it's initial release. So, I'm digging up an older review I did for this show:

About 5 years ago, I re-watched the entire Droids cartoon series - i.e. all 13 episodes, as well as The Great Heep special. It was the first time I had seen the series unedited since it's original run in the '80's.

Anyway, this show is AWESOME! It really stands up to the test of time, despite being 30+ years old at this point:

The opening theme song Trouble Again is an essential part of the show, and I had really missed this when watching the execrable 2004 DVD release. The song really sets the tone for the series, i.e. the hapless droids getting in scrapes through no real fault of their own The song also really reminds me of something The Police (one of my all time favorite bands) would have come out with back in the day; makes perfect sense, since the drummer from The Police (Stewart Copeland) composed the song.

The animation rocks! Really nice how there is almost always something in the background to look for. Though I know this has been mentioned before, the animation reminds me quite a bit of the comic books drawn by the superb French artist Moebius, which makes sense since it was apparently inspired by Moebieus' work.

Enjoyed all of the nods/homages to the OT, i.e. the lightsaber that Thall Joben used, the Vehicles like the B-wing Fighter, X-wing Fighter (which was glimpsed briefly floating on water), Sy Snootles & the Rebo band in Doodnick’s café, IG-88, Boba Fett, etc.

The Stormtroopers' slightly different animated design here was great; it reminded me somewhat of their look in certain issues of the Marvel SW comic. And, I liked the laser-sticks. It would be great to see action figures based on this animated look.

The Vehicles/Tech were great! It was nice to see the aforementioned OT-vehicles, but also cool were the Desert Sail Skiff (a mini-rig from the Kenner SW toyline, that was never in the films), the Side Gunner (a toy in the short-lived 1985Droids toyline), and all of the various other ships/robots on the show . Also really liked the space-ship that Thall Joben rode in – it reminded me strongly of a modified Rebel Blockade Runner. And, of course the racing ship The White Witch was fantastic – a toy of this ship would be very nice.

IMHO, The Great Heep is the best episode in the series. Superb story & animation; I liked all of the different R2 & R5 units. Also cool to see Admiral Screed using the Interrogator droid, which was obviously inspired by the one DV used on Leia in ANH. The ending was very fitting, and it was interesting how The Great Heep ended up. In some ways, the story reminded me somewhat of the Marvel SW comic Droid World, one of my favorite EU stories from back in the day.

Though the show isn't necessarily immediately identifiable as an '80's-era cartoon, it was still amusing to see the pseudo-punk rock haircuts sported by Thall Joben & Jord Dusat, as well as the scene in the cantina when R2-D2 'break-dances' - LOL

Trivia:

"The Great Heep" was actually broadcast in the evening in June 1986, more than six months after the last episode of the show had aired (the show was on Saturday mornings). When viewing the series, it's unoffically considered "Episode 9.5".

When I first heard the song Trouble Again as a kid, I thought the first line was, "Repping softlinks, in a danger zone..." It's only now that I realize it's "Stepping softly, in a danger zone". Interesting, because I thought "repping" was a SW slang term for "repairing", and that "softlinks" was some kind of mechanical reference - LOL.

In closing, watching the series made me want this all the more in either a remastered online streaming format or on DVD/Blu-ray; in either case, the sound & picture quality need to be seriously cleaned up. A while back I also saw saw the short animated Holiday Special Boba Fett sequence on the 2011 Star Wars Blu-rays, and the print was beautiful - despite being taken from a 30+ year old TV show. So, there's no question that they can give Droids & Ewoks the same quality treatment.

ROCKS is basically a general nostalgia thing, for a few weeks we pick a show, or a group of related shows, and choose some episodes that we think are either particularly representative of the show or particular high points. If you look back on the board we've done:

1: Transformers
2: Defenders Of The Earth
3: Superman
4: DuckTales
5: Danger Mouse
6: Count Duckula
7: Star Wars-related cartoons (tie-in with Movie Club when we were talking about the original trilogy)
8: Wallaca & Gromit (one-off, we did all the specials, and again the feature-length adventure was the Movie Club pick for that week)
9: Bucky O'Hare (complete series as it was short)
10: Dungeons & Dragons
11: Spiral Zone

You may not have heard of all these shows - if you're American, you might not be familiar with the British ones for instance. And occasionally we do something obscure, like at the moment with Spiral Zone.