Submarine cartoon 80s series#

If you haven’t seen it yet, I would heartily recommend that you obtain and watch at least the opening mini-series, The Evil That Lies Within. And then there was the big bad, the fireball-spitting Metlar. D’Compose was a skeletal giant who could turn people into zombies, while Tendril was a plant creature that could duplicate itself when pieces of its body were hacked off. If ever a kids cartoon could be described as Lovecraftian, Inhumanoids is your show.Īncient monsters imprisoned in the centre of the Earth aeons ago, the baddies certainly eclipsed the baldy heroes of the piece. Not quite the stuff an exciting children’s adventure show or toy line is made from, you may think. The mini-series beginning the Inhumanoids saga introduces us to a team of scientists, all experts in geological research. The whole movie-length story was then released on video, which was again how I think I came into contact with it.

Submarine cartoon 80s series#

The Inhumanoids mini-series was first shown in America, and was broken down into seven minute episodes, which, along with other series like Jem and Robotix, made up a compilation programme. They both began with a mini-series that expanded into a full, multiple story series (or two in Centurions’ case), and both also had some fairly adult aspects compared to the kids shows that had come before them. This series had a lot in common with Centurions. Without the Chest Burster, though, obviously. “Man and machine: power extreme!”Īs cheesy as this series may seem now, there is one particular episode which stands out as something impressive for the time, a pretty straight kid friendly adaptation of Alien. They need to undergo a slow-motion attachment sequence. This being the 80s, they don’t just slip into the bionic workwear in a changing room. Quite clearly developed in order to sell a toy range, the series featured a team of air, land and sea operations experts, who could attach a sort of light mech suit onto themselves tailored to the relevant danger they were in (and, of course, which suit attachment the toy makers wanted to sell). These were the days before satellite broadcasters had hours to fill on children’s broadcasting channels, and the thought of a single channel showing more than an hour or two of cartoons before Newsround every day was unimaginable.Ĭenturions was one of those series, although I may be wrong about this – I can never remember watching it on television, but instead saw a few episodes on video.

The Video Collection was one of the biggest ranges at the time (remember the jingle?), and a lot of my experiences of cartoons back then were through either my own videos, or watching others at a friend’s house.