Punching Day: Sky Commanders🌭 (Patreon)

In the late 1980s, Kenner Toys wanted to compete with GI Joe, so they came up with their own original concept: GI Joe plus ziplines. Zipline GI Joe should have been an idea that printed money. Ziplines are fun, and Reagan had deregulated children's television enough to allow Kenner to make a 30-minute-long toy commercial disguised as entertainment from Hanna-Barbera.

Sky Commanders are fondly remembered by most people who just saw the commercials, but not by anyone who played with the toys or saw the show, because they were a good concept with the worst possible execution. Picture someone about to hit a baseball with perfect stance, then accidentally letting go of the bat, launching it into the audience and sending the team's beloved mascot to hell (where all mascots go).

First, let’s talk about Sky Commanders as a toyline. The cardinal sin of a children's toy, one that will make children love it and parents hate it, is being too messy. Sometimes a child's joy can outweigh a parent's terror; that’s why slime is still so popular. However, Sky Commanders weren’t cheap and everywhere. If parents had an option not to buy their children a tripping hazard factory for adults, they would take it. The toys were also pretty easily broken by knots in the zipline, and they took way more setup than a GI Joe, so children with short attention spans were not about to build the meticulous landscapes needed to effectively play with them.

So the toy was a radical idea that was difficult to execute, and the show suffered from a similar problem. Quick, come up with an idea for why a team of adventurers can only travel via zipline. It’s not easy, is it! The zipline is essential to the story, and there are so, so many reasons not to use a zipline. I personally have avoided using a zipline every single day of my life. Figuring out why the Sky Commanders had to command the sky was not an easy task, so Hanna-Barbera came up with an overly complicated solution.

The exposition dump of the thirty-second intro is this: “Deep in the South Pacific, a tumultuous and untamed new continent has erupted. Spawned by a highly unstable new element known as Theta 7. If this powerful new element could be controlled, whoever possessed it would be the undisputed ruler of the world. One man, General Lucas Plague, is determined to hold that title, and it’s up to a rugged team of mountaineering experts, led by Commander Mike Summit, to stop him. Employing revolutionary new gravity lock and laser cable technology to traverse the ever-changing terrain of the high frontier, Mike summits Sky Commanders, and General Plague's Raiders are locked in mortal combat, with the fate of the entire world hanging in the balance.”

If I’m eight years old, you lost me, tumultuous. That is a pretty heavy sci-fi plot for kids. I can’t imagine discussing the geopolitical implications of Lucas Plague obtaining Theta 7 on the school bus. It wasn’t just the Sky Commanders writing team who was stretched thin. Hanna-Barbera was used to animating Yogi Bear, not the complex sci-fi action scenes of a show based around zip-lining. They outsourced a lot of the animation to Japanese animation studio Toei, and the final result looks pretty rough at times.

They got around the animation problem by having a lot of close-up shots of the characters delivering dialogue while supposedly ziplining, relying heavily on the voice actors' performances to carry the show, which was a bad idea. They carried the show in the same way I would carry Shaquille O’Neal. Let me introduce you to the cast.

It’s huge and as diverse as a group of almost entirely white people can possibly be. I’ll focus on the characters we meet in the pilot because the cast is so big, not everyone gets airtime. Also, it’s pretty hard to tell them apart when they’re all wearing similar helmets. I think that’s why almost every single character has a crazy accent and defined stereotype. There’s Mike Summit, (leader), Jack “Spider” Reilly (Australian), Rex “Cutter” Cling (second in command), R.J. Scott (surfer kid), Pete “Kodiak” Crane (tall), Loran “Red” McCollough (girl), Cliff “Books” Baxter (nerd), and Yuri Androv (Russian).

That’s just the heroes of the story. General Plague also gets four distinct henchmen: Rader Rash, Dr. Erica Slade, Mordax, and Kreeg, which sounds like the name of a kid who goes to a Montessori school and has parents who wanted to spell Craig in a fun way. All the voice actors made choices with their accents, but none more than Red, who is Irish. Every time she opens her mouth, I want to apologize to an Irish person. The line “Wise up RJ you can never be too prepared,” becomes “Warse up ahr jay yer can neveh be teh prehpared.” It sounds like she got the accent from a game of telephone that started with the Lucky Charms Leprechaun and had a pirate in the middle.

The show also made sure to create one female villain for the female hero to fight, but in the pilot, most of what Red does is nag RJ to stop dicking around. The pilot involves the Sky Commanders tricking Dr. Plague into believing they are retreating so he will lead them to his hideout. Is it that important to find his hideout when a big point of the show is that the landscape is so unstable it’s impossible to stay in one place for very long, and in fact you have to wear a gigantic tactical backpack and be ready to zipline away at any moment? Apparently, yes.

The Sky Commanders' headquarters is a ship that they can easily escape in if a mountain suddenly starts to crumble, but for some reason Dr. Plague is having his henchmen lug tons of equipment from mountain to exploding mountain. No wonder it’s taken him so long to find Theta 7. So often thwarted evil plans come down to bad project management. However, what he lacks in management skills he makes up for in interior design. His lair contains an acid bog full of monsters. One of them gives Cutter the opportunity to participate in the story by being eaten. (He gets better).

Again, I’m not sure how life has developed on this world, which keeps crumbling and regrowing around our heroes, but the acid bog is full of enormous, nightmare-inducing creatures. There’s a full Kraken in the acid bog that I guess dies when the mountain eventually collapses. It should be impossible to sustain life in that much of a shifting environment, but somehow General Plague has not only managed to find an acid bog, but also a Sephora, because his eyeliner is incredible.

Most of the episode is just ziplines breaking. That’s the plot of the show. They start ziplining, oh no, a horrible ziplining accident has suddenly occurred. Whatever will we do? Oh, thank goodness, someone has managed to put out an emergency zipline, and we can all clip onto it. The day is saved! If I were a parent watching this show, I would never allow my kid near a zipline. They are constantly getting blown up or attached to a crumbling mountain if this show is to be believed.

The heroes of the show spend about forty percent of it tumbling through the air like rag dolls. They don’t seem very proactive in their own story. Sure, they’re technically battling General Plague, but most of what they’re doing is just trying not to die. I don’t know why, but ziplining for your life is just not that entertaining to watch. There’s not a lot of fighting in the show, probably because it was too expensive for Hanna-Barbera. They didn’t have a fighting budget; it was a gliding or tumbling budget only.

Kenner planned to do a second run of the toyline that would focus more on the monsters of the high frontier, but the show and the toyline were both canceled before it was produced. At the end of the pilot episode the team finally catches up to General Plague as he flees his mountain lair. They shoot a couple of lasers at him and when someone suggests they continue to chase him Mike Summit says, “No, let him go. We’ve had enough adventure for one day. We’ll deal with Plague and his raiders again soon enough.”

So, the whole episode was for nothing. The tumbling, the getting eaten by a giant flower, the attempt at an Irish accent. They caught up to General Plague and let him fly away for no reason. It took the whole episode just to find him, and when they did, they were like, “actually I’m pretty tired,” and ziplined the fuck off. GI Joe would never! I’m glad the majority of these toys ziplined right into a trash can.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Greg Cunningham, who knows Sky Commanders was one good lunch meeting away from genius because it totally could have worked if like the new continent was a vertical disaster zone where mountains grew overnight and valleys collapsed in minutes and gravity storms could like flip terrain and gravity and stuff sideways. Like anything with wheels or marching or treads is straight up dead weight, the only people who can survive there are climbers, riggers, rescue pilots, and lunatics. They HAVE to zipline, there is no other safe way to travel. General plague builds crawler fortresses with drilling platforms that harvest bits of Theta 7 and it leaves dead gravity zones behind that are super unstable, and his guys are cutting and sabotaging anchor points and weaponizing terrain collapses against the Sky Commanders. Maybe Spider Reilly gets exposed to Theta 7 radiation during the first expedition and gets a low-grade mutation and can like sense tension in cable lines and carries microfilament anchor webs and can free-climb the High Frontier. And then the toys are like modular cliffs and suction anchors and spring-loaded cable launchers and breakaway bridges and monster nests and rescue pods and the fun is building these elaborate traps that fling dudes everywhere and ziplines are happening and people are swinging and stuff is collapsing like a jenga tower. But he hasn't thought about it too much.

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