I am a child of the 80’s.

I grew up on G.I. Joe, He-Man, Voltron and the Smurfs.

Some of my favorite shows were produced by a company known as Rankin-Bass. These shows, though I was too young to appreciate it at the time, followed a particular formula. This is nothing unusual; many 80’s cartoons were formulaic. Heck, this isn’t even unique to 80’s cartoons! However, something about the “Rankin-Bass Formula” etched itself into my brain. Now that I am an adult (physically, at least), I find myself wondering if the Rankin-Bass Formula is a dead art, or if it could survive a transplantation of medium.

I know, I know, I’m dancing around the point; I’ll come to it here. The Rankin-Bass Formula is the template by which the shows Thundercats, Silverhawks, and the much lesser-known TigerSharks came to be. If you strip away the cats, birds/metals, and sea life, respectively, you will find that the core team of each of these shows is assembled from the same basic “stock”. I intend to go into more detail with these characters in upcoming blogs, but the stock group boils down to this: the Leader, the Lieutenant, the Muscle, the Woman, the Boy, the Girl, the Sage, and the Mascot.

Now then, I mentioned a transplantation of medium. Can the Rankin-Bass Formula work in a fantasy novel? It would seem plausible, since the Thundercats, Silverhawks, and TigerSharks were themselves fantasy (or at least science fiction) serials. However, as with comic books, I find myself no longer so willing to accept that a group of individuals come together because of some form of cosmic magnetism. The *reason* the group is together is part of the author’s job of getting me to buy into his world. This is especially true in the case of an epic novel.

For the Thundercats, they were the last survivors of the planet Krypton … no, wait, wrong show. The Thundercats were the last survivors of Thundera (which blew up in a remarkably Kryptonian fashion, in my defense), and they were hounded to their new home by their pre-existing enemies. So, for the Thundercats, theirs was a bond of survival and of biological fraternity. Still, a large number of plots depended on this pre-existing threat (the Mutants).

The Silverhawks were a sort of paramilitary unit, upgraded into cyborg bodies to police a (dimension? area of space?) called Limbo. The Silverhawks share no particular bond (with the exception of twins Steelheart and Steelwill), but rather are ordered to work together by an unseen chain of command, represented by the Sage (Stargazer). Plots revolved around criminals within their jurisdiction committing various crimes, and the team responding.

The woefully underdeveloped TigerSharks were closely patterned off of the Silverhawks. They, too, were a paramilitary group assigned to protect the planet of … I kid you not, “Water-O” (really, people, this was the best you could come up with for a water planet?). The few plotlines that were seen revolved around criminal activity on Water-O and the team’s response.

Nothing particularly epic in any of these iterations of the idea. Thundercats and Silverhawks certainly had the requisite “big bad” to instigate an epic threat – I suspect that one of TigerSharks’ chief weaknesses was the weakness of T-Ray as a villain. I suspect that the creators felt that such epic tales were beyond the attention span of their target demographic. So, I pose this question, on the off-chance that anyone is actually going to read this blog entry: what do you feel is a compelling (and believable) reason for a group such as this to come together? Should it be the epic threat itself that unites them? Or is it not too trite to have the team be brought together by some Powers-That-Be before the story even begins, such that the story involves the group’s response, as a whole, to the epic threat?