Mighty Max S1E1: “A Bellweather in One's Cap”

This review was commissioned by @krinsbez.


Yet another western cartoon from the early nineties era, when the main purpose of the medium was selling toys and trying to be like Ninja Turtles for the purpose of selling toys. I'm not familiar with Mighty Max, in particular. When I heard the title, my mind went to "The Mighty Ducks" series from slightly later in the decade, but nope, no relation. Rather, Mighty Max is a spin-off of - of all things - the "Polly Pocket" toy franchise from Mattel, of Barbie and He-Man fame.

Apparently Polly Pocket had a boy-targeted counterpart. I had no idea.

Aside from the main character of this series presumably being named Max, possessing uncommon strength, and fitting into a little pocket-sized playset box, I know nothing about it. Let's check out the pilot.


The first thing the OP depicts is a magic, glowing hat with a rather Mario-esque "M" emblazoned on it, which flies around before placing itself on the head of a blond kid (probably Max) and teleporting him into a hellish unearthly wasteland.

He looks surprised at the hat, despite the matching shirt he was already wearing.​

He is rescued from danger there by a hulking (but jovial-looking) swordsman and an anthropomorphic owl, who he then transports into a succession of other fantastical world using his hat powers. We see them fighting dragons in a cave, dogfighting in a spaceship, fending off xenomorph-ish aliens in some creepy industrial setting, and so on and so forth. No vocals, just "radical" guitar riffs accompanying the chaotic imagery.

So. Kid gets a magic hat that takes him to ersatz eighties scifi/fantasy settings, and he brings some friends he meets along the way with him. Okay. Decent enough pitch.

The intro is very short, as per the norm for cartoons of this era and region. After it, we open on some sinister looking construction vehicles boring through the ground, while a mumbling, hateful voice rambles about how he's preparing a tunnel through which to unleash his wrath and anguish onto the world. Well, technically he'll be unleashing his sloth and pride first. Those two will already be in the tunnel when it's finished, after all. The speaker reveals himself to be a richly robed and armored skull-faced figure in the Skeletor tradition. Fittingly for a villain who looks like a recycled He-Man concept, his fortress looks like this:

Surprisingly, the world that he's planning to invade with his assault tunnel looks a lot like our own circa the production of this series, at least as viewed through his scrying crystal. Either interdimensional tunnel shenanigans, or there's a very, very weird place hidden deep within Earth's crust.

Cut to Max, who is not yet mighty, arriving home from school. That's a really big house he's coming home too; this kid's family is loaded. Lots of expensive artifacts and collectibles inside, too. His parents aren't home; there's just a voice message from his mother telling him not to expect her home until late at night, and telling him that dinner is in the fridge. Okay. He goes upstairs to his room, puts his homework on his desk next to a bust of Socrates (whose spirit he beseeches to bless it. I like this kid), and sits on the bed to cuddle with his free-roaming pet lizard.

He also has a multi-monitor TV set up in his bedroom, which is currently showing the news. There's an unusually large number of simultaneous volcanic eruptions around the world, including three new islands breaking sea level within the last twenty-four hours. Max doesn't seem to be paying much attention to the newscast, but the show emphasizes it.

So, I guess the volcanic activity is supposed to indicate that Skeletother actually is underground, beneath the surface of the same planet that Max lives on. That's a bit hard for me to square, aesthetically, but aesthetic mismatches aren't exactly out of the ordinary for cartoons of this sort.

There's a knock at the door, which Max answers using a frankly implausible system of jury-rigged alarms and speaking tubes before coming down to answer in person. It's a delivery man with a package. Surprisingly, said package isn't addressed to his mother (who I guess he lives alone with? A father has yet to be mentioned), but to Max himself. He opens the package, and discovers an old timey treasure chest containing a chozo statuette.

Maybe that's supposed to be Thoth or Horus or something, but...well, it looks a hell of a lot more like what I said.

He's mystified by this arrival, but not shocked or anything. Also, he immediately gets out an English/Hieroglyphic dictionary and starts translating the inscriptions around the statuette's base. Max definitely takes after his mother's (?) archaeological affinity. He translates it, bafflingly, to read "You have chosen to be the cap-bearer. Go to the minimarket to await the sign, Mighty Max." Because Pharaonic Egypt had a word for "minimarket," apparently.

What's more remarkable, of course, is that it has his name on it. This detail startles him to the point of dropping the statue, which breaks into pieces and exposes a red ball cap curled up inside. Somehow. Maybe the cap is supposed to have magically appeared when it broke. A hat with an M on it, to match both his shirt and the name that the statue just identified him by.

...if I were him I'd assume this was a prank. But, well, unusually bright though he is, he's still just a kid.

Ominous, vaguely pop-Egyptian-y music plays as he does the opposite of what I'd expect given the fear he just displayed and puts the cap on his head. There's a flash of light, a blast of wind, and the thing from the OP happens.

In his underground lair of doom, Skeletother is alarmed by a corresponding flash of bright light from his scrying crystal. He mutters about how this must be the work of the Chosen One, whose coming is prophesied, but Skeletother seems to have been holding out on it being a dud. Well, the flashing crystal ball means that the prophecy isn't a dud, apparently, so something needs doing about this. He dispatches a molten rock monster to handle the situation, preferably through lethal force.

Back in his house, Max manages to pry the hat off again, seemingly with no ill effects or isekai translocations. After musing at how weird that felt and looking at the hat in obvious consternation, he asks himself "Now, how stupid am I?" And, a moment later, decides that he is in fact stupid enough to go to the minimarket as instructed.

INT 18 and WIS 6 on this kid.

He rides his bike to the minimarket, not noticing the giant footprints literally melted into the pavement leading up to the other side of the building or the giant hole burned through the back wall. Once he enters the store though, the situation becomes a bit more apparent, as the lava monster has just burned the shopkeeper's improvised weapon up with a touch and is about to kill him.

The shopkeeper sees Max in the door, and screams for him to run and save himself. The next thing that we see after that is Max fleeing, and the monster bursting through the sliding door right after him leaving a trail of burning, pitted footprints.

Given the direction the shopkeeper was facing when he shouted at Max to flee, and where the monster was...man, that's pretty bloody handed for this kind of show. At least they didn't show it onscreen. And at least it would have been very, very quick. Rest in peace, carbonized shopkeeper.

Max tears off on his bike, and the magma creature keeps pace behind him. Annoyingly, Max alternates between realistic childlike fear, and dumb cartoon action quips as he tries to outrun it, and his expressions do likewise. This is an issue a lot of these shows have, where they want their teen heroes to be "cool" but also relatable, and end up just making them sort of uncanny valley.

At one point, he vaults his bike up onto a fence and rides along the top of that to flee through a residential area.

I'm not sure how he thought that would help him. But, it doesn't.

Or, well. It actually does, in the end, but not in a way he could have remotely been planning on.

He reaches the end of the fence, obviously, which means the bike goes off the edge and he goes over the handlebars into the wall of house at high speed. However, in his moment of panic, the Key of Kings on his head activates fully, and a portal is opened for his body to fly through instead of breaking itself against the building.

The lava monster's semiliquid body slams into the wall a split second after the portal closes. The camera doesn't linger long enough for us to see it burn through the side of the building and slam into the floor inside. Hope there was no one in that room.

Max falls out the other side of the portal onto a barren, rocky desert. Before he can get to his feet, he is approached and hailed by a larger, living version of the statuette he received, who tells him that its glad to see that the package it sent has gone through and the chosen one arrived on schedule, as foreseen five thousand years ago. Also, it has a posh British accent, because that makes sense for an ancient Egyptian god thing. At Bird Boy's side stands the large, sword-wielding warrior from the intro, who helps Max to his feet despite the latter's protests.

Max tries to bluff them into thinking he's a martial artist who should not be messed with. A noble attempt, but not a convincing one.

The big guy is named as Norman. Apparently, Birdboy brought him here to serve as the chosen one's bodyguard. Well, he does look the part.

The two are silent for a moment and just give Max a chance to calm down, while giving him unamused looks to make sure he knows to drop the secret Kung Fu master act. Once he does, Bird Boy starts looking for another set of portal coordinates that he needs to get them too. Considering that he foresaw the exact chain of events that would lead to Max escaping the lava monster and wildly succeeding to make a portal that would bring him here, that shouldn't take him too long. Max asks Norman where the hell they even are, and Norman simply answers "Mongolia." That's quite a bit closer to home than I was expecting, but it's little comfort to Max. Before Norman can give him more of an explanation, Bird Boy declares that he's found the next portal location and calls them over.

Said portal location is just near this big, nondescript looking rock, apparently. Bird Boy, or Virgil as he now names himself, tells Max that he'll explain everything as they travel, for now just come over here. Max approaches, and Virgil lays a hand on his shoulder and somehow activates the hat, causing another portal to open at the specified site.

So, that wall he crashed into happened to have a latent portal opening right in front of it, I guess. And Virgil knew the lava monster would chase him into it if he went to the right minimarket at the right time.

The three go through the portal, and emerge from another at the feet of the Sphinx. Okay, we're finally actually in Egypt now. Max demands answers from Virgil, threatening to run away and take the hat with him if he doesn't get them. Virgil says that he'll be happy to provide them, and in fact he's been practicing this coming speech for the past five eons. Didn't he say five millennia, a few minutes ago? That's three orders of magnitude difference. This breaks my suspension of disbelief and ruins the entire story. Anyway, the speech explains...almost nothing. Largely because of how generic it is. Max has been "chosen." By whom? Unspecified. To do what? To "be a hero." What does that entail in this context? Unspecified. The hat he's been given is the last of the "cosmic caps" and the portal network it lets him access is called the Transport of the Gods. Also, being a "hero" means that he is "a focus point for the powers of good." Whatever that means, aside from "can use the portal hat."

As Virgil speaks, he uses Max to open another portal, bringing them to the courtyard of the Taj Mahal.

Some tourists freak out at their magical appearance, which prompts Norman to draw his sword and glare at them warily. Fortunately, they go through another portal to France before the situation can escalate.

Virgil explains that Norman is the world's greatest - if perhaps not its most restrained - bodyguard, and is nearly unstoppable in battle. Virgil himself, meanwhile, will serve as Max's advisor and educator in the challenges ahead. Where did these two come from? Why and how were they chosen for the job? Unspecified. Apparently, Virgil has spent the last few millennia (or eons? One or the other) becoming an expert on "being a hero." Okay. He then goes on to just tell Max that he's "it," the big deal, the main character, the hero. Great. Still doesn't explain jack shit.

Finally, he guides Max to open yet another portal from a dingy Parisian alleyway that leads back to his home town. As he leads them - without hesitation or reservation now because the writers forgot about him not having any reason to trust them at some point in the last couple of minutes - toward his house, he asks about the lava monster that attacked him before.

Virgil is surprised to hear that a "magma beast" was already here, and laying in ambush at the very Appointed Minimarket no less! This means that the Skull Master is very nearly escaped from his imprisonment, and already able to send minions out into the world. They must work quickly to stop him.

So...Virgil *didn't* plan on Max encountering that monster, then. He just happened to be chased to the exact right spot. Or, I guess, the prophecy just knows more than Virgil himself does. Also, despite the magma beast having been right in this neighborhood just minutes ago, they sure aren't showing any concern about it attacking them in the chosen one's house.

So, the Skull Master is almost free, which is what enables him to send magma beasts into the human world. Okay. Max, Virgil, and Norman enter the former's house. Literally the second after they close the door behind them, the magma beast that they were just talking about but somehow forgot was still onsite approaches the building. Virgil may be knowledgeable, but he is also senile.

Inside, Virgil and Norman start looking for the basement. Max insists that his house doesn't have one, but Virgil dismisses his protests as invalid considering that the scroll he carries around is very specific about this. And, sure enough, Norman happens into a hollow-sounding spot on the wall, and tears off the plaster to reveal a hidden door that Max never knew about.

Norman might be taciturn and trigger-happy, but he's clearly a pretty competent guy at least as far as dungeoncrawling-adjacent skills are considered.

Beyond the door is a staircase leading down into what looks like an Egyptian tomb, with a weird demonic idol thing on the far wall. Max remarks at how cool it is that this was hidden under his house this whole time. Fear, trepidation, confusion all forgotten. As he approaches the weird fanged idol type thing, another portal starts to appear in front of it, but Virgil pulls him back from it. Apparently this is the gateway to Skull Mountain, where the Master of that same name resides. It's not clear if Max's family moved into this house because he's the chosen one and it was destiny, or if he's the chosen one by virtue of living in this house during this time. One or the other I guess.

As they speak, the magma beast descends into the basement/tomb place after them.

While they scramble to get away from the magma beast, Max - damn, I keep accidentally writing "Yugo" and having to catch myself - happens to run back toward the evil fang icon wall, reopening the portal with his approach. And then Virgil happens to fall through it while backing away from the monster, which follows him through. The portal then closes again for no reason despite Max not having moved further away or anything.

Max lets out a mournful outcry, and then declares that a hero's got to do what a hero's got to do. He's going to go and defeat the Skull Master. To save his planet. To save his friends, and his mother. To save Virgil. He says that last name with extra emphasis, because he's apparently gotten really attached to Bird Boy in the three minutes that they've known each other and not had any real bonding experiences.

So, he reopens the portal and they go through amid radical guitar riffs. They come out on the Skull Mountain outskirts, on a ledge overlooking a river of magma.

Despite having gone through the same portal less than a minute before them, Virgil and the magma beast are nowhere in sight. The obvious interpretation is that it disintegrated him and then dropped down into the magmal river and vanished, but I doubt the show is going there.

Anyway, a bunch of solid rock monsters start attacking them, and Norman gets wrestled into a random elevator by them and yanked offscreen in the laziest writer shortcut for "the good guys get separated" ever. Max is now alone, which he needs to be for his dramatic first encounter with Skull Master.

He's a bit larger than I realized, when we saw him at the beginning without anything human-sized for scale. Also, his theme music is more effective than I was expecting. Very understated, enervating, more-felt-than-heard ambiance. It seems to fit well with his slow speaking voice and motions.

Skull Master is simultaneously surprised, amused, and insulted to see that the chosen one is just some little kid. Five thousand years of paranoia and anxiety over this chosen one, and he ended up being a total nonthreat. Unfortunately, despite a halfhearted attempt by Max, this does not mean that there's any chance of them not being enemies. As Max backs away, he ends up being pushed onto a little island that has Skull Master's scrying crystal on it. He backs into the crystal, threatening to knock it over, and like a total idiot Skull Master raises his arms in alarm and shouts "THE CRYSTAL!" in unmistakable concern, thereby letting Max now exactly what to threaten him with.

So much for what could have turned out to be an effective, if painfully generic, villain. Aside from having slightly deadlier monsters as his go-to minions, this guy is...well, he's just what he looks like. Just another Skeletor.

So, Max uses the crystal to force Skull Master to let him get away for a moment. Surprisingly for someone with such a variety of technological and magical forces under his control, Skull Master doesn't seem to have any ranged attack options, at least on him at the moment. He's forced to just look into his scrying crystal and try to plan another ambush location. While laughing fiendishly as if this was some kind of secret victory for him. This guy continues to not impress, despite his better-than-average presentation and mooks.

Meanwhile, Max finds his way to where Virgil has somehow gotten himself suspended over a magma pit by a chain in the few seconds before they followed him through the portal, and rescues him. But only after asking him "how's it hanging?" It doesn't seem like he's trying to be cruel, or just badly botching an attempt at cheering him up. It just feels like the writer making a terrible pun at the audience through Max's mouth.

Anyway, he frees the bird. Before they can plan their next move from there, a bunch of magma beasts and a weird cat/lobster/humanoid thing catch up to them, and they have to start running. They swing across the lava pit on that chain Max just freed Virgil from, and find themselves conveniently in the same place where Norman is still fighting those rock monsters. He's been disarmed, so Max tosses his sword to him and he quickly breaks the remaining rock beasts apart. That sword is either magic, or some monomolecular superblade bullshit.

Norman remarks that that fight was fun. Max congratulates him on how cool that was. They cut the last bit of chain that was binding Virgil's hands together.

Then the floor gives way under their feet and drops them down a chute into the next plot beat.

No, really. That's actually what happens. And no, it isn't a trap that Skull Master deliberately springs on them. The ground just happens to crumble under their feet just then, and there happens to be the top of this long metal slide/chute type thing right beneath them that carries them down to the next thing the writer needs them to do.

The next hazard is probably going to be getting crushed by Ruby as she falls from Mountain Glennnn.

As they wander on, counting on Virgil's scrolls to tell them where they can find a portal out of this pyroclastic cave system, they pass by the tunnel that Skull Master's diggy machines have been working on.

The diggy machines are present, but not currently active. I guess they need time to cool or recharge. Or maybe Skull Master has just recalled their crews to help hunt for the intruders. Or something.

Virgil finds a portal opening, but its in the air over a magma pool a good dozen feet from the edge. Unfortunate. Too bad these portals are all one-way. As they try to figure out how to get to the spot, Skull Master catches up to them. Alone, no minions, armed with only a sword. And much less intimidating in this lighting.

Virgil calmly tells Max that he has no reason to fear, because he is destined to win. I don't think you need destiny on your side to beat this guy, but even so it's nice to make sure there isn't even the slightest pretense of tension or stakes.

...

Now, what the show COULD do here is what other prophesied-hero narratives often do to keep the tension up; have the villain threaten the hero's friends and loved ones whose fates AREN'T shielded by destiny. The show doesn't even have Skull Master try to pull that here.

And even if it did, it would fall flat, because aside from that completely unconvincing and forced caring that Max apparently developed for Virgil we haven't seen any friends or loved ones. I guess threatening his mother would count, but even that would be pretty weak without us having seen them interact so much as once.

...

Fortunately, Skull Master is as slow-moving and limited to close quarters as before, so they easily outrun him and get to one of the empty digger vehicles. Which is unlocked and doesn't require an ignition key.

Max declares that he "has no idea what he's doing" when he takes the controls. Despite this, he somehow knows exactly how to dislodge the vehicle from the cave wall, turn it around to knock Skull Master off his feet, and then floor it toward the ledge that the portal entrance is floating beyond. Digger goes over the edge pushing Skull Master along with it into the magma, good guys jump off of the roof of the vehicle into the portal, and they find themselves in the Australian outback.

There's a final gag where it turns out that the nearest portal entrance to them is fifty miles away. Wow, Australia is such a shithole not even the gods bothered putting more than a handful of wormholes there. The end.

Well, almost the end. There's a little stinger where Max sits in his home library and points out all the countries we visited in today's episode, along with a couple of random historical factoids. I literally laughed out loud. What, you think you get to call your show "educational children's programming" if you stick a 30 second geography lesson on the end? None of the countries visited were relevant. They were all completely interchangeable locations that the story didn't engage with even cursorily. Sorry Mattel, throwing half a minute's worth of trivia onto the end of your show is not going to magically turn it into Where On Earth Is Carmen San Diego, did you think any parents anywhere would be stupid enough for this? Actual end.


Meh.

I appreciate how much plot these cartoons were able to compress into so little screentime, but this is a case where the characters and story suffered badly for it. No time for anyone to develop. No time for any of the many introduced elements to be explored or examined on even a basic level.

The biggest problem with this pilot was how unmoored the protagonist is from everyone and everything around him. Max has no personal stakes in this adventure. Nothing drew him into it besides the actions of other characters. Chuck Simian's pilot didn't have this problem. Even the fucking Street Sharks pilot - despite being otherwise less competent than Mighty Max's across the board - managed to avoid this.

Mighty Max tries to act like Max has developed an attachment to his companions, but he never actually had a chance to do so. We never got to see his mother in person. There's nothing he particularly wanted at the beginning of the episode, no drive or aspiration or discontent. The only interesting things about him - his antiquarianism and great academic intelligence - ended up being completely irrelevant after he got the stupid cap. Hell, you can't even say he's motivated to save the world, since he didn't know it was in danger until more than halfway through the episode and then the villain turned out to be a total joke who could barely threaten a small country let alone the world.

So, it's really hard to care about anything in this show. Maybe it gets better after the pilot - I know this one was supposed to be fairly popular in its time - but going by this? Just meh. It's not even remarkably bad, just ineffective and dull.