SWAT Kats: the Radical Squadron S1E1: "The Pastmaster Always Rings Twice" (continued)

So, Jake and T-Bone jump into a two-seater aircraft and fly out of their underground base, while heroic guitar riffs all but drown out their dialogue. Crossing the city takes them but hardly minutes, and soon they come in for a landing on the museum's roof. Wait, why does their underground base have this massive, structurally precarious runway tunnel if they're flying VTOL aircraft? Maybe they think it'll save them on fuel in the long run, but I'm not sure that they made the right call there. Just as they land the plane, Briggs and Zinian conveniently escape onto the roof and slam the door behind them. Sure was lucky they happened to run up here and not down toward the building exits!

Less lucky is the fact that, unlike with those skeletons in the graveyard, Pastmaster doesn't seem to have bothered calling off the smilodon after it chased everyone away from him. It smashes through the door right after them, which somehow knocks them off the roof at an angle that you'd need a physics degree to parse. Briggs and Zinian manage to catch themselves on a drainage pipe, but it doesn't look like it'll hold forever. In the meantime, the smilodon forgets all about them and decides to attack the plane.

Not very effectively, but A for effort.

Fortunately, it isn't only the bad guys who can make call upon the power of troll physics. Jake waits for the beast to scrabble onto exactly the right spot, and then throws the canopy open. Which has enough force to send the smilodon flying across the rooftop deck and smacking into a wall. Like I said, either willful exercise of troll physics, or an opening mechanism that must be powered by troll physics at some point along the thermodynamic chain. With a little bit of space cleared, T-Bone runs out and grabs the civilians before the pipe they're clutching can give way.

The smilodon recovers and tries to pounce at him as he rescues the scientist and reporter, but Jake is still in the open cockpit. T-Bone comes a few steps toward the monster and positions himself so that it will have to pounce right across Jake's sights to get to the closest target. When it does, he shoots it with some kind of foam gun that the plane is equipped with. The animated mannequin is paralyzed, and after a moment it stops struggling and the glow in its eyes starts to fade away.

Looks like Pastmaster's creations are designed to de-animate themselves if they've been mission killed. Maybe to save him a little extra mana or whatever. Or else its duration was already running out and fighting the containment gel just cost it its last bit of energy. Either way, it appears to be a normal museum dummy again now.

Anyway, this is also a pretty elegant introduction to the lead duo's roles. T-Bone is the athletic one. Jake is the tech-using one. Their appearances already hinted at this, but this smilodon fight is still a good, concise introduction to their respective skillsets. And, after shit like Bots Master, it's nice to see a SatAm team use actual tactics that don't depend on camera jumps and time dilation!

Meanwhile, down in the museum, Pastmaster is still looking for his Tome of Time. And...well, he finds it.

Dang, guess that hunch of his was right on the money. They just had it in a display case next to a bunch of other old books from its general time period. I'm actually pretty surprised at this! I was expecting Pastmaster to find a hint about where it might be, perhaps, but nope, they literally just had it at the museum.

He cackles about how he now controls all that is in the past once again, and with that power he may shape the future as he sees fit. It's actually fairly poetic, how he phrases it. Not amazing, but better than average for a cartoon villain.

Back on the roof, Dr. Zinian and T-Bone investigate the lifeless smilodon dummy while Jake (or...actually, T-Bone calls him "Razor" in this scene. Did I mishear before? Is "Razor" a nickname? Or is his full name Jake Razor?) and Kelly get the plane ready for lift off in case they still need to evac. Zinian explains that the smilodon model is actually a real fossil skeleton with fake fur built around it, and that it must have been reanimated by an evil sorcerer using the power of necromancy (or...maybe chronomancy is more accurate. It seems like he can animate things by virtue of them being artifacts of the distant past, not because they're dead). She's...not quite nonchalant in her delivery there, but she still has the air of one speaking from their academic training. Okay, so yeah, magic is definitely a known thing in this world. Going by her framing and delivery it's pretty rare, but still very much known to exist. That more or less squares with how everyone else has been reacting to Pastmaster so far.

Well, speak of the devil, they happen to spot Pastmaster exiting the building onto the street below, with the book clutched in his hands. Zinian exclaims that that's a bona fide occult grimoire that the unusually short and garishly dressed man is stealing, and if he's their necromancer then he could *really* do some damage with it.

...

Okay. Magic is real and everyone knows it's real. They have a confirmed spellbook of great power in their possession. And they just put it in a display case next to a bunch of other old books?

Wouldn't that be like putting a live nuke on display in the military history section?

I guess they're reaping what they sowed.

...

The local police arrive (obnoxiously late, as the watching SWAT Kats grumble from the roof) and try to head Pastmaster off. And yeah, he's just barely more than half the height of the typical catperson. I wonder if there's a story behind that, or if it's just common dwarfism? Well, anyway, he's less than intimidated by rando city cops, and he's eager to flex his arcane muscles now that he has the Tome of Time again. He opens the book to a page with an illustration of a dinosaur type creature on it, and commands for the beast indicated to be drawn forward through time and obey the master of all that came before the present. A portal opens in the sky, and it drops onto its feet with an imposing roar.

It looks like at least three different dinosaurs mixed together. Up on the roof, Dr. Zinian identifies it as a "megasaurus rex." So, this world had different dinosaur species than our own, as well as cat-people replacing primate-people, and also magic. Again, more attention to detail than most such shows; I would normally expect them to either call it a nonspecific "dinosaur," or call it a tyrannosaurus even though it barely looks anything like one. The creators decided they didn't want to burden themselves with real life palaeontology, and signalled it in the pilot episode so that the nerdy dinosaur kids wouldn't be frustrated. I respect this!

The cops run. Pastmaster has his dinosaur minion pick him up in its hand and start carrying him to...somewhere? Not sure what his next objective is, but I can totally understand him wanting a dinosaur to carry him to it rather than resorting to walking like some peasant. The T-Bone and Jake get back in their plane and take off to deal with this escalating situation while the women see them off with an encouraging pair of JoJo poses.

The duo's heroic riff continues to be much louder than the rest of the soundtrack. Really the one weak spot in this score.

They fly after the kaiju-sized megasaur and open fire with...erm..."octopus missiles." Apparently they're missiles whose nosecones pop open into a ring of blades instead of just carrying a warhead. Unfortunately, the dinosaur has gotten about thirty times bigger between shots, and is now full-on kaiju sized, so knife-missiles don't do shit to it. In fact, it swings its arm and breaks the missiles with enough force to send a cloud of shrapnel flying back at the plane and actually damage it. The SWAT Kats plane goes spinning out of control and somehow manages to tumble its way into the giant hole in the sky that Pastmaster summoned the monster through.

It's even harder to make sense of than the scene with the smilodon throwing the women off the roof, in terms of direction and energy. Behind them, the reporter and curator despair, asking aloud who's going to save the city now that the SWAT Kats are gone. I guess they have no other military worth mentioning? Surprising, given how much heat that police chopper at the beginning was packing.

The SWAT Kats (seriously, why SWAT? They're not a SWAT team!) fly out the other side of the wormhole and into the sky over a pop-culture-mesozoic swampland. Not for very long though; that shrapnel cloud cut one of their fuel lines, and now they're losing altitude after inexplicably gaining it earlier. They crash land, and quickly come to the attention of another pair of chimerical prehistoric predators.

They escape the sauropod/spinosaur crash victims by ejecting from the plane and launching themselves high into the air...where a flock of predatory pterosaurs are seemingly waiting for them. It's the pop-culture-mesozoic, so of course the entire landscape is just a million monster attacks stacked on top of one another.

Before we can see how T-Bone and RazorJake get themselves out of this one, it's back to the other side of the time portal. The police are hammering Pastmaster and his mount with RPG's, but to no avail. All they're doing is making the dinosaur mad and Pastmaster smug. Pastmaster leafs through his tome and determines that he can, in fact, bring this whole region of land back in time to his native "dark ages." The spell will need to be cast at the top of the tallest clocktower in the land he wishes to effect, though. He notes that that used to be his own tower, but since that's no longer standing he'll need to figure out which of these skyscrapers has the tallest clock in it.

Where is he going in the meantime, though? Just stomping random shit that happens to be in his path? I guess?

An expensive looking vehicle pulls up behind the nearest police line, and a...crime lord? aristocrat?...gets out. From how the police adress him though, he's apparently their official commander. But like, look at him:

He looks like someone's furry interpretation of a Batman villain.

Also, a few moments later we see that he's holding an actual scepter. What even is this police department?

Anyway, he asks if "those meddling SWAT Kats" have responded to this crisis yet. When he hears that they got taken out almost immediately, he does a poor job of hiding his smug satisfaction. There's definitely some interagency rivalry here. Or agency-superhero team rivalry. Whatever the SWAT Kats count as. Anyway, Commander Farrel (or is it Feral? One of the two) authorizes the use of poison gas against the monster. Jesus fuck, in the middle of a city? Well, this guy is already living up to his villainous appearance, that's going to kill more people than a rampaging megadino ever could. Granted, he might mean knockout gas, but I don't think so.

Well, whichever kind of gas he has them shoot, and whatever collateral damage it might cause, it at least does prove itself effective. The oversized megasaurus collapses, faceplanting into a fenced-off tar pit that's pretty clearly meant to evoke LA's La Brea site. Which means that the Megakat City Museum of History is basically the La Brea Museum, just with a wider scope that includes the historical era. And the LAPD are murder-happy nutjobs. Sounds legit, yeah. Anyway, the living dinosaur he summoned through time goes down, but Pastmaster's undead physiology is unaffected by gas.

Zinian tells the commander that he'd better get that book away from the diminutive skeleton-wizard, or he'll just keep summoning more dinosaurs. Commander FaRelle is a little snippy with her for trying to assert expertise while being a civilian, but still, once Kelly concurs and assures him that Zinian knows what she's talking about, he at least has the sense to comply even if he has a bad attitude about it. Since explosives haven't seemed to do much to Pastmaster so far, he gives the order to hit him with netguns and try to keep him from opening that book again until they can get it away from him.

You know, assuming that gas was just a knockout poison rather than something lethal, I feel like Farielli is doing a pretty good job here? His tactics are all soundly logical, and so far seem to be working better than what either the SWAT Kats or the junior police officers were doing on their own. Using that much tranq gas in the middle of a dense city is still going to cause some injuries and deaths, but with the amount of damage Pastmaster is causing on his own I think it may have been the least bad option.

Then again, Pastmaster himself ALSO seemed surprisingly reasonable despite his villainous looks and mannerisms when he first appeared, and look how that turned out. Well, we'll see if that ends up being a pattern.

Well, while netguns may have been a good idea, unfortunately Pastmaster is quicker on the draw than whoever's holding the netguns. Standing on his dead or unconscious dinosaur, he opens the Tome of Time again and calls a flock of those vicious pterosaurs through the portal. While Forello calls for air support and his men do their best to repel the new wave of attackers, Pastmaster has one of the larger specimens grab him and fly him toward a tall skyscraper that happens to have a big clock on it. With the police pinned down, they can't really spare the attention to shoot him down, and the air support is still a few minutes away.

Apparently, this is the top of City Hall. I guess that explains the big ornamental clock and steeple atop this otherwise very glossy-looking modern skyscraper.

Kelly yells at the Commander for doing too little, too late, and...well, I guess he might have been able to prevent this if it hadn't been for that extra two seconds of arguing with Zinian, but he also might not have.

Back in the pop culture mesozoic, it turns out that T-Bone and Jake's ejection pods are actually highly manoeuvrable, armed, self-propelled aerial vehicles in their own right.

They dogfight the pterosaurs with more exotic explosive-less missiles, and shake the last few by donning gas masks and flying low over a volcano so the fumes will choke the pursuers. Oh hey, a cartoon remembering that volcanic fumes are toxic! Too bad about that whole "convection" thing, but still, baby steps. Unfortunately, either the sky-portal closed while they were evading the pterosaurs, or they were just too stupid to fly into it, and the ejection pods don't carry all that much fuel themselves. So, down they fall once again. This time though, Jake says he has an idea for how to get their plane moving again, but it's a risky one.

70 million years later, Commander Forrella is trying to dislodge Pastmaster from the city hall steeple, but the mayor is reluctant to let them do anything that might damage his shiny building. When Zinian and Kelly rush into his office to try to explain how serious this situation is to him, he tells them to go up onto the roof and see if Pastmaster will negotiate with them.

Well, even if Farrel doesn't turn out to be a total caricature, the mayor sure is one. :/

Anyway, for some reason it's now Zinian and Kelly's job to go negotiate with the evil wizard who's trying to destroy the city. Why? Because they're the ones who told the mayor about it, I guess.

Back to the SWAT Kats. Jake makes some modifications to the plane's engines, and T-Bone puts his gas mask back on and drills into the side of that volcano to release some of those gases. Good thing he didn't hit a magma dyke by mistake, lol. Jake explains that from the smell of those gases, he thinks they ought to be combustible, and hopefully they'll burn hard enough to power the engines without clogging them with impurities or blowing them up with excess energy.

Okay. Interesting little bit of science education worked pretty seamlessly into the action. It's kinda weird that they'd throw this in alongside the blatantly made-up dinosaur species, but on its own this is pretty well done.

Back in Megacat City, Zinian and Kelly go up to the roof and try to reason with Pastmaster.

He won't negotiate. Big surprise. They try tackling him, and are very lucky that he just blasts them back inside the building instead of turning the air in their lungs into trilobites. Well, as Kelly muses, it's all on Commander Forororol and hopefully the SWAT Kats if they're still alive.

Pastmaster starts casting his spell. It's a complicated one, so it takes a few minutes; he has to time it so that it completes just as the clock strikes twelve, apparently, so disrupting it could be pretty easy if only they can get through his defences. Speaking of which, the mayor finally authorizes the police to attack the tower. Unfortunately, Pastmaster has enough pterosaurs guarding it at this point that the helicopters can't get close; the Commander himself goes up in one, and barely survives when they bring his chopper down. This world's paleofauna is something alright, even if we assume that Pastmaster is casting a bunch of buffs on them.

The sky darkens. An even bigger, more ominous portal seems to be opening. And...it apparently goes all the way back to the pop culture mesozoic, even though Pastmaster is cackling about bringing back the Dark Ages. Um...why would it go back that far, then? Well, it's convenient that it does, because it lets Jake and T-Bone fly their volcano gas-fuelled plane through into their native time again.

How much time has passed for the city, subjectively, between the SWAT Kats being sent back and them returning? Is it the same subjective time period that they spent in the past? Maybe? I don't know. This part doesn't make enough sense for me to guess at.

Anyway, they shoot one of their blade-missiles at the clock, preventing the minute hand from hitting twelve. I guess it's literally the clock that needs to be stopped, rather than it being the actual time of day. Actually...wait a minute, how did T-Bone and Jake even know that they needed to stop the clock? How did they even know that Pastmaster was up on the city hall roof? Who am I? Where is this? Why are you? Anyway, this Sally/Anne failure forces Pastmaster to get up on a pterosaur and have it pull out the blade to unstick the clock.

And...the SWAT Kats unceremoniously charge his mount and send it and him tumbling back into the sky portal, sending them to...um...I dunno? The pop culture mesozoic? The dark ages? Hell? No idea. Somehow the Tome of Time gets shredded too, so that's convenient.

What a rushjob of an ending, seriously.

Also...is the only reason that the SWAT Kats succeeded where everyone else failed that their plane is slightly faster and better able to avoid the guarding pterosaurs than the aircraft the police were using? That's kind of lame, ngl.

Anyway, the skyportal closes and the day is saved. Pastmaster may or may not ever be back, and may or may not manage to retrieve a new version of his book from earlier in the timestream. The too-loud guitar riffs play. Kelly and Zinian watch the plane with expressions that...well, you tell me.

Zinian is full on making the "dat ass" face.​

And, that's the end.


Well, aside from the rushed ending, I do think this is a solidly above average nineties kids' cartoon. Maybe not a great one (Batman TAS and Gargoyles both ran concurrently with this show for at least a little while, so yeah) but significantly better than average.

Aside from the attention to detail, I liked some of the idiosyncrasies of the supporting cast. Especially Commander Falafel. The dude did pretty much everything right, he just didn't have the kind of hardware he needed. He's a jerk, sure, but I like that he has a role more complicated than "ally," "enemy," or "comically inept rival." Pastmaster was also a fun baddy, if only because of his magic having such a distinctive gimmick.

On the other hand...I want to like the women, but they barely had a chance to even distinguish themselves from one another. Zinian is the one who volunteers knowledge, and Kelly is the one who has the political connections to make people listen to it, but the two of them are always in total agreement, and their opinions about non-academic and non-political things also seem to be identical. Kelly's a little snarkier, but otherwise I feel like these characters needed much more room to breathe, ideally away from one another. Maybe future episodes do more with them.

Jake and T-Bone are...well, I like that Jake is more grounded in something like real life science than most cartoon inventor-heroes, but other than that they're just too generic. There's potential, but this pilot doesn't have time to make them stand out from the crowd of SatAm hero teams.

I appreciate that they're a duo, though. A lot of these shows make the mistake of having more lead characters than they know what to do with, and this one avoids that. There's the strong guy, the smart guy, and the supporting cast. That's all the show needs. It could have more, but it doesn't need to.

So, like I said. Above average for its genre, but that's not a high bar. If subsequent episodes give the leading duo and their two main allies a little more breathing room and subsequent villain encounters have better pacing, then my impression of it would be more strongly positive. No more of it in queue though, so I'll just have to wonder for now.