#tiny yap oopsies o:

[meowrimo]

after 5 days of nonstop social hour, i am finally home & curling up on the couch ^_^ yipeeeee !!!

[fly-pow-bye]

ThunderCats Roar - “The Horror of Hook Mountain”

Co-Executive Producer: Victor Courtright

Supervising Producer: Nate Cash

Producer: Marly Halpern-Graser

Story by: Joan Ford

Teleplay by: Eric Knobel

Directed by: Jeremy Polgar

There is a horror in this one...but is it the episode itself?

Our journey begins with Tygra taking Lion-O on a hike for him to learn one of the many, many lessons he needs to learn to become a good Lord of the ThunderCats. One of them happens to be climbing the titular Hook Mountain, which is both terrifying and super cool according to Lion-O. Tygra had to admit that he is right with the latter, though not with the same definition of "cool".

Lion-O: Good thing we got our booties!

Don't worry, he means boots. Really really tiny boots that would not protect him from absolute zero, but boots nonetheless. Cold temperatures aren't the only danger, either, as this mountain has super avalanches, trick snow floors, and lethal stabby ice canyons! Yes, that is exactly how Tygra puts that last one; I could imagine he has to lower his vocabulary to a level Lion-O could understand, but it could be more for the sake of having a running gag where he constantly calls stalagmites "stab canyons."

Treading this mountain would require a leader that can trust his teammates, and, for Lion-O's lesson, Tygra decides to have him do the classic trust exercise. Even before Tygra could even explain what a trust exercise even is, Lion-O reveals that he does know and decides to fall so Tygra can catch him.

Unfortunately, he takes it too far by falling from a very high part of the mountain right on top of a bunch of hungry pterodactyls who just say "yum, yum, yum, yum", which he managed to climb off-screen with the power of cartoon logic. This episode definitely establishes which one of these guys is the straight man. We get to see Lion-O seemingly falling to his death, while Tygra rushes around, tiring himself out.

All of that just for this rather poorly drawn reaction with maybe a little too much attention on the booty. Here, I really do mean posterior! In the name of trust, he decides to trust Tygra's training on this leader stuff, and he starts climbing the mountain with a sentence that shows his confidence as a trusting leader.

In the middle of that sentence, we see Lion-O and Tygra struggling to get up the mountain, as even Lion-O realizes his little booties and cape aren't enough for him to survive the cold atmosphere. They do find a cabin, and Tygra, being the more down-to-Earth fellow, decides to ponder about whether they should trust. Of course, Lion-O decides to take out his Claw and shoot a grappling hook towards the door. Why didn't he just use the Claw Line to climb the mountain? They actually have Tygra ask that question, and Lion-O just shrugs. See kids, we know we're being stupid!

Lion-O sleeps on the snugly bear rug, kind of like, well, a cat. Tygra, without much hesitation, decides to sleep in the bed. It's almost as if Tygra knows he's being forced to do something that would most likely lead to him getting eaten by whatever creature owns this house by the script. He is tired, but still.

The next morning, we get a reason to use that classic "dun dun dun dun" cue, and surprisingly, they didn't even use it until now. They did not even use it for the minute long trust exercise gag! Okay, maybe it wasn't a minute long, but it felt that long. That "dun dun dun dun" was for the reveal that a yeti owns this cabin, and in what horrifying way is this yeti going to greet his unwanted guests?

Yeti: (singing) 1, 2, good morning to you!

It turns out that this yeti seems to be a nice guy, and actually likes having visitors around. He introduces himself as Snowman and also introduces his pet sabretoothed cat, Snowmeow! They also really like to people-watch any people that come to their home to sleep, which gives Tygra more of a reason to not trust them. There's a few more things here and there that could raise his suspicion, namely that aforementioned bear rug suggesting he may hunt, but that's the big one.

Speaking of that rug, Tygra tries to alert Lion-O about that suspicious guy who likes to stare at people, who is still resting on it. They decided to have the all important detail of Lion-O farting as soon as he gets up, complete with a fart cloud coming out of him, because...I have no idea.

Of course, as a good leader who is following Tygra's lessons, he decides to blindly trust this man and his wild cat. Lion-O does get horrified by the snow cat, but only because this cat is nude. This is an obvious joke on how this bipedal cat is reacting to a regular cat. One interesting reference that pops up from this is that he pulls out a spare outfit, and it happens to be an outfit with an abdominal opening like the original Lion-O's.

Tygra is none too happy about this blind trusting, and tries to literally carry Lion-O out of the house.

Namely, as soon as he reaches for the door, a bunch of steel bars pop out of nowhere.

Snowman: You're not going a-ny-where!

It's here where one might expect the obvious twist: that this guy is probably Mumm-Ra in another one of his many disguises. But no, he has a different reason to trap them. As a spider crawls out of his fur just to make him seem more gross, another way to get people to believe Tygra's side of the story, he tells them that it isn't safe out there, because of...

Snowman: The Sparkle-Maw!

I'm certainly sparing the readers all of the wacky close-ups this episode has, because there's a ton of them. In this episode, they outnumber the "dun dun dun duns", which is kind of an accomplishment. He then talks a little history about this Sparkle-Maw, including how it is able to camouflage itself, and that it ate all of his friends. He slowly looks at the one photo of his blizzard buds with tears in his eyes, only to be interrupted by a smoke alarm.

Snowman: Oopsy-poopsy! Bacon's burning! (throws possibly only picture of his friends out of frame, presumably breaking it)

Wow, everyone just doesn't really respect their fallen friends in this series, do they? Whether it be Jaga just shrugging off the destruction of his planet with a "oh, everything splodes someday!", or Snowman just throwing away what is probably a sentimental photo. I get that they're trying to subvert our expectations, but it does take a bit of weight from this.

Tygra doesn't believe him, because, even in this weird world where pterodactyls still exist, there seems to be a man for every type of animal, and the unicorns roam free, he just knows the Sparkle-Maw isn't a real creature. Knowing Lion-O must see through this as well, he tells him to use the Sword of Omens, but Lion-O doesn't want his friends eaten by that Sparkle-Maw, and decides, as a good leader, that he will trust everything this man says. Tygra tries to clarify he didn't mean blindly trust, but the smell of pterodactyl bacon just can't be resisted.

A long time seemingly passes, with Tygra writing in his journal about how unbearable it is that he still hasn't figured out Snowman's horrible plan as he stares at him passing along a ball of yarn with the two other cats in the room, Lion-O included in that. There's a lot of jokes about how they're cats, and they're not particularly cringe-worthy.

That long time turns out to be 375...unbearable...minutes, and I could just imagine Tygra actually counting the seconds in his second, scratching a number with his claws on the wall, as Snowman, his pet, and his other guest remains blissfully unaware. Either Tygra is gradually going nuts, or he's reacting like anyone should when almost everything else seems to add up to a Hansel and Gretel situation. Then again, he did climb into a stranger's bed, he can't be that sensible.

Tygra does get an idea based on Snowman's love of playing games: a game of Thunderian Picture Guess. It's like Pictionary, minus any royalties to Mattel. Since Snowmeow can't talk, and Snowman seems to only see everything as the Sparkle-Maw, Tygra draws something he really wanted Lion-O to say: "lightning purr shovel." At least, that was one of Lion-O's guesses.

Lion-O eventually gets the right answer, "thunder thunder thunder thundercats hoe", which ends up causing the sword to shine through the cabin and right into the Cat's Lair's disco ball. We got to see what they were doing throughout the episode: watching an apparently boring cooking show that only Panthro was interested in. I was kind of worried this would lead nowhere, as if a ThunderCats Roar could fail if they're merely bored. However, they do decide to go after it anyway, though it's suggested that WilyKit is just going with it because the show was just so boring. It's a little more justified than a similar scene in one of the earlier episodes.

Lion-O and Tygra look out the window, and Tygra uses this as proof that there's no Sparkle-Maw out there, as he just sees the ThunderCats in their Thunder Tank, and a bunch of spiders that came out of nowhere.

These must be those Sparkle-Maws Snowman was talking about. He tells Snowman that he should trust him and his teammates, and he eventually decides to let him free, telling him that he's going to miss him. Lion-O valiantly runs forward...far away from the Sparkle-Maws, leaving everyone else to do all the dirty work. From what I've seen in the original, this isn't too far off so far.

We get our higher-budget fight scene here, and I'd put it somewhere in the middle. The animation is above-average, and while there's not as many clever uses of weapons as, say, Boggy Ben, it's doesn't feel like an afterthought either. It's also not one-sided, as the Sparkle-Maws manage to trap them with their big claws.

Thankfully, Lion-O seemingly running away turns out to be a strategy that ties in with one of the first jokes in the episode. Here's a hint: it's almost as long, and it's kind of silly. Also, the Snowman eventually joins the fight, too, getting over his fears and trapping one of the Sparkle-Maws with his net gun. That seems like a good bit of progression with his character, though there might be more to it than that.

In the end, Lion-O reveals that Tygra messing up big time has led him to learn the importance of trust, and Tygra just kind of accepts it. Honestly, the real lesson should have been that Tygra shouldn't have been so prejudiced against yetis, but maybe leaving that unstated is a good thing.

Most importantly, Lion-O gets to celebrate that they defeated the Sparkle-Maws. Sure, he was talking about THE Sparkle-Maw rather than a bunch of them, those spiders didn't really have any camouflage abilities, and those spiders didn't really have anything sparkling on them nor did they have particularly big mouths, but maybe that was just him embellishing the monster...right?

Pretty much every episode of ThunderCats Roar ended in a way where everything went back to normal, and this episode is an outlier. It's strange because there's no other episode that ends like this yet. One will see what I mean.

How does it stack up?

I didn't really have too much to say about this episode, but not much to complain about, either. Well, except for maybe the overuse of exaggerated, but that's kind of the norm for the series.

I'm going to put this whole episode in the middle. Not great, not terrible. Three cats.

Next, this show with messy animation gets literally messy!

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