Scanning, and Evil SWATKats...

From: Andy Hill <chance_at_unix.infoserve.net>
Date: Thu, 4 May 1995 07:13:31 -0700 (PDT)

     I will make the time to get colour copies of the stuff I have, and
send them to WKOZIOL to put up on Ratman's site. So far, I've got an
early poster from Christian and Yvon Tremblay that essentially shows the
early concept of the TurboKat and T-Bone, with an early version of "The
Giant Bacteria" in the background, about to eat the TurboKat. I've got
the package art for the toy release, and some B&W pics of what the
MetalliKats and others would have looked like had they been produced.
I'm getting a huge book of artwork from back east, an in-house marketing
thing, and I'll copy some things out of that for posting to the FTP site
also. It'll be fun, and Ted won't earn a dime - what more could you ask for.

     "Evil Side of the SWATkats". This isn't exactly my favourite
episode, although the idea is great (kind of a mirror of the old Trek
"Mirror-Mirror" ep). Two complaints, mainly because this ep managed to
directly focus on ten year olds. One, not all the characters were
"reverse polarity", which was really irritating, and some of those that
initially exhibited "evil" traits eventually settled back down into their
standard characters when it was evident they were "mistaken". Second,
the character models for the "evil" T-Bone and Razor were too extreme -
there was no conceivable way that T-Bone could easily mistake evil Razor
for real Razor and similar with Razor mistaking T-Bone.

     What I really liked in this ep was the way that the 'KAT guys
_acted_ differently. In the scene where our Razor and T-Bone sneak past
the PumaDyne guard, they do it non-confrontationally, after all - the
guard is asleep. Our 'KAT guys jump through all the infra-red beams and
have a conversation at the end, "quite the workout" etc. Cut to evil
Razor and T-Bone doing the same thing. Evil Razor makes sure he wakes up
the guard just to punch his lights out, and when these guys run the
infra-red corridor, T-Bone knocks Razor to the ground, and they also have
a "conversation", but they hate each other - in direct contrast to our 'KATS.
The creative people did lots of "little" subtle things to offset some of
the over-the-top stuff. Notice that in the scenes where the two
TurboKats are battling it out, Evil Razor works the weapons panel just as
our Razor, but his claws are always extended! In this ep we learn that
'KATS have to shave...our 'KATS do, evil 'KATS don't. "Subtle" take-two:
Commander Feral in our dimension hadn't shaved, Feral in the evil
dimension had. Cool, huh? To top it all off, the writer of this episode
was named "Katz"!

     Speaking of 'KATS shaving, how old do you thing the 'KAT guys are.
I don't have anything like official information on this, but best guess
would be 31 for Razor, and about 35 for T-Bone. Feral would be, I think,
late forties. Kind of screws up "young hot-shots" but I think Feral
would think anything younger than him would be a "young hot-shot". When
I think of the pilot/Enforcer combination, I always seem to conjure up
images of Roy Scheider in "Blue Thunder" for some reason, hence the age
guesses.

Andy


 _________________________________________________________________________
     "His biography said he bumped his butt 'cuz he ate too much sugar...
        ....it's SAD (really)..." - Slappy Squirrel, "Bumbie's Mom" ANIMX
 _________________________________________________________________________
     "We have a mission Ann, down these mean skies, a 'KAT must fly...
                 ...we wanna be the good guys..."

      (Thanks Lance. Some of us got the reference - eventually!)



Received on Thu May 04 1995 - 10:04:35 PDT