Bucky O'Hare - 03

1 year ago
56

"The Good, the Bad, and the Warty"
As previously mentioned, the situation's looking pretty grim for the good guys: Bucky O'Hare and company are stuck in a toad mother ship (a.k.a. a magma tanker in the comics from which this cartoon was loosely adapted), the mercenary sleazasaur Al Negator has the codes to the Genus satellite defense systems and is about to turn them over to the toads (just as soon as he gets paid), and the toads are amassing a huge invasion force. How are the good guys going to get out of this? Find out in this thrilling conclusion to the cartoon's three-episode pilot.

Points of interest:
1:25 Obviously, Bucky couldn't have melted a hole in the hangar wall that big with his dinky little hand blaster; in fact, this is left over from a scene that was scripted and storyboarded, but cut from the finished product due to time constraints, showing Dead-Eye and Willy using that Toad Croaker to wreak some havoc of their own—including blasting their way through the wall with its cannons.
1:56 You really should have thought of that a lot sooner, Dogstar.
3:02 Considering that these toads are swamp-dwellers, why would they—of all people—forget to waterproof one of their devices? Well, just remember their home world is a purely artificial environment now, and that the Void Droid was designed to operate in such environments—not in a swamp or anywhere else one might expect water to be readily available.
4:06 If you look closely, that spot where Bucky actually managed to do some damage to Toadborg was a small seam between the plates of his armor; naturally, he would be hoping (in vain, however) that more of his shots would find more such vulnerabilities.
8:26 It's odd enough that the Air Marshal happened to be watching when the Void Droid was destroyed, but this proves Toadborg witnessed that incident as well.
8:52 Actually, some experiments NASA ran proved people can survive in the vacuum of space for up to two minutes; but (of course) Toadborg either doesn't know or doesn't care about that.
8:46 For drama's sake, the artists let us see under Willy's helmet.
10:10 Note the odd physical form in which these "Simoleans" are provided: like the "Mizoomas" Al Negator paid to Tinker on multi-colored rectangular chips in the previous episode, I suspect "Simoleans" to be a fiat currency that—like many common currencies here on Earth—can be represented both digitally and physically; and those strings of beads Al Negator packs into his cheeks (!) are just a physical storage medium for its digital form.
11:00 If you've been paying attention, those blasters were lying there the entire time throughout the previous scene, so this part should come as no suprise; what's curious is why Toadborg thought to gather up his captives' weapons and place them there. What I suspect is that like currencies, weapons in the Aniverse are pretty fungible items; in other words, Toadborg was planning to add Bucky and Dead-Eye's blasters to the toads' arsenals later, and simply forgot to take them with him when he left the room.
15:07 Kudos to Willy for his engineering skills: that's some mechanical hacking he's doing, not just reprogramming.
15:42 While one would expect a lightning strike to have fried that data card already, the animators had to show Toadborg spitting it out to confirm to us kids in the 1990s (who were still using floppy disks to store our data) that those access codes were truly lost (On the other hand, they could simply have had someone on the United Animals Space Council announce at the end that they were changing the access codes to their defense system.)
16:08 Evidently, those defense satellites are programmed not to pick off defenseless escape pods or individual free-floating troops in space suits; the system's animal programmers are remarkably forgiving and generous.
17:20 Slipping a little innuendo past kids who didn't quite understand all the facts of life yet: note that rather dubiously dressed rodent (probably a member of Tinker's species) swaying to the music a couple stools down from Al Negator in this bad guys' bar. Does anyone care to guess how she earns her keep?
18:05 Seems Mark has come around to Jeff's way of thinking; and for all the dubious company he keeps, Jeff is actually a pretty decent fellow.

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