#Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors

[vintagegeekculture]

Hi, do you happen to know the name of the cartoon from the 80s where they rode inside giant tires with guns on either side?

That's Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, a French-Japanese-American co-production. It had the avant-garde elements of French animation, the slick, imaginative sophistication of Japanese scifi animation, and the merchandisability of an American 80s cartoon. The premise has been compared to Star Wars, with its young impulsive hero, cocky pilot best friend, funny robot sidekick, and wizard mentor, but the number one thing it seems to take from George Lucas is that the interstellar future will be a lot like California in the 1950s, with greaser kids working on hot rods in their garage, and drag racing in their spare time.

A lot of 80s cartoon shows have aged disastrously (Thundercats is particularly hard to watch at times) but Jayce has aged incredibly well, mainly because of the solid characters and the fact the writing team included Joseph Michael Straczynski, who had them lean heavily on continuing storytelling that stretched throughout the series. It's right up there with Galaxy High School, Real Ghostbusters, Pole Position, and Vytor: Starfire Champion as 80s animated shows that actually are pretty good and are worth it to rediscover.

In fact, the continuous storytelling may be the single greatest weakness of the series: like Conan the Barbarian, it never got a legitimate finale. A series like this deserves nothing less than a Götterdämmerung.

JMS was famous for being one of the first creators active on the internet, at the time, answering questions on the Compuserve forums in 1992. A lot of his early comments on Babylon 5 have been preserved for posterity (B5 fans used to pore over them like sacred scrolls), but if you look at the actual transcripts, most of the questions he got were about Murder She Wrote, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors and Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. In fact, there was an early appearance of people wearing Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors' Lightning League symbol to very, very early B5 get togethers.

[doctormerkury]

28mm Jayce, Oon, and Saw Boss from the Wheeled Warriors cartoon and toy series. Lightning Strikes!

[therobotmonster]

My Retro-Cartoon Ramblings, Part 4

Going back to the Shuki Levy-themesong pool, there's Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. We're mostly gonna talk concepts and broad strokes here, because I haven't been able to make it far into the series, cuz it just... uh... it's lucky it has that opener.

So like he's gotta "Unite the Magic Route" to save the galaxy. Okay. Makes sense. They're cars driving through hyperspace tunnels taken over by biotech plants, being able to find the secret way through the system would let them defeat the Monster Mi-

Wait... magic "ROOT?

It's a root, a plant root, that's the McGuffin!?!

I mean, there's some potential here, it's got runaway biotech computers, it's got a trippy space-truckin' thing going, it's got a villain named "Saw Boss", but somehow its still the one thing neither cartoon nor ad should be...

Just... meh. The theme song is literally all you need. Also, Toy Galaxy has a great breakdown of the whole Wheeled Warriors mess I couldn't do justice to here.

Spinning away from the toyetic, I am fascinated by "Heathcliff and the Catallac Cats" Aka "Cats and Company", the original themesong of which fits way better, but doesn't name-check Heathcliff so it got axed.

The show was 1/2 Heathcliff doing his remarkably aggressive schtick in his American comic strip-styled universe, and 1/2 the Catallac cats which had, well, its own style, best described as "Top Cat but Horny."

Both sides' plots were structured around comedic hijinks around scams or schemes, and both had a theme of rough, street-smart cats with demanding, high-class girlfriends. Odd to have that happen twice in the same show. A lot more fisticuffs than you'd expect. A lot more.

The whole thing feels like the animation studio going "FINE, we'll make the Heathcliff cartoon if we can make our horny cat mobsters with the transforming car." Also, the CCs are SUPER 80s. No other era could have spawned them.

[yoan-le-grall]

[thes-hitoverlord]

/co/

[trnsocial]

What Makes a Sidekick?

The word sidekick is different in cartoons than it is in comics. Sidekicks in comics tend to be characters who act as younger versions of the main character, like Robin to Batman or Speedy to Green Arrow. They have some of the same capabilities as their mentor but lack the skill to use them. In cartoons, specifically in the 80s, sidekicks could be practically anything, as long as they provide…

[docgold13]

Profiles in Villainy

Sawboss

Many years in the future, the brilliant scientist named Audric sought out a means to cure intergalactic hunger.  His experiment went catastrophically awry when the artificial flora he created gained sentience.  This mound of vines and fungi took a roughly human form and called itself ‘Sawboss.’  It saw itself as the superior life-form in the cosmos and set about a destructive campaign to conquer the entire galaxy.  

Creating countless clones of itself, Sawboss launched attacks on every known inhabited planet and in short order overwhelmed the human defenses.  The human survivors were forced to flee, banding together to create a ragtag resistance called The Lightning League.  This resistance was led by a young man named Jayce, the son of Audic.  Jayce possessed the original root that his father used to create Sawboss and the villainess entity tirelessly hunted Jayce, fretful that the youth might use this root to discover a means of destroying Sawboss and its clones.

Sawboss continued to hunt Jayce while he and the Lighting Legion stayed a step ahead, conducting raids to free the worlds conquered by the despotic creature.  Some time later, Sawboss was finally destroyed by the dimension-hopping heroine known as Juniper Lee. 

Actor Guilio Kukurugya provided the voice for Sawboss, with the villain first appearing in the premier episode of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, airing on September 9th, 1985.

[wzrxdtcygvuio]

Wheeled Warriors The Adventures Begin (Golden Book)

(2/2)

[billlaotian]

[vixyvixen95]

Roll’ in the battle!

Lil Saw boss a did for a painting experiment

Based on the toy

[loreetperso]

Ok, here me out: What about a reboot of... Jayce and The Wheeled Warriors?? I mean we got She-ra and He-man. We got the Ninja turtles... My little poney... All rebooted with updated stories. Don't tell me there isn't a place for a reboot of this :

I mean, Have you seen this chara-design ???

And like... You can't make it worst than the original story wise... Also this banger opening ???

I mean come on, please someone make this a good show!!!

[yoan-le-grall]

[jasoncanty01]

The Controversy of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors