Cheapo DVD Review: Defenders Of The Earth - The Story Begins. (1985)

  Day 6 of my DVD review marathon. Or day 7 if you want to be pedantic and count yesterday, when I didn't post anything. Hey, I didn't say I was doing 12 DVDs in 12 days.

Today's offering is blatantly stitched together from several episodes of an old cartoon.

When the evil space-tyrant Ming the Merciless lands on earth with a surprisingly small army of minions, a group of heroes come together to foil his dastardly plans on a weekly basis.

Flash Gordon - hero of the spaceways
His lovely wife   Oops, sorry. The memories of his lovely wife, built into a computer.
Rick Gordon - Son of Flash and computer wizard.
The Phantom - Protector of the Jungle and wearer of purple long-johns.
Jeda - The Phantom's teenage daughter. Friend of animals and token chick.
Mandrake The Magician. A magician. he wears a cape and everything.
Lothar - Mandrake's sidekick/muscle. He's big, black and desperately trying not to be a stereotype.
LJ - Lothar's son and token black kid.
Kshin - a spare brat Mandrake found lying about who totally isn't going to get underfoot and be annoying

And whatever the hell this..thing ...is.  

It's a mascot character. I hated mascot characters when I was a kid and nowadays, the only way I can describe how I feel about the unfunny little bastards would need words the English language hasn't invented yet.   

  On the bad guys side we have Ming the Merciless - green for some reason - his camp son, his really camp robot octopus and a platoon or so of Ice Robots because every 80s cartoon villain needed useless mooks to get utterly teabagged.
 Ming's daughter shows up in a later episode but I doubt she's as much fun as Princess Aura from the 1979 cartoon.  .

9 year old me was a big fan of Aura. I can't really blame him.

 I vaguely remember Defenders Of The Earth being on when I was much, much younger but I don't think I ever saw any episodes. Which means that when I finally got to see this movie  batch of episodes shorn of credits and duct-taped together I didn't have my nostalgia goggles on. 

I think I needed them. Some 80s cartoons aged well or were so cheesy that you can have fun watching them for the cornball.

 DotE has neither. It doesn't have the charm of, say, Thundercats or much in the way of memorable characters chracters. Then there's the storytelling.

Ming has an Evil Plan Of The Week, the team foil it - all very standard. 

 In theory, having three famous heroes team up to fight the bad guys could have been interesting. Having their kids fight alongside them might also have been interesting. Then again, this was the 80s and the idea of cartoons with intelligent writing was a concept some studios hadn't grasped yet.

Flash Gordon's wife is rather brutally killed in episode 1, which is unusual,. But everybody has forgotten about it within 10 minutes, including Flash and Rick. That bugged me. 

It also bugged me that the little purple sod kept changing size every other scene. 

Available evidence suggests that back in the mid-80s, I didn't miss out on much.

How much did I pay for this: £1.50

Was it worth it: Not particularly.  Defenders of the Earth is a typical 80s cartoon with all that implies.