Thursday, August 18, 2011

Saturday Morning's Forgotten Heroes: Conan & the Young Warriors (1994)

With Conan returning to the big screen this weekend, let's take a step back in time to when Robert E. Howard's barbarian was given a crack at Saturday morning stardom.

Conan & the Young Warriors was the follow-up to the weekday, syndicated Conan the Adventurer, which had bowed two years earlier. As before, Conan is more of a watered down version of the brutal hero of Howard's novels and the comic books. You won't see Red Sonja or even Belit, who was to Conan what Catwoman was to Batman, or so it seems.

Here's a sample episode:



Even though syndicated shows had been amping up the violence for about a decade by the time this series came along, Conan was beholden to network censors at CBS as well as the pesky parental watchdog groups, and thus no one was ever killed.

I never saw the show, so I can't give a fair rating.

2 comments:

magicdog said...

I've never seen this show. I remember the first Conan cartoon but never knew it had a follow up.

The kid with the ability to control animals seems to be a ripoff of the Beastmaster (although this kid carries one ferret instead of two).

The whole kids with a destiny thing seems like such a cliche gimmick.

hobbyfan said...

Cliched because the networks still felt having kids as sidekicks was a selling point. It killed the show for Conan fans, that much, I'm sure of.