Monday, February 27, 2012

Daytime Heroes: Jayce & the Wheeled Warriors (1985)

One of the more underrated and underappreciated syndicated series of the mid-80's was Jayce & the Wheeled Warriors, a DIC entry that launched in 1985, but lasted just one season, and this was despite 1) a compelling storyline and 2) a kick-ass theme song, composed by house tunesmiths Shuki Levy & Haim Saban.

It was one of those shows where the hero is looking for a missing father, and that had been done before on Saturdays in the past (i.e. Jana of the Jungle & New Adventures of Gulliver). In this case, Jayce had all these marvelous vehicles and his friends to support him against the mutant Sawboss and his Monster Minds. Long-time ABC studio announcer Ernie Anderson paints the word picture in the open, uploaded by JediJuggernaut:



Bear in mind, this was back when DIC had cool shows with awesome animation. The quality of the animation would deteriorate around the early 90's. Small wonder, then, that DIC is no longer around, having been absorbed by Canada's Cookie Jar Entertainment within the last two years. Could Jayce make a comeback? Only if someone had the bucks to get the rights and the imagination to finish the story.

Rating: A.

2 comments:

magicdog said...

I definitely remember this one!

I had a crush on Jayce (I liked the skunk stripe - it looked so cool!) and every episode was full of action.

It did annoy me that a definitive ending never came (that I can remember. Apparently the Monster Minds were accidentally created by Jayce's dad, and his little sister was supposed to be part plant as well (and would warn the gang that the evil plants were nearby).

One of the team was also a Han Solo type along with a wizard guiding them on their quest.

Definitely one of DIC's better shows.

hobbyfan said...

I used to watch this pretty regularly when it first came out, and I thought Flora (I believe that was her name) was soooooo cute. Yeah, she did have some plant to her, IIRC, to explain her powers.

It's just too bad everyone was gravitating over to Transformers, She-Ra, et al, and left this behind.