Sunday, November 23, 2014

Personal Favorites: Stalker From The Stars (Thundarr The Barbarian, 1980)

Thundarr The Barbarian faces a very odd foe in the episode, "Stalker From The Stars".

A spider-like space vampire lands on 40th century Earth, and begins capturing human prey to take back home for food. One of his victims is Princess Ariel, and for Thundarr (Robert Ridgely) and a flu-ridden Ookla (Henry Corden), that makes it personal.

The quirk in the script is obvious in the final part. Earlier, the Stalker had webbed up Ariel's hands to block her magic, but she seemingly has magic powers throughout her body. One simple kick frees her hands. Later, after being completely coccooned, Ariel is able to get herself out by making the coccoon disappear, when Thundarr wasn't able to penetrate the alien webbing to save an elderly man. The easy excuse is that the Stalker caught Ookla's cold, which weakened the strength of his webbing as the story went on.

Edit, 7/20/20: The video was deleted. For now, we have a screen shot of a scene from the episode:




Rating: A.

Edit, 5/25/23: We've found a new copy of the episode. Part of the opening is missing, and Dick Tufeld's narration is sped up. Otherwise, it's fine.



2 comments:

magicdog said...

I remember Thundarr!

What drove me nuts in this episode was the fact that there weren't enough weird and deadly creatures on Earth and the writers had to create an alien one!

If you have seen the recent incarnation of TMNT, there's a spoof/nod series with a character that is very much equal parts of Thundarr and Zandor of The Herculoids.

hobbyfan said...

Haven't been following the current Turtles series, but I'll have to check into that.