Dungeons and Dragons 01x04: Valley of the Unicorns

Time once again to hear from regular guest contributor Daisy and the D&D gang! Like always, if you'd like to do your own guest recap of something, you can contact me at jvonhalsing@gmail.com for guidelines.

Episode four is called “Valley of the Unicorns.” It’s written by Paul Dini again, this time with Karl Geurs, whom IMDb tells me worked on Winnie the Pooh’s Most Grand Adventure and The Jungle Book 2. So I guess we can expect a lot of Uni for this one.

Oh joy.

We open to the scene of a spooky forest, where the trees literally have faces and a fully grown unicorn is drinking from a pond. Lightning cracks, and suddenly a pack of wargs descend upon the unicorn! As the enemies face off, we jarringly cut to Uni, freaking out and jumping into Bobby’s lap. Bobby asks her what’s wrong. Eric, who’s busy shaking rocks out of his boots, says that it’s probably nothing, because Uni freaks out at the slightest provocation. Which is true. But then Uni suddenly bolts.

The kids give chase, Eric awkwardly trying to yank his boot back on.

Eric: “We can’t go anywhere until I get rid of the rocks in my shoes!”

Diana: “Keep ‘em. Maybe the rocks in your head need company, Eric!”

This is going to be one of those episodes where everyone is a gigantic dick to Eric, isn’t it?

Dungeons and Dragons 01x03: The Hall of Bones

Daisy's back with another exciting episode of Dungeons and Dragons! For those of you who don't know, Daisy is our semi-regular guest blogger. A long time fantasy fan, her looks at the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon are always hilarious and insightful. To find more of her stuff, click the tags at the bottom of the post, or the spiffy D&D banner in the sidebar. Take it away, Daisy!

Today's episode is called “The Hall of Bones.” Woo, spooky! It’s written by Paul Dini, who, among many other things, worked on Batman: The Animated Series.

We open to the kids hurrying through some kind of creepy swamp. Magical ecosystems, man. Screw ‘em. Apparently they’re being chased by something, and we get our first glimpse of it when Diana narrowly evades being caught by some sort of hairy flying monster. Point Diana. Uni’s not so quick, though, despite being on all fours, and manages to get swept up by the… griffins? Flying monkeys? Oh, yup, they’re flying monkeys. Uni loses a point.

Bobby freaks out, of course, and rescues Uni by… knocking a tree into the flying monkey that’s holding her, and nearly killing them both. He manages to catch her before she can smash into the ground and presumably break all of her legs or get crushed by the falling tree.

I’m not giving him a point for that, even though it technically worked out. After that flower crap in the last episode, I’m drawing the line on dumb luck here.

Sheila freaks out and herds Bobby and Uni away from the remaining winged primate threat. Hank fires off some shots at the monkeys, and… what’s this? Hank’s magical arrows disappear before they can do anything. Bobby tries to knock over another tree, because that’s how Bobby rolls, but his club just smacks uselessly against the trunk. Looks like everybody’s having performance issues. Eric encourages everyone to dive behind him and holds up his shield, which seems particularly brave given the circumstances, and it actually works! At first. A flying monkey dives at them and is repelled. Point Eric.

Eric: “They’ll never break through this!”

Dammit, Eric. Now you’ve jinxed it. Of course, that’s the moment when Eric’s shield gives out. Bobby speculates that the batteries are dead. It’s actually a pretty good metaphor.

Dungeons and Dragons 01x02: Eye of the Beholder

Daisy is back for another guest installment of D&D! If you're interested in swapping posts or doing a guest recap of your own, contact me at jvonhalsing@gmail.com for details and guidelines.

Episode Two of Dungeons and Dragons is ‘Eye of the Beholder’, and it has noticeably fewer villainous pet rabbits and randomly teleporting dragons than the first one, but also way more bumbling knights.  Whether you consider that an improvement or not is probably a matter of taste.  I find that this episode gets overlooked a lot, especially in terms of how it relates to Eric’s characterization, but I think that has more to do with most of the plotline being kind of forgettable than anything else.

So let’s get to ‘Eye of the Beholder’.

We start out with a scene of the kids walking in the desert again.  Oh joy.  The horses from the last episode are gone.  I guess they returned them to Helix in a fit of upstanding behaviour.  Or maybe they died.  I mean, it’s not like anybody is really an expert on horse care here.

Presto:  “It must be a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade.  And there isn’t any shade!”

Sheila:  “You can say that again!”

Diana:  “With four suns up there, what d’you guys expect?”

There are four suns this time?  Oh my god, is Eric dead?  But, no, there he is, standing with the group.  The rest of the kids sit down to take a break except for Eric, who keeps standing.  I have suspicions that his sweat has rusted his armour shut and he can’t bend enough to sit down.  In the foreground we see Uni get hit with a couple stray blasts of sand.  She shakes her head and goes to investigate the source of the flying sand.  Eric talks about how he’s been in this situation before, but at the time he was actually just lost in his parents’ safari-size backyard.

Eric:  “I was lost.  The sun was baking my brains.”

Presto:  “So that’s what happened to your brains.”

Dungeons and Dragons 01x01: The Night of No Tomorrow

Today's recap is the first guest post submitted by my friend, Daisy. Daisy is a lifelong SF fan and a big retro cartoon enthusiast, so she's chosen to take a look at some grand old Saturday morning gems with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Everybody be nice and keep your feet off the coffee table.

The first episode of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon is ‘The Night of No Tomorrow’, and… it is not one of the better ones.  It’s not terrible, either.  But it definitely has some pacing issues, and I do have to wonder about the decision to start the series after the kids have already arrived in the Realm, rather than leading into it with the amusement park ride and giving us a chance to see something of their lives on Earth.  It might have been a better way to get in some establishing character moments and give us an idea of what they’re trying so hard to get home to.

That said, and without further ado, here’s ‘The Night of No Tomorrow’.