Skeletons are probably the most underrated of all the “spooky” beings—very few would call them their favourite (I’m one of the exceptional few), but Halloween just wouldn’t be the same without a dozen of them dancing around. Who knew that the animate embodiment of our mortality could be so amusing? I can only imagine that the minds behind Skeleton Warriors had the same realization, and as they saw in their mind’s eye all the early nineties middle school metalheads with skull-adorned trapper keepers, they could just feel the cash flowing from mom and dad’s wallets to their bank accounts. The early nineties were definitely a time of ghoulish/gross/monstrous toy lines, and Skeleton Warriors was simply an attempt to move the dial a little further into “Iron Maiden album cover” territory—and the toys were brought to us by Playmates, the company that instigated the entire trend with their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure line (they also did the Toxic Crusaders toys, just so we’re clear that Ink & Pain exists in a recursive, purgatorial realm.) I had one of them, of course, but all I remember is how stiff and fragile the thing felt, and how quickly one of the skeleton’s arms snapped off. Obviously it drank plenty of malk.
Of course, because 1994 was still in the age of the cynical toy commercial cartoon, Skeleton Warriors received a single-season animated series to make sure the little SOBs got the message. What this means is that a simple, appealing idea—skeletons wearing funny clothes and carrying weapons—is larded up with a backstory and characters with biographies whose vacuousness is hidden under a thick layer of purple prose, snarky jokes, and character traits probably written in bold font. This can either make the thing less interesting by tacking on cliche after cliche, or make them more entertaining by making these innately silly characters more overwrought and thus more ridiculous (can you imagine reading the series bible for something called Skeleton Warriors with a straight face?) The series demonstrates an unheard of middle ground, where it is simultaneously overly serious, dripping that nineties EXTREME energy, and also incredibly goofy, with the action figure elements butting into the storyline in somewhat amusing ways.
Interestingly, one of the companies behind the franchise is Landmark Entertainment, which is mostly known for fabricating theme park rides for places like Universal Studios. I guess they were branching out into the skeleton business? The series is also stated to be created by Gary Goddard, one time director of the Masters of the Universe movie starring Dolph Lundgren, and a guy who has had some pretty nasty accusations made against him in recent years, so that’ll be the last time we’ll be mentioning him.
As set up in the first episode (which has four credited writers, always a good sign), the series follows the travails of the Steele siblings, the royal family of Luminicty. They live in the kind of world where most people dress in pseudo-medieval tunics, but are in a gigantic futuristic city with flying cars and television (at one point, they show a laser guillotine whose design I could not even remotely parse)—just pick an era, people. The youngest of the three royal sibs, Joshua, is tricked by Baron Dark, who couldn’t possibly be an evil man, into giving him access to the city’s main power source, the Lightstar Crystal, which is split in half in the struggle between Dark and the oldest sibling, Justin. One half of the crystal gives our trio of heroes superpowers, while Dark’s half turns him into a living skeleton covered in tiny skulls—it’s pretty obvious who got the better deal. Dark proceeds to use his skeleton power to turn the rest of his minions into bone bags so they can begin a campaign of conquest against Luminicity, while Justin and the gang team up with their tech expert uncle Ursak—who apparently went bug out in a cabin in the middle of the nowhere but also had the resources available to build supercomputers and missile turrets—to do battle with them under the eye-rolling moniker of the Legion of Light. It’s the old good guy team versus bad guy team format, the backbone of so many bad toy-based cartoons.
Of course, this set-up also fully demonstrates the central flaw with this storyline: what kid would ever want the toys of the Legion of Light, when the whole thing is called Skeleton Warriors? They’re here for the dang warriors who are skeletons, not some ponytailed doofus with a sword, or a middle-aged bearded guy wearing laser tag equipment. They should have gone full Transformers with this premise (or, hey, even Bots Master), with one team of skeletons going at it with another one. I can’t believe how many times the cartoon schlock merchants made that same error! No one likes the normal human characters in these things!
Certainly, you don’t get to like the main ones here from the start. The first thing we see in the first episode (I mean, after the CGI skeleton head, voiced by the indelible Tony Jay, providing some framing narration in the form of the world’s most meaningless fortune cookie koan) is the boringly straight-edged Justin having a laser sword fight with the whiny Joshua over the latter hanging out with the not-obviously-evil Baron Dark—yes, the older brother is worried about his younger brother hanging around a strange older man, who looks like Glenn Danzig if he had actually played Wolverine as Wizard Magazine had once demanded. When they and their sister Jennifer gain superpowers, what they get is so plain and uninteresting (laser hands! Flight! That’s pretty much it!) that it does nothing for their appeal—the only somewhat out there one is Joshua, who can walk through shadows, and also because of his short-lived treachery becomes a desiccated-looking zombie, the missing link between man and skele-man. When they go to see their uncle in his G.I. Joe cabin, he immediately hands the three of them their more toyetic costumes out of the blue—I guess he made them ahead of time. Each of their action figure designs has a skeleton motif (including, in the case of Justin and Joshua, a chest skull with spikes coming out of the eye sockets at about nipple height), which makes sense when making toys, but why do they look like that on the show? Is it to intimidate the skeletons? That episode also ends with them giving each other more superhero-y names for no reason in particular, with Joshua becoming “Grimskull”, which is the most nineties, Rob Liefeld nonsense possible (that the whiny brother becomes a zombie with a low growl of a voice, presaging Christian Bale’s turn as Batman, who needs to redeem himself every other episode feels like a real artifact of the grim ‘n’ gritty era), which shows just how ill-fitting the toy commercial stuff is with a narrative that sometimes takes itself very seriously.
(Another example: in a later episode, we learn that Ursak had a premonition of Baron Dark’s bony brigade, which is why he retreated to his bunker to build a billion accessories for you to buy—I just find it infinitely amusing that he lived the life of a paranoid hermit because “the skeletons are coming!”)
Which brings us to Baron Dark and his titular Skeleton Warriors, the reason for the season—despite being treated as a serious threat in the battle of good against evil, they sure seem to have a track record of embarrassing failure. They can’t ride around on their flying motorcycles for more than five minutes without crashing or exploding, or being shot with a laser or have a rock dropped on them (don’t worry, though, because they’re skeletons and can piece themselves back together, there’s no real violence here.) No matter which of the bonheads it is (even the lone lady skeleton, who still wears a breastplate so you know she’s supposed to be…attractive?), they are all singularly incompetent in every episode, a real bunch of lumbaring numbskulls. Even Baron Dark himself will oftentimes undercut his own intimidating appearance (he’s a skeleton covered in skulls!) and cackling villain energy by coming up with halfhearted insults like “the Legion of Losers” (I bet he stayed up all night on that one.) Given how serious the other characters are taken (although Grimskull at least gets to have some one-liners) and how “dark” this show is trying to look—I do love that nineties aesthetic of “shadows on everything regardless of what the lighting situation is”—the antics of the skeletons (who are sometimes given tongues, a real animation boner) seem to come from the sillier shows of the era, and to be honest, I prefer that to the show being played entirely straight, if the protagonists and their snooze-worthy personal dramas are any indication of what that would be like. It presents a very incongruous mixture, is all.
This is one of few bad cartoons of the era that, despite its short run, had a “definitive” ending, at least in theory. In the final two-parter, Baron Dark gets both halves of the Lightstar Crystal—his brilliant plan being “push Grimskull off a bridge”—which grants him even more powerful skeleton-creating lasers, and also a gold costume upgrade oddly reminiscent of Frank Langella Skeletor’s in the climax of the Masters of the Universe movie. Despite appearing all-powerful, though, Justin Steele manages to beat him in a sword fight and knocks him and the crystal into a pit of lava. That would take care of that. Except that Tony Jay CGI skull appears for his usual closing monologue and pretty much says, “Oh, no, we got skeleton stories for years, we’re definitely going to come back, just like the skeletons on this show that is definitely not ending after one season.” Once again, they go for the epic but immediately sabotage themselves in the most comical way possible.
Skeleton Warriors does have all the signifiers of something more dramatic—it even has a very similar design style to the contemporaneous X-Men series, and was animated by the same studio—but it ultimately can’t live up to its presentation with its content, probably because of what was expected of Saturday morning fare at the time. For every time our heroes yell “Noooo!” at some devastating loss, or a CGI skull philosophizes about the nature of war or sacrifice, there’s a bad joke or a silly toy company-mandated design to make you realize that, actually, this whole thing is pretty dopey. On the other hand, I don’t think there was a way for anything aside from a Dokken album to live up to this franchise’s surface level concept, which was really just an excuse to make skeleton action figures for adolescent boys. A noble endeavour, certainly, but make no bones about it, it wasn’t one that translated into a sweeping epic.
BUT, IS THE THEME SONG CATCHY?: It’s basically an extended cheesy guitar riff, so it’s the highlight of every episode.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 