The History of THE DEFENDERS OF THE EARTH: The Great Depression Avengers

I had been wondering why you changed your thumbnails recent to feature Dan but another youtuber I follow recently had similar copyright troubles with AI sloppers wholesale lifting others thumbnails to confuse potential viewers. Sorry you're dealing with that.

I genuinely missed this series and while I'm in my mid 40s. I didn't really know, Mandrake or the Phantom well though I've seen them referenced multiple times, until my 20s when I had a brief gig of scanning syndicate feeds for a newspaper.

I wonder if it qualifies as over the top or meta if the characters referenced Beetle Bailey as a comic character in their comic?

13:45 no Phantom 2040 clips?
Aww, people should see environmenral futurism more

I barely remember watching Rocket Robin Hood when I was 3 or 4 for some reason in the morning en español.

The only thing The Phantom defends is white savior complex. That IP should be cancelled.

So they made toys… but not of the kids they added to sell to kids?!

Q5 saying to swap the genders of the kids stinks of them just saying something random to flex their control and so they can say they technically did their job so give them money.

One of the best most underrated cartoon of the 80's.

The show was pretty middling. I like Flash Gordon. I like the film serial / pulp fiction era. The show didn't do much besides say, "Hey, these characters exist."

Phantom always one of the most underrated superhero’s.

I remember the cartoon. I actually was going through some old VHS tapes a couple years ago, and found the last couple minutes of an episode of Defenders of the Earth. We were always reusing tapes back then.

Why don't the crew ever find Dan's jokes laugh-worthy until the end?

I'm not gonna watch this. You shoulda made it Members Only.

Man this was one of those shows that didn’t air in my area and I discovered its existence once I got to college and had access to the internet and bought some VHS tapes of the whole series from a guy who sold…ahem…not legal releases…on his website. Then years later I bought the DVD set as it became one of my favorite 80s cartoons and a few years ago I grabbed those NECA figures that I was ECSTATIC to see when they first revealed them. Great video, now I gotta do a rewatch!

Calvin and Hobbes were supposed to be in the Defenders of the Earth cartoon as grown ups.

Calvin was became a bronzed hulking barbarian and Hobbes had mutated into a giant green and yellow tiger. Sadly, the series was canceled before they were introduced.

Oh, man. I remember watching this show back when it came out and not realizing what it was doing because I didn't know any of the characters except Flash Gordon and I didn't even know that was supposed to be Flash Gordon because I watched it dubbed from the original language and they called him by the name he was known in the old school newspaper comic strips in that language.

But Ming the Merciless was a huge clue and it suddenly clicked that the blond guy in red and gold was Flash (duh!) and his wife's consciousness that was downloaded into their HQ's main computer was Dale Arden.

But when my mind was actually blown was when I was watching the show on my grandparents' living room and my grandma walked by and asked me about Mandrake and Lothar by name and then when The Phantom came onscreen she immediately knew who he was, and she started asking me about characters I didn't even know because she wanted to know if they were also in the show, such as Mandrake's girlfriend Narda.

So of course I asked just how did she know these characters, and she explained that she used to read all about their adventures in the Sunday paper when she was a girl, and I finally realized what the show was actually doing.

Up to that point I'd assumed that, except for the Flash Gordon characters, the whole cast were original characters created for the show. Years later I finally saw the OG comic strips myself and I realized that this Phantom was actually the son of The Phantom from the comic strip, which you can actually see in an episode that has a flashback, and I finally got to know Narda and Lothar's GF.

I was and continue to be a big fan of Defenders of the Earth.

We no longer had newspaper comic strips in Germany in the 1980s, but I knew who Flash Gordon was from Filmation cartoon and the original 1930s movie serial that aired on TV at the time. Meanwhile, it turned out that my Mom, who would not allow me to read comics, because comics supposedly harmed children's reading ability, had been a fan of the Phantom since her childhood, when German newspapers still carried comic strips. I'm not sure if she was aware of the irony. At any rate, I knew Flash Gordon, Mom knew Phantom, so we watched Defenders of the Earth together. And while neither of us were familiar with Mandrake or Lothar, we quickly came to like them as well.

I never had any of the original toys and in fact, I only saw them in a store once – on holiday in italy in one of those stores that seemingly had every toy ever made, but you never had time to browse the place, because your parents did not fancy spending time in dodgy toy stores on holiday.

Decades later, it turned out that my Mom remembered almost none of the cartoons I had watched as a kid, even if she was in the same room. With one exception. She remembered Defenders of the Earth. Mom was already very sick and had dementia, when I bought the NECA figures. But she immediately recognised Phantom, Flash and Ming when I showed them to her.

I have all the NECA Defenders figures, though I wish they'd made the kids, too, so we could have the whole team. I'd also have liked to have Ming's children Prince Krotan and Princess Castra. But at least I have the four adult Defenders plus Ming and Garax. Okay, I could have lived without Garax, but a three pack of wave 2 was about the same price as buying Mandrake and Lothar separately, so I basically got Garax for free.

Creators aren’t the only ones who hate Q5, most people aware of their meddling also hate them. After all look what they did to The Real Ghostbusters.