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[DVD Review] ‘Skeleton Warriors’
THE GLORIOUS DARKNESS!
After Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future failed to take off (which is a shame, considering it was the most ambitious children’s show OF ALL TIME), Landmark Entertainment went back to working on the great theme park attractions they’re known for while secondarily thinking up new concepts to pitch to the networks. When Gary Goddard brought his godson to see the final performance of the Conan stunt show at Universal Hollywood back in 1993, the three-year-old was enamored with the skeleton soldiers onstage. Since Goddard had fond childhood memories of Ray Harryhausen’s work in Jason And The Argonauts and similar warriors resonated with his godson who was a few generations younger, the skeleton imagery seemed timeless and powerful. Thus, Skeleton Warriors was born. 
Goddard and his team work endlessly on their pitch, creating tons of art and maquettes to bring to Toy Fair. During the convention, the show was picked up by CBS, and licensing rights started being snatched up left and right. The toy sculpts, as well as the giant skeleton suit that roamed around Toy Fair, created a lot of buzz for the He-Man-like property due to the amount of detail put into them (this was a Pre-Spawn world), and Playmates started production soon after.
Debuting in 1994 as part of the Action Zone hour, Skeleton Warriors was ambitious and unlike other Saturday morning programming at the time. The show had bookends featuring a floating CGI skeleton head as host who posed the moral dilemma of the episode, each of which focused on the ongoing struggle between the Legion Of Light and Baron Dark’s Skeleton Warriors over the Lightstar Crystal. Captain Power was the first children’s show to heavily incorporate CGI, and the original plan was to have Skeleton Warriors be entirely CGI. If CBS had committed to the show a few weeks earlier, the plan would have gone through but because of time constraints, the show went the traditional 2D route, with the bookends hinting at what might have been.
‘Are you part of the problem or the solution?” is the big question posed by the series, and the better than average writing staff elevated Skeleton Warriors from being normal Saturday morning fluff. The individual “lessons” posed in each episode are also handled well, but they are meant to be watched in order, as there are actual character arcs and a central storyline that runs throughout.
Sadly, the series would only last a season due to a number of reasons. CBS shuffled the show around a lot, and it never played in the same time slot more than three times in a row. Years later, Fox would pick up this habit and cancel Arrested Development. Skeleton Warriors was also really dark and violent for a children’s Saturday morning cartoon. But, the biggest factor in the show’s cancelation was the toy line. While they were highly detailed and pretty spectacular looking, Playmates decided to only release the villains in the first wave, leaving kids to only play with the bad guys. By the time three of the heroes were released, the show was ka-put. Talon, the lone female protagonist, was never released, as were several incredible designs lined up the second series. Even the Sega Saturn (WOAH!) and Playstation game came out after the series was canceled. To Goddard’s credit, him and his crew managed to wrap things up (for the most part) at the end of the season, so the story feels concluded rather than abandoned.
Skeleton Warriors was short-lived and heavily borrows from Masters Of The Universe (Guardian is practically the same character as Man-At-Arms), but it holds up surprisingly well and is a blast to watch. The character design is mind-blowing, the animation is great in that 90’s action cartoon sort of way, and the fact that the episodes need to be watched chronologically make it more satisfying than it ought to be. The copious amounts of stylized violence and cheesy one-liners – and there are A LOT – just make it that much better.
A/V
The transfer is kind of disappointing. Judging from how it looks, I imagine most of the masters were stowed away in someone’s attic, or a cabinet in a storage unit. The video quality changes between each episode, with some looking particularly crisp – especially the first episode – but most are washed out and soft in appearance, which is a shame because the character design for the show is really, really impressive. Audio, on the other hand, is very strong. The score has some haunting bits, and the theme song is about as ridiculously awesome as you remember.
Special Features
Commentary – There are two commentary tracks included in the two-disc set, and both are pretty dry. Series creator Gary Goddard chats on the pilot episode, but gives little insight into the episode and instead narrates it. Co-producer Robert DeLapp talks over ‘Past Perfect, Future Tense,’ and doesn’t say anything much of interest either.
Bad To The Bone: The Making Of Skeleton Warriors (29:54) – Here’s the meat and potatoes of the bonus features. The nearly thirty minute behind-the-scenes doc starts with that fateful trip to the Conan stunt show, and goes through a lot of concept art that I wish I had hanging on my wall, including the Drew Struzan painting that adorns the DVD cover, which he has for sale on his website for $95,000. The show’s history is really interesting, and they go through a lot of the changes it had over its production. Goddard even drags out a few figures that never made it into mass-production, and chats about what would’ve happened if they aired past the first season. What really makes this doc special is that towards the end, the creative and writing teams discuss why the show didn’t work, and since more than fifteen years have passed, they’re very clear-headed about the situation and give some real insight into Skeleton Warriors’ cancellation.
Score: 3.5/5
Night School, director Ken Hughes and writer Ruth Avergon‘s tale of a headhunting slasher on the streets of Boston, arrived in the early Golden Age of the slasher film and never quite broke through the endurance test that other films in the subgenre, like Friday the 13th, managed to pass with flying colors. Blame it on a more cerebral tone, a crowded market, whatever you like, but saying it’s a shame that the film didn’t break through doesn’t begin to cover it.
Night School isn’t just an underrated slasher, or an underseen one. For my money, it’s one of the best films the subgenre has ever produced, full stop, and Vinegar Syndrome’s new 4K UHD restoration, arriving just in time for the film’s 45th anniversary, is must-have proof. Stacked with special features highlighting the craft of the film and its place in slasher history, and headlined by a gorgeous restoration showcasing the wonderfully textured production, this is Night School as it’s meant to be seen for slasher devotees everywhere.
So, what makes the film so effective? It starts very simply, with the revelation that a killer with a very cool knife and a motorcycle helmet as a mask is murdering young women in Boston, taking off their heads, and dropping those heads in the nearest body of water (no matter how small).
Solving the case falls on Judd Austin (Leonard Mann), a detective with an academic background who traces all of the victims in one way or another back to a local night school. There, suspicion falls on a womanizing professor (Drew Snyder) who sleeps around on his research assistant and romantic partner, Eleanor (Rachel Ward), whose own death could be right around the corner.
I’m doing my best to stay as spoiler-free as possible here, not just because I think plenty of slasher fans still need to see Night School, but because the film is quite determined to be a whodunit in the classic Italian giallo sense. The kills are brutal and elaborate, the killer deliberately covered head-to-toe in leather and a gleaming black helmet, the knife and the headhunting a disturbing signature. Avergon’s script is well-versed in the trappings of exactly this kind of story, complete with red herrings galore. And yet, by the time it’s all wrapping up, there’s also the sense that the answer was right there in front of you the entire time, something the very best films by legends like Mario Bava and Dario Argento could also achieve.
But on to the restoration: Like the best of the gialli, Night School is also a beautifully engineered film full of colors and delicate camera compositions and sound design. The opening kill, which takes place on a playground carousel outside of a daycare, is rich in exactly this kind of thing, from the cityscapes that lead into the scene to the sound of a motorcycle slowly rolling forward, its engine already dead. Cinematographer Mark Irwin, best known for his many collaborations with David Cronenberg, paints the film in rich reds, absinthe greens, and haunting, chilled blue-white light on wet Boston streets, all of which are preserved beautifully by the restoration team at work on this one.
It’s a movie that very deliberately evokes a specific place – the aging streets of Boston in the 1980s, and the halls of relatively low-level academia – and then takes that place into haunted territory, saturating every frame with color and shadow that suggests a killer lurking just out of view.
Night School is not a massively gore-heavy film, but it does deliver the slasher goods with a series of tense, often unpredictable kills and body discoveries that range from the darkly comic to the flat-out jaw-dropping. That’s thanks to the sound design, the score, the editing from Robert Reitano, and more, all of which add to the film’s giallo soul.
In every case, the scene’s geography is outstanding, and it’s easy to see where the simplest possible kill shot might land, but the film never goes for the obvious. Throw in a surprisingly (for 1981, anyway) feminist bent to the storytelling and some very progressive moments for an early slasher film, and this one fits right in with Black Christmas and The Slumber Party Massacre as a film with depth you can just keep unpacking.
That depth, helped along by a load of featurettes and two new commentary tracks featuring members of the crew, is what stands out the most in this new 4K set. Night School may be a niche film recognized mostly by horror addicts and the slasher faithful, but it deserves to be something more, a landmark on the roadmap of slasher cinema history. It’s one of the best in the genre, and this restoration highlights, underlines, and shouts that from the rooftops.
Night School is now available in 4K UHD from Vinegar Syndrome.
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