From: "eric walker" <eric.walker@channel1.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.animation
Subject: the young sentinels
Date: 8 Oct 92 21:29:56 EST
Reply-To: "eric walker" <eric.walker@channel1.com>
Distribution: rec
Organization: Channel 1 Communications

     Does anyone remember a Filmation Saturday morning cartoon series
from the called 1970s called "The Young Sentinels?"
     I'd completely forgotten about this one over the years, until today
when I was thinking about cartoons to pass the time at work.  (My job
has
a lot of rote work and drudgery, so I can think about other subjects
while
I work.)  Memories of this show came to me for some reason, and I
remember really enjoying it when it aired, years ago.
     It was a superhero cartoon, and like several Filmation series it
tried
to be a "serious" cartoon - at least to as much of a degree as "serious"
ever got on Saturday mornings.  The animation was the typical Filmation
style of the seventies - abysmal - but stories were quite interesting,
in
a science-fiction-comic-book way.
     The stories involved a super-computer from another world called
"Sentinel 1," who chose three young beings from Earth and turned them
into heroes with super powers: Hercules, a the strong-man of the team;
Astria, a lady who could shape-change into any animal form; and Mercury,
a
speedster who could travel at the speed of light and move into other
dimensions.  There was also a robot sidekick (name forgotten), who
wasn't
as silly as the typical "comedy relief" characters you see on Saturday
mornings.  (Remember the Filmation Batman with Bat-Mite?)
     The episodes of this series were quite different from other
superhero
cartoons, and I remember enjoying several of them.  The one I remember
most
clearly has the trio of heroes going against an arch-foe of theirs, who
had
been created by Sentinel-1 in the past as a hero and given all of their
powers, but he turned evil.  In this particular episode, he tapped into
Sentinel-1 so that he could build his own super-computer to aid him in
his plans of conquest.  He succeeded, and built a whole slew of
Sentinel-
1's, but because these computers were "perect," they realized that their
creator was evil, so they rendered him powerless and brought him into
deep
space where he could do no harm.  It was an interesting twist ending.
     Another episode had to do with the "Master Sentinel," a cosmic
super-
computer and father of all the Sentinels, being infected by a living
virus.
The Sentinels had to travel into deep space, into the depths of this
master
computer, so that they could find the virus and destroy it.  They
realized
that the virus was intelligent, because it kept changing its form into a
series of geometrically perfect shapes - cubes, pyramids, dodecahedrons,
etc. - and they convinced it to leave without having to destroy it.
     I don't remember too much else about this series.  There was one
episode that had to do with them travelling to another dimension,
apparently to save Earth from some creatures there; then there was the
story of a NASA mission to Jupiter that accidentally brought back plant
spores that grew at a tremendous rate, threatening Earth's survival, and
other superhero/science fiction stories.
     I don't think this show lasted very long.  It may have only been on
for one season - or perhaps two, because I remember that for some reason
the series was renamed "The Space Sentinels" instead of "The Young
Sentinels."
     Does anyone else remember this show?
--
Channel 1 (R)   Cambridge, MA

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