Post by Harkovast on Dec 24, 2016 17:09:15 GMT
I loved cartoons as a kid, and still do.
My favourites were always action and adventure shows, like Thundercats, He-Man, Batman the Animated Series, SWAT Kats and many others.
But not all these were classics, some of them were appalling shoddy pieces of shit....and I think I might have found one of the shittiest ones of all.
The opening for the show is pretty dramatic, with an admittedly cool electric guitar theme tune and lots of fighting and action. However, warning signs are already there.
Cartoons of this genre always have the best animation and action in their opening sequence (since we see that every week). Just think about how mind blowing the opening of Thundercats was. Fun as the rest of the show was it was never as bad ass as that! (Okay I actually went and watched the Thundercats opening again and it really might be the best opening to any cartoon ever. When Cheetara charges through all the mutants, that might be the most kick ass thing possible in animation.)
Well Arthur and the Knights of Justice doesn't measure up to that standard (obviously) but on closer inspection there are already signs of shoddiness. When the armies are fighting were see awkward repeating animation. If you are going to have fuck ups in your opening you know you are in trouble. This is them putting their best foot forward, trying to make a great impression. Its like the first date. If you can't be arsed to have a shower and change your clothes for that, imagine what it will be like when you stop giving a fuck? Yeah, welcome to King Arthur and the Knights of Justice. (Man that title is way too long when you have to keep typing it out...)
Aside from cartoons, I've always big a fan of knights. Armoured guys riding around bashing each other with swords, they are just cool and awesome to me (as you might have guessed from my web comic!)
Well this cartoon manages to find ways to completely ruin that concept.
At the start of the show we learn that King Arthur and his knights have all been sent to the "cave of glass" where they are trapped.
We never see this, and we never see Arthur or his knights on the show, Merlin just describes it in voice over to no one in particular.
An evil force of warlords are ravaging the land and they attack Camelot by firing vast amounts of arrows and axes (yes they fire axes...just go with it).
With Arthur gone it seems the castle is pretty much empty except for Merlin, Guinevere and some random servant girl. Watching the bad guys fire projectiles into an empty castle is really fucking weird! Merlin uses his magic to stop the arrows and axes (no really, they have machines that fire axes...they aren't even spinning through the air they just fly straight like axe shaped javelins.) I don't know why Merlin is bothering. Since there are no defenders, the projectiles aren't going to hit anything. You could just go indoors and you would be fine.
Anyway, while Merlin is doing this a flying warlord swoops in and kidnaps the queen.
Yeah maybe having only three people defending a castle, two of whom were none combatants was not a brilliant idea.
Lord Viper, leader of the warlords declares that now he's got Arthur and the queen he's hot shit and runs the joint (okay, not in those EXACT words).
Merlin is pretty dejected that he's fuck it all up and let evil win (yeah, fucks sake Merlin, how are you losing? You've got magic! You just got out witted by guys who think firing axes is a valid tactic. You suck.)
Fortunately, the old geezer gets encouragement from the "spirit of the round table" who is a glowy chick who looks a bit like She-Ra who shows up to give him some encouragement. She tells him to look into the future to find 12 good men who are heroic and good enough to take the place of the knights and save the world.
Not super helpful there, table ghost. I mean somewhere in the future there are twelve guys? Don't want to narrow that down at all?
So is it any wonder that from such a ridiculously unhelpful piece of advice, Merlin uses his magic to summon an American Football team.
No, really, that's the plot.
In the future, there is an American football team called "The Knights" who are led by Arthur King (see what they did there?) Now I'm not a big sports fan but even I know there are more than twelve guys in an American Football Team. But on the team bus, these twelve are all there is. There aren't any other buses, no coach, no cheerleaders, no substitutes....hell one of the players has to drive the fucking bus!
At this point we get introduced to our heroes.
There's the leader, Arthur who we see is good at tactics because he helps them win the big game with an unexpected play. Okay, fair enough.
And then there's....the rest of them I guess?
Seriously, we are introduced to all twelve of these big jock dudes at once, how the fuck am I supposed to keep track of whose who?
There was a black guy who seems to take in rap a lot of the time and has a 90s black guy angular hair cut with lines cut in the side (fuck off, we thought that was cool back then! Like modern fashions are any less stupid!) I think there was another black guy in there, though he wasn't an appalling stereotype so he didn't stand out.
There was one with big hair and a funny accent, one who said nerdy things, one driving the bus that they all made fun of....how many is that?
Seriously, 12 characters is probably too many even if you introduce them gradually, but to just dump them all in is insane! Especially when they all share basically the exact same back story and role.
So our heroes get zapped back in time and Merlin fills them in on the situation. They seem to all take this in their stride (with all their football induced brain injuries, I guess life normally seems pretty confusing anyway.)
Merlin tells them that if they don't stop Lord Viper then their future will be destroyed....wait what? That's not how this works! The bad guys aren't time travelling! How will their success or failure affect the future? That doesn't work at all.
Their objective is also to return to their own time....which would seem to be undoing the shit Merlin did to them. I mean it's his fault they got brought through time with no way to get back. Merlin is either useless or making things worse, I swear.
The team aren't sure if they should help until Merlin shows them Queen Guinevere who is so hot that Arthur is immediately motivated to rush into action to save her.
No, seriously, that's the plot. Arthur has an Excalibur in his pants and that's what motivates him.
Merlin explains that since the real Arthur and his Knights have been captured so the new Arthur will take their place. You see the football team happen to look exactly like them. What are the odds?
This scene, as well as destroying any hope that this show won't be terrible also manages to make all the characters seem even MORE interchangeable.
They all talk in American Football related terms ("when's the kick off?" and "I feel like I just got hit by the front line of the Redskins!") and then the they all say magic words to summons armour and weapons for them. It's one of those transformation sequences they can reuse each week to pad out the episode and save on animation.
Once these generic characters I can't keep track of, all put on their all coverinng suits of armour, all hope of knowing who is who is right out the window. You could literally change them for an entirely new set of heroes and I wouldn't have been able to tell. Swap out a few voice actors, I mean why the hell not at this point?
Interestingly the transformation involves horses getting armour and carts turning into medieval tanks (stay with me.) This gives the impression that there are a load of random animals and things laying around in Camelot and the magic just transforms what ever crap is in there. Like there might have been a beaten up old sofa and that would have made a big spiky battle sofa.
The transformation is set off by them all saying their Knightly motto about defending the innocent, which no one told them to say, but they all do in unison anyway. Maybe they used to say a motto about being Knights and fighting evil when they were playing American Football.
One thing I will give credit for is that Merlin explains that the whole transformation gave them knowledge of how to sword fight and ride horses etc, so at least they thought of that.
Though if this magic can turn anyone into a knight, why did he need people from the future? Seems to be over complicating things. Just turn a few peasants into warriors and kick the warlord's asses.
They ride out to battle the evil warlords, who have a giant army of warriors. Weirdly, the standard mooks all just stand aside and only the character warlords take part in the actual fighting. I don't know why they would introduce a huge army of bad guys, just to have to awkwardly ignore them later.
Later on we learn that the warlords are all stone statues brought to life.
When this is first mentioned I thought it was a metaphor for how tough they were. But know, it turns out they are literally living stone beings. When they get destroyed the sorceress Morgana, who leads the warlords, can remake them. Just to make things more confusing, the bad guys only very occasionally get destroyed. In the first few episodes it never happens at all, despite them getting defeated, knocked down pits etc. They always just recover and carry on as if they were normal people that the cartoon show can't show getting hurt, and they talk and interact like people (or at least normal cartoon bad guys). Lord Viper, their battlefield leader isn't a statue, as we can see his face, so it seems like the others are just guys in armour.
So why would you throw in a weird detail like this if its not going to be important or come into play?
If I made the evil bad guys living statues, Arthur and his knights would be smashing them to bits constantly, thus allowing plenty of bloodless battles. Instead it is mentioned so infrequently it feels jarring whenever it does come up.
The characters designs and vehicles are very clearly created with making toys in mind (toys no one would want, cause this show was terrible.) All the knights looks really strange and their weapons are down right bizarre. Several of them can fire rockets, one of the warlords has a giant bone club, others have weird blade implements I don't even have a name for. It feels like whoever made the show had the concept of knights explained to them but had never actually seen a picture of one and just made it up from their strange imaginings.
The knights can all summons magic animals from their shields (in addition to the horses they ride, weirdly). Arthur can summon a dragon which I swear if I was him I would be using way, way more! He uses it to fly him somewhere and that's it. Its a fucking dragon! It breaths fire! Have it toast all the fucking warlords! The knights also have a symbol of weapon on their chests that they can call on to become a real weapon for them to use. You can tell they were reaching for ideas with so many characters as one guy have a symbol of some bricks and fires brick walls out of his chest. Yep, that's a thing he does.
Now I know during the 90s we weren't as enlightened about gender politics as we are now, but even by the standards of the day this show was incredibly regressive.
All the heroes are male, even though there are WAY too many of them. Even if they have to be an American Football Team, you could have given them a female couch, some cheerleaders, a female fucking bus driver just to mix things up!
Aside from a bit of representation, it would maybe have helped make the characters a little more memorable instead of a sausage fest of interchangeable dudes! And don't try and tell me it wouldn't be historically accurate or some shit. I just described this show to you, women being knights would be FAR from the least realistic thing to happen. Hell, in history women in armour fighting is a thing that has actually happened... knights firing missiles and axes at each other not so much.
The magic table gives them all powers and armour anyway, so why couldn't it turn the women into super bad asses too!
Thinking back to when I was young, most hero teams had some women in them, but here the only female roll for the good guys is the queen who is-
1- hot
2- captured
After they rescue her, I kid you not, Merlin brings in a load of chicks to reward the knights. He says "I think in your time you called them....cheerleaders".
Has Merlin confused cheerleaders and medieval hookers?
So not only do we have the woman being a damsel in distress that gets rescued, a load of them are brought in as a literal prize for the heroes.
The Queen thinks Arthur is the original king, and thus her husband. No one corrects her about this and she just thinks he's acting a bit strange.
Yeah....the implications are not good.
She never indicates he is spurning her in any way, its never clear why he can't tell her the truth and he thinks she's super hot and Merlin says to Arthur "She is your queen."
NO! No she isn't! She's married to another fucking guy, Merlin you fucking bearded perve! This is rapey as fuck!
The only woman who actually gets any agency is the evil sorceress, because I guess the a woman who isn't a sex object for men to fight over has to be evil.
Even April O'Neil getting endlessly captured on mutant turtles was more progressive than this shit.
And I don't buy the excuse that this was the 90s and people weren't as enlightened, because most shows had way better gender issues than this. In the 80's He-Man had the female heroes Teela and Sorceress as well as Evil-lyn on the evil side, and that was nearly ten years earlier!
Almost every hero team has at least one woman in on these kind of shows. Yeah that 'aint perfect (its usually only one chick and everyone else is a dude) but its a million times better than crap!
And no one is implied to be tricking women into sex on any of the other shows I can remember!
I think the biggest problem with this show is that the premise itself is misguided.
The normal reason you would have a character brought through time like this on a cartoon are-
A- To be a fish out of water so we have a reason to explain what's going on.
and
B- So we have someone the audience can relate to, like a kid having adventures.
On point A, we waste this by having Merlin explain everything in a voice over, rather than to the heroes, so we don't got told everything rather than learning naturally as the heroes learn it. When the heroes learn it just feels like an awkward recap of what we just got told.
On point B, unless you are a big jock American football player these guys aren't relatable at all! In fact it kind of puts an extra layer of separation in that everything is either to do with knights or American Football stuff.
Look, right now I can write a better concept.
How about just Arthur is from the future and everyone else is a regular Knight from the past? Bam, right there I just made the concept work better.
Or what about if we have various people brought together to be Knights from the future and only one of them is a football players who talks in football related terms and that's his gimmick? So he's always saying things like "I'm going long" or "we gotta get back in the game!" and that makes him distinctive from everyone else? You know, so we have memorable characters we can recognise?
A friend of mine described this show thusly-
"Is this show part of a money laundering operation?"
I think that kinda captures how stupid and misguided it all is. The animation was cheap and nasty, the character designs ugly and samey and the plot was stupid and made no sense.
And if you thought all that was bad, in a later episode a load of really stereotypical samurai called the Purple Horde, led by a guy called Lord Chang, show up as new bad guys and there is the following exchange-
Merlin "remember the tricks I taught you are just illusions, not real magic."
Arthur "Between that and what I've learned about Judo, I've got a shot at beating Chang."
Merlin "How do you know he'll even agree to a one on one battle with you?"
Arthur "If he's anything like the warriors from the far east in my time, he wont want to lose face by refusing a challenge."
Yes, the many mighty warriors from the far east that rampaged around in the 1990's.
Speaking as someone who was there, I can assure you that if it wasn't for their strict honour codes, the far eastern hordes would have captured President Bill Clinton and destroyed all our Playstations.
This show makes me think of Excalibur....in so much as it makes me want to be thrown into the nearest lake.
My favourites were always action and adventure shows, like Thundercats, He-Man, Batman the Animated Series, SWAT Kats and many others.
But not all these were classics, some of them were appalling shoddy pieces of shit....and I think I might have found one of the shittiest ones of all.
The opening for the show is pretty dramatic, with an admittedly cool electric guitar theme tune and lots of fighting and action. However, warning signs are already there.
Cartoons of this genre always have the best animation and action in their opening sequence (since we see that every week). Just think about how mind blowing the opening of Thundercats was. Fun as the rest of the show was it was never as bad ass as that! (Okay I actually went and watched the Thundercats opening again and it really might be the best opening to any cartoon ever. When Cheetara charges through all the mutants, that might be the most kick ass thing possible in animation.)
Well Arthur and the Knights of Justice doesn't measure up to that standard (obviously) but on closer inspection there are already signs of shoddiness. When the armies are fighting were see awkward repeating animation. If you are going to have fuck ups in your opening you know you are in trouble. This is them putting their best foot forward, trying to make a great impression. Its like the first date. If you can't be arsed to have a shower and change your clothes for that, imagine what it will be like when you stop giving a fuck? Yeah, welcome to King Arthur and the Knights of Justice. (Man that title is way too long when you have to keep typing it out...)
Aside from cartoons, I've always big a fan of knights. Armoured guys riding around bashing each other with swords, they are just cool and awesome to me (as you might have guessed from my web comic!)
Well this cartoon manages to find ways to completely ruin that concept.
At the start of the show we learn that King Arthur and his knights have all been sent to the "cave of glass" where they are trapped.
We never see this, and we never see Arthur or his knights on the show, Merlin just describes it in voice over to no one in particular.
An evil force of warlords are ravaging the land and they attack Camelot by firing vast amounts of arrows and axes (yes they fire axes...just go with it).
With Arthur gone it seems the castle is pretty much empty except for Merlin, Guinevere and some random servant girl. Watching the bad guys fire projectiles into an empty castle is really fucking weird! Merlin uses his magic to stop the arrows and axes (no really, they have machines that fire axes...they aren't even spinning through the air they just fly straight like axe shaped javelins.) I don't know why Merlin is bothering. Since there are no defenders, the projectiles aren't going to hit anything. You could just go indoors and you would be fine.
Anyway, while Merlin is doing this a flying warlord swoops in and kidnaps the queen.
Yeah maybe having only three people defending a castle, two of whom were none combatants was not a brilliant idea.
Lord Viper, leader of the warlords declares that now he's got Arthur and the queen he's hot shit and runs the joint (okay, not in those EXACT words).
Merlin is pretty dejected that he's fuck it all up and let evil win (yeah, fucks sake Merlin, how are you losing? You've got magic! You just got out witted by guys who think firing axes is a valid tactic. You suck.)
Fortunately, the old geezer gets encouragement from the "spirit of the round table" who is a glowy chick who looks a bit like She-Ra who shows up to give him some encouragement. She tells him to look into the future to find 12 good men who are heroic and good enough to take the place of the knights and save the world.
Not super helpful there, table ghost. I mean somewhere in the future there are twelve guys? Don't want to narrow that down at all?
So is it any wonder that from such a ridiculously unhelpful piece of advice, Merlin uses his magic to summon an American Football team.
No, really, that's the plot.
In the future, there is an American football team called "The Knights" who are led by Arthur King (see what they did there?) Now I'm not a big sports fan but even I know there are more than twelve guys in an American Football Team. But on the team bus, these twelve are all there is. There aren't any other buses, no coach, no cheerleaders, no substitutes....hell one of the players has to drive the fucking bus!
At this point we get introduced to our heroes.
There's the leader, Arthur who we see is good at tactics because he helps them win the big game with an unexpected play. Okay, fair enough.
And then there's....the rest of them I guess?
Seriously, we are introduced to all twelve of these big jock dudes at once, how the fuck am I supposed to keep track of whose who?
There was a black guy who seems to take in rap a lot of the time and has a 90s black guy angular hair cut with lines cut in the side (fuck off, we thought that was cool back then! Like modern fashions are any less stupid!) I think there was another black guy in there, though he wasn't an appalling stereotype so he didn't stand out.
There was one with big hair and a funny accent, one who said nerdy things, one driving the bus that they all made fun of....how many is that?
Seriously, 12 characters is probably too many even if you introduce them gradually, but to just dump them all in is insane! Especially when they all share basically the exact same back story and role.
So our heroes get zapped back in time and Merlin fills them in on the situation. They seem to all take this in their stride (with all their football induced brain injuries, I guess life normally seems pretty confusing anyway.)
Merlin tells them that if they don't stop Lord Viper then their future will be destroyed....wait what? That's not how this works! The bad guys aren't time travelling! How will their success or failure affect the future? That doesn't work at all.
Their objective is also to return to their own time....which would seem to be undoing the shit Merlin did to them. I mean it's his fault they got brought through time with no way to get back. Merlin is either useless or making things worse, I swear.
The team aren't sure if they should help until Merlin shows them Queen Guinevere who is so hot that Arthur is immediately motivated to rush into action to save her.
No, seriously, that's the plot. Arthur has an Excalibur in his pants and that's what motivates him.
Merlin explains that since the real Arthur and his Knights have been captured so the new Arthur will take their place. You see the football team happen to look exactly like them. What are the odds?
This scene, as well as destroying any hope that this show won't be terrible also manages to make all the characters seem even MORE interchangeable.
They all talk in American Football related terms ("when's the kick off?" and "I feel like I just got hit by the front line of the Redskins!") and then the they all say magic words to summons armour and weapons for them. It's one of those transformation sequences they can reuse each week to pad out the episode and save on animation.
Once these generic characters I can't keep track of, all put on their all coverinng suits of armour, all hope of knowing who is who is right out the window. You could literally change them for an entirely new set of heroes and I wouldn't have been able to tell. Swap out a few voice actors, I mean why the hell not at this point?
Interestingly the transformation involves horses getting armour and carts turning into medieval tanks (stay with me.) This gives the impression that there are a load of random animals and things laying around in Camelot and the magic just transforms what ever crap is in there. Like there might have been a beaten up old sofa and that would have made a big spiky battle sofa.
The transformation is set off by them all saying their Knightly motto about defending the innocent, which no one told them to say, but they all do in unison anyway. Maybe they used to say a motto about being Knights and fighting evil when they were playing American Football.
One thing I will give credit for is that Merlin explains that the whole transformation gave them knowledge of how to sword fight and ride horses etc, so at least they thought of that.
Though if this magic can turn anyone into a knight, why did he need people from the future? Seems to be over complicating things. Just turn a few peasants into warriors and kick the warlord's asses.
They ride out to battle the evil warlords, who have a giant army of warriors. Weirdly, the standard mooks all just stand aside and only the character warlords take part in the actual fighting. I don't know why they would introduce a huge army of bad guys, just to have to awkwardly ignore them later.
Later on we learn that the warlords are all stone statues brought to life.
When this is first mentioned I thought it was a metaphor for how tough they were. But know, it turns out they are literally living stone beings. When they get destroyed the sorceress Morgana, who leads the warlords, can remake them. Just to make things more confusing, the bad guys only very occasionally get destroyed. In the first few episodes it never happens at all, despite them getting defeated, knocked down pits etc. They always just recover and carry on as if they were normal people that the cartoon show can't show getting hurt, and they talk and interact like people (or at least normal cartoon bad guys). Lord Viper, their battlefield leader isn't a statue, as we can see his face, so it seems like the others are just guys in armour.
So why would you throw in a weird detail like this if its not going to be important or come into play?
If I made the evil bad guys living statues, Arthur and his knights would be smashing them to bits constantly, thus allowing plenty of bloodless battles. Instead it is mentioned so infrequently it feels jarring whenever it does come up.
The characters designs and vehicles are very clearly created with making toys in mind (toys no one would want, cause this show was terrible.) All the knights looks really strange and their weapons are down right bizarre. Several of them can fire rockets, one of the warlords has a giant bone club, others have weird blade implements I don't even have a name for. It feels like whoever made the show had the concept of knights explained to them but had never actually seen a picture of one and just made it up from their strange imaginings.
The knights can all summons magic animals from their shields (in addition to the horses they ride, weirdly). Arthur can summon a dragon which I swear if I was him I would be using way, way more! He uses it to fly him somewhere and that's it. Its a fucking dragon! It breaths fire! Have it toast all the fucking warlords! The knights also have a symbol of weapon on their chests that they can call on to become a real weapon for them to use. You can tell they were reaching for ideas with so many characters as one guy have a symbol of some bricks and fires brick walls out of his chest. Yep, that's a thing he does.
Now I know during the 90s we weren't as enlightened about gender politics as we are now, but even by the standards of the day this show was incredibly regressive.
All the heroes are male, even though there are WAY too many of them. Even if they have to be an American Football Team, you could have given them a female couch, some cheerleaders, a female fucking bus driver just to mix things up!
Aside from a bit of representation, it would maybe have helped make the characters a little more memorable instead of a sausage fest of interchangeable dudes! And don't try and tell me it wouldn't be historically accurate or some shit. I just described this show to you, women being knights would be FAR from the least realistic thing to happen. Hell, in history women in armour fighting is a thing that has actually happened... knights firing missiles and axes at each other not so much.
The magic table gives them all powers and armour anyway, so why couldn't it turn the women into super bad asses too!
Thinking back to when I was young, most hero teams had some women in them, but here the only female roll for the good guys is the queen who is-
1- hot
2- captured
After they rescue her, I kid you not, Merlin brings in a load of chicks to reward the knights. He says "I think in your time you called them....cheerleaders".
Has Merlin confused cheerleaders and medieval hookers?
So not only do we have the woman being a damsel in distress that gets rescued, a load of them are brought in as a literal prize for the heroes.
The Queen thinks Arthur is the original king, and thus her husband. No one corrects her about this and she just thinks he's acting a bit strange.
Yeah....the implications are not good.
She never indicates he is spurning her in any way, its never clear why he can't tell her the truth and he thinks she's super hot and Merlin says to Arthur "She is your queen."
NO! No she isn't! She's married to another fucking guy, Merlin you fucking bearded perve! This is rapey as fuck!
The only woman who actually gets any agency is the evil sorceress, because I guess the a woman who isn't a sex object for men to fight over has to be evil.
Even April O'Neil getting endlessly captured on mutant turtles was more progressive than this shit.
And I don't buy the excuse that this was the 90s and people weren't as enlightened, because most shows had way better gender issues than this. In the 80's He-Man had the female heroes Teela and Sorceress as well as Evil-lyn on the evil side, and that was nearly ten years earlier!
Almost every hero team has at least one woman in on these kind of shows. Yeah that 'aint perfect (its usually only one chick and everyone else is a dude) but its a million times better than crap!
And no one is implied to be tricking women into sex on any of the other shows I can remember!
I think the biggest problem with this show is that the premise itself is misguided.
The normal reason you would have a character brought through time like this on a cartoon are-
A- To be a fish out of water so we have a reason to explain what's going on.
and
B- So we have someone the audience can relate to, like a kid having adventures.
On point A, we waste this by having Merlin explain everything in a voice over, rather than to the heroes, so we don't got told everything rather than learning naturally as the heroes learn it. When the heroes learn it just feels like an awkward recap of what we just got told.
On point B, unless you are a big jock American football player these guys aren't relatable at all! In fact it kind of puts an extra layer of separation in that everything is either to do with knights or American Football stuff.
Look, right now I can write a better concept.
How about just Arthur is from the future and everyone else is a regular Knight from the past? Bam, right there I just made the concept work better.
Or what about if we have various people brought together to be Knights from the future and only one of them is a football players who talks in football related terms and that's his gimmick? So he's always saying things like "I'm going long" or "we gotta get back in the game!" and that makes him distinctive from everyone else? You know, so we have memorable characters we can recognise?
A friend of mine described this show thusly-
"Is this show part of a money laundering operation?"
I think that kinda captures how stupid and misguided it all is. The animation was cheap and nasty, the character designs ugly and samey and the plot was stupid and made no sense.
And if you thought all that was bad, in a later episode a load of really stereotypical samurai called the Purple Horde, led by a guy called Lord Chang, show up as new bad guys and there is the following exchange-
Merlin "remember the tricks I taught you are just illusions, not real magic."
Arthur "Between that and what I've learned about Judo, I've got a shot at beating Chang."
Merlin "How do you know he'll even agree to a one on one battle with you?"
Arthur "If he's anything like the warriors from the far east in my time, he wont want to lose face by refusing a challenge."
Yes, the many mighty warriors from the far east that rampaged around in the 1990's.
Speaking as someone who was there, I can assure you that if it wasn't for their strict honour codes, the far eastern hordes would have captured President Bill Clinton and destroyed all our Playstations.
This show makes me think of Excalibur....in so much as it makes me want to be thrown into the nearest lake.