Subscribe!Cro (1993)
Originally posted on 02 May 2026First episode title: Just a Stone's Throw Away
How familiar with the show am I?: I'd never heard of it.
Is this the first episode?: Different sources disagree on the episode ordering. The place I got this episode from says that this is episode 1, and IMDb agrees, but Wikipedia has a completely different ordering that puts this episode in Season 2!
A Cro-Magnon boy called Cro in prehistoric times lives with a Neanderthal family and woolly mammoths, in a place called Woollyville, and has all kinds of adventures with them. Also, as a framing device, a mammoth called Phil has been brought back to life in the present day, and all of Cro's adventures are the stories that Phil tells to a boy named Mike. And it's educational!
Important characters amongst the Neanderthals include a woman named Nandy who seems to believe herself to be a kind of psychic, and men called Ogg and Gogg. There's also a more ape-like character named Bobb who can't speak like the others can. Mammoths seen in the episode, other than Phil, include a yellow-furred "Southern belle" mammoth called Ivanna, an orange girl mammoth called Pakka, and a red young boy mammoth called Steamer. In the present day, Mike lives with a scientist named Dr. C, and she's the one who thawed Phil from the ice that preserved him, as recounted in the series' opening theme.
In this episode, Mike is having trouble trying to throw a ball of paper into a basketball hoop, which inspires Phil to tell him a story about devices for throwing things further. In the past, while the cave-people are eating dinner in their cave, Ogg accidentally leans on his spoon and launches some food at Cro, causing a food fight as everyone else starts using their spoons as catapults too. Then Nandy rushes in and says that the signs are telling her that something bad is going to happen. The other Neanderthals don't believe her, but Cro says that it can never hurt to be prepared. So, Cro heads out with Pakka, with Steamer tagging along as it's Pakka's turn to watch him, to gather food to take back to the cave. Meanwhile, Ogg, Gogg, and Bobb go out to find more rocks to make the cave more secure against danger.
Cro's party crosses over a natural bridge between two cliffs to reach a ditch full of watermelons they know is there. Cro and Steamer go down into the pit, but find they can't throw the melons high enough to get them back up to Pakka. Cro remembers the spoon incident, and ties a vine to a tree to make a catapult to throw the melons up. In doing so, they work out other principles, like tying a knot in the vine and using it to stop the tree in the right position to load it up with a melon. Similarly, Ogg's party figure out that they can transport rocks faster if they use a large plank of wood in the same way as the spoon, but it doesn't fling the rocks far enough. Nandy comes to see what they are doing and tells them they will need a longer lever, so Ogg sends Bobb across the bridge to search for an even bigger plank. After Bobb has reached the other side, Cro and Pakka reach the bridge with the melons and are halfway across it when they realise that they've lost Steamer. They don't have time to go back and look for him before an earthquake hits, and they only just make it across before the bridge collapses, leaving Steamer (and, unbeknownst to them, Bobb) trapped on the other side!
Back in the present, Mike has now made a little catapult but is still having trouble getting the paper in the hoop, so Phil explains some more about the physics of how it works. Then he continues the story, with Steamer and Bobb encountering each other across the valley. Each of the groups they've been separated from try to come up with ways to get them back. Ogg and Nandy make use of the catapult principle and try to launch Gogg to the other side. Their invention fails, and for a second it looks as if they've launched Gogg off the cliff to his doom, until we learn that that was just a dummy they were using as practice. Meanwhile, Pakka and Cro are trying to make a tree-based launcher like before, this time to launch a rock attached to a rope to make a way across - it also doesn't quite make it, though.
Ivanna sees what Ogg, Gogg, and Nandy are doing, and helps them build a much more sophisticated catapult. However, the problem is raising it into position. Cro and Pakka see this and tell them about the technique with the knot in the vine, and finally they are able to successfully launch a rock across. They use this to get to the other side and save Steamer and Bobb. In the present, Mike challenges Dr. C to a basketball throwing contest, and Mike uses a catapult to enable him to get it in - but Dr. C has her own, even better launching machine, and she easily beats him.
First off: the educational side. I can forgive the way that the physics lessons are worked into the sections that take place in the past. But the framing device feels pointless. When you have a human child in prehistoric times learning these lessons, there's no reason for another kid in the present to learn about them too! Apart from that, though, there's nothing annoying about Mike and Phil themselves.
The Neanderthals are exactly the usual stereotypical caveman type. Even Nandy, who's more intelligent than the others, talks with the same bad grammar as the rest.
Ogg has the biggest role of the Neanderthals - he seems determined to prove that he's smarter than he looks, but ironically ends up rushing into poorly-thought-through plans as a result.
Cro, by contrast, talks just like a modern American human. He has what I have come to think of as a typical generic "protagonist voice" that I've been hearing all over these cartoons. Realistically, both humans and Neanderthals would have had similar speech capabilities.
It's not clear what exactly Bobb is. As mentioned, he's more ape-like than the Neanderthals and can't talk, but he's not just an animal - perhaps the intention is for him to be the "missing link" between apes and humans.
The mammoths also talk like modern humans, although Steamer talks like a small child of course. He has a cute mop of hair that kind of makes him look like a mammoth version of Cro, although Steamer's hair covers his eyes.
I think Pakka is my favourite character. She's intelligent and comes up with all the business with the knots, she's also cute, and she's believably worried about Steamer when he gets trapped by the earthquake.
The "bridge" is clearly natural, not man-made, but they all call it a bridge anyway. It's still absurdly conveniently shaped like an artificial one would be, as well as collapsing on cue in the earthquake. It's as if they originally planned for the plot to include a proper bridge, before realising the Neanderthals would probably have never built something like that if they hadn't even invented simple catapults yet!
Speaking of what they would be able to build, the Neanderthals go from the simpler catapults to a really elaborate one as soon as Ivanna gets involved! It still isn't fit for purpose until Cro and Pakka also come along, because they can't manage to pull it back far enough until they know to use knots as stoppers.
But then once the rope is in place, the way Cro gets across it is to use a cable car that seems to come out of nowhere! The basket itself looks like some kind of wicker, and the wheel appears to be metal - this time period is way too early for metalworking! Couldn't they have just shown him climbing across the rope? He seems athletic enough! Although I guess he wouldn't be able to bring the other two back that way...
Anyway, this show was nice, and I have no real major problems with it, but I still don't think the parts in the present added anything much to it.
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