Subscribe!The Power Team (1990)
Originally posted on 28 February 2026First episode title: Yes We Have No Tomatoes
How familiar with the show am I?: I hadn't heard of it before.
The Power Team is the cartoon segment from a live-action, video game themed show called Video Power. Like Saturday Supercade, it uses characters from all different video games in its cast - unlike Saturday Supercade, the characters all appear together, and none of them are any characters that you've heard of. The concept here is that they've all emerged from their video game cartridges in order to fight crime in the "real world".
The main characters of this show are:
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Johnny Arcade, the host of Video Power, who is from the real world and whose father owns a pizza shop; he's not part of the Power Team himself but he helps them from his home
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Max Force, the main character of a shoot-'em-up called NARC that involves catching drug trafficking criminals; his enemy, Mr Big, is the main villain of this show, although of course there are no drugs involved in this '90s children's cartoon!
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Kuros, the knight hero of the fantasy game Wizards & Warriors
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Kwirk, an anthropomorphic tomato from the puzzle game of the same name
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Tyrone, from Arch Rivals, a basketball game where you're allowed to beat the other players up to get the ball off them
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Bigfoot, a monster truck from a self-titled racing game, and who is treated as a sentient being
In this episode, Mr Big and his gang are attacking all trucks carrying tomatoes and stealing them, in order to control the market and anger Kwirk. So the Power Team load up Bigfoot with tomatoes and then hide in the pile while he's driving along, to lure Mr Big into trying to steal from them. He does stop them, so the Power Team jump out and a battle ensues, which ends with the criminals driving away embarrassed.
Then later, Kwirk, who takes the theft of tomatoes personally, goes looking for Mr Big by himself, finding his gang in a warehouse full of tomato sauce cans that they're planning to overcharge restaurant owners for. Kwirk starts fighting them but the gangsters successfully trap him. His friends are worrying about him back at Johnny's house, where Johnny's father has agreed to meet up with Mr Big on behalf of all pizza shop owners to negotiate a deal. This is all in order to lead the Power Team right into the warehouse, where they rescue Kwirk and force the bad guys out of the place in a flood of tomatoes.
Out of the Power Team characters, Kwirk is the one who looks the most distinctive and has the biggest personality, and thanks to this episode's focus on him I got to experience his more than anyone else's. He is quite a loudmouth and gets angry easily, but in a comical way. It's not just stuff the villains do too - when they're all hiding in the pile of tomatoes, Tyrone teases him about his appearance, and that's enough to goad him into calling him "basketball breath", whatever that means!
Kuros, being from a medieval fantasy world, is a mishmash of stereotypes, talking in a slightly formal way but hardly wearing any more clothes than Conan the Barbarian, with enough strength to stop a car in its tracks with his bare hands. He gives a sense of wanting to uphold his honour and such, but his role in this episode isn't very big so I didn't get to see much of that. I did love this random shoehorning of some information about his game though, when they're hiding in the tomatoes:
Kuros: I'd hate my arch-enemy, the evil wizard Malkil, to see me like this!
Speaking of the sequence where Bigfoot is carrying the tomatoes, he does not in any way resemble a cargo truck like this! I can't imagine that "disguise" fooling anyone, but I guess it only needed to work for a second before they all jumped out and attacked the gangsters anyway.
Max Force is a character who would get to shoot his enemies to death in the game he's from, so he had to be toned down for a show like this - instead, his suit was given a variety of gadgets. One button fires off a section of the suit as a projectile weapon, and he has a spray that turns the ground into slippery ice to make his opponents fall over, amongst other things. He might as well have been a different character!
The most visually impactful attacks in this episode actually come from Tyrone. Instead of beating people up with his fists like in his game, he uses the basketball itself as a weapon, doing all kinds of physics-breaking trick shots. This is also an understandable change, since if he didn't have his basketball in battle, he would hardly seem like a fighting basketball player at all. Most memorably, in the final battle in the warehouse, he hits Mr Big with a shot that pushes his head down into his coat and puts the basketball in place of it, even wearing his hat and shades!
Ah yes, Mr Big. He is a very stereotypical gangster boss type, almost always with a cigar in his mouth, which the kid-friendly characters of course make sure to point out is bad for your health. He also insists on pronouncing "tomatoes" the British way, with an "ah" sound in the middle, which the other characters are just as insistent is incorrect - it's yet another one of those things that irritates Kwirk. Being from a video game world like the heroes, he keeps using video game related terminology in his banter, and he even (for some reason) has the cartridges that all of them came out of, which he can apparently use to transport them back to their respective worlds if he gets close enough, although he never makes good on these threats.
Mr Big: Hope you got a bonus life, Tyrone - you're gonna need it!
Of Mr Big's minions, the one who attracted my attention the most is a guy named Spike, who has shades and tall blonde hair. In fact, his design is mostly what I like about him. He shows some annoyance at the stupidity of his own comrades, and like Mr Big he throws around video game related phrases a bit.
Spike: Too bad you boys don't have a pause button handy!
The only other named minion is Joe, who is a generic "idiot goon" type in a suit. Although, the show is kind of unfair on him - the main demonstration of what's meant to be his stupidity is a "my left or your left" routine where all the confusion would be cleared up if Mr Big just said "my left", so it's not really Joe's fault.
The final act of the episode, where Kwirk goes off on his own to look for the bad guys, starts off with Kwirk in a detective outfit giving himself a noir-style narration of his exploits. By complete coincidence, that's how the last segment of the show we covered last week began too! I swear I didn't line that up intentionally!
In Kwirk's fight against the bad guys in the warehouse, he tips over piles of boxes to get in the gangsters' way, which he notes is "just like back in the Kwirk game world". What a natural way to talk to yourself and not at all a shoehorned-in mention of the game you're from! It looks like the game does involve pushing boxes to solve puzzles, but the situation doesn't match in any other way.
Overall, this show didn't have much to excite me about it, but Kwirk is one particularly memorable character - maybe if I watched episodes that focused on each of the others more, I would come to appreciate them as much!
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