TigerSharks (1987)
First episode title: Voyage to Water-O
How familiar with the show am I?: I hadn't heard of it before.
Don't confuse this with Street Sharks - yes, we've got people turning into underwater creatures and fighting evil, but the vibe is very different! This time we've got space travel, alien races, and even a dragon!
The opening shows us a bunch of the aforementioned transformations, and also repeatedly tells us "you've got a tiger by the tail". Interestingly, none of the characters in this show actually turns into a tiger shark specifically, yet the show's slogan heavily leans on that half of the title.
Now, the episode. It begins with a manta ray shaped spaceship flying through space. Already, things are looking pretty cool. On board, we meet a manta-like humanoid called T-Ray and a frogman called Wall-Eye. They're approaching a planet called "Water-O" - not pronounced as two separate words, but instead rhymes with "aero". And they're going there because their own planet has dried up, and they need a new world. Oh, and did I not mention? Visible bubbles and the physics of movement make it clear that the inside of the ship is filled with water - just as you'd expect from a space-faring race of sea creatures!
They fly over an ocean on the planet, and T-Ray gives Wall-Eye the order to land it on "that icy part". Which is weird if you think about it - you'd expect them to want to fly right into the ocean, and not land on... uh... land.
So the spaceship swoops down, and what the fishmen see is that several varied creatures are frozen in the ice. In case there's any danger from whatever they are, T-Ray orders Wall-Eye to open fire. We get a look at the control console of the spaceship, which is another interesting thing about it - rather than what we would picture for the controls on a machine, these ones seem to be made of crystals. If you think about the efforts needed in order to make our technologies waterproof, it makes sense that an underwater race would have completely different technology from the start!
Anyway, I don't think these two have thought through the effects of blasting frozen creatures with heat energy. It thaws them out, and the first thing to emerge is what looks like a large dragon, which starts breathing fire at them!
They make a hasty retreat, and this time they do actually head for the water. But we're shown that there's another vessel already on the surface. Two pink, big-eyed, fishy-looking aliens are on board, and they urgently transmit a message to "TigerShark Lorca", telling him there's an emergency. Under the surface, on the seabed, what looks like a human being in a diving suit has exited a kind of pod to explore, and a flashing light inside the pod makes it clear that the transmission is coming through to there - in other words, he's not close enough to hear the message, and T-Ray's ship is heading straight for him! Yes, there is a lot going on here, but I promise we'll straighten out who all the relevant groups of characters are as we proceed.
For the first time since all the way back at the start of Debutniverse when I looked at The Transformers, we have a notable scene transition effect. Major scene changes are marked with a shark fin outline insignia that comes into the screen horizontally, which we zoom through into the next scene. I like when a show commits to its theming and extends it to non-diegetic aspects like this.
And this transition takes us from Lorca on Water-O to an outer space shot of... that's Earth! It's a little indistinct but I'm pretty sure we're over the Pacific Ocean. I mean, it's so indistinct that on my first viewing I didn't even register that this was Earth, but that's probably just the fault of the copy I'm watching.
On Earth, there's a vessel docked in the water near some cliffs, and a pier that extends out from the land to meet it. A man with elf-like pointed ears is walking out along the pier, and a security gate at the end starts talking to him in a robotic voice:
You are entering a classified area of TigerSharks Intergalactic Underwater Salvage. To avoid the alarm system, please identify yourself by voiceprint.
If I was a security system, I'd give out information less freely. "Intergalactic Underwater Salvage" is very interesting, as it implies the discovery of a lot of planets with liquid water, something that's notoriously rare in what we've discovered of the universe in reality. Anyway, the man, who has what might be an attempt at an Irish accent, claims to be "Big Julie from Jupiter", setting off the alarm and making lasers appear. He admits that he was joking and he's actually "TigerShark Dolph", and the machine lets him in to the vehicle it refers to as the "Sark".
He gets inside, and the other members of the crew are an interesting mix. Some of them are humans, there's another pointy-eared man like Dolph, and there's a woman with green skin who also has pointy ears. Nothing in the episode goes ahead and says it, but it looks like this is set in a future where space travel is common enough that it's normal to have aliens living on Earth - so normal that no-one even talks as if the non-human Earthlings are any different from the humans, or acknowledges their appearance in any way. This is a pretty major use of "Show, Don't Tell" for a kids' show like this!
A bald man with a moustache and a cane berates Dolph for playing around with Sark, which looks to be the name of the ship's computer as well as the ship itself, and Dolph asks Mako, the other pointy-eared man, how Lorca is doing on Water-O. They haven't received his latest report yet because there's a 12-hour delay between Water-O and Earth. 12 light-hours is too close to be realistic - our nearest star after the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is over 4 light-years away - but I'm prepared to accept faster-than-light communications and travel in something like this. It's honestly surprisingly realistic that they included a delay at all!
The bald man seems just as annoyed about the mission as he was at Dolph's joke.
Walro: It was a dumb idea sending him up there to salvage that spaceship alone. I don't know why I agreed to it.
The rest of the crew chime in and provide some more exposition. It's mentioned that Lorca at least has the Waterians to help him, which would be the pink fishy people we saw before. And the green woman tells us the reason why the mission is so vital - the ship has a cargo of "X-400", presumably an explosive, and enough of it to knock Earth out of orbit, apparently!
Dolph asks if Sark has a "complete analysis" of Water-O yet. The facts it gives in response are so basic, you would expect them to be the kind of thing they'd need to know before they sent someone up there! The planet is 90% water and its inhabitants are amphibious. Dolph asks Walro if he can imagine being able to breathe underwater, and Walro starts to say "I have", but he gets interrupted by the transmission of Lorca's report.
Because this is the transmission they were waiting for, this is Lorca before we saw him before, when he's still in the capsule he went to the seabed in. Seeing him without his diving helmet on, we can see that he has pointy ears too, and it becomes clearer that his skin colour is a pale purple (it was hard to tell if that was just due to him being underwater before). In the recording, Lorca, who seems to be intended to have an Australian accent, tells the TigerSharks that he's moving out of the "bubble" to take a look at the wreck of the spaceship. This takes us to when we last saw him - obviously, we know that he's failing to hear the Waterians' warning right now.
So then, as you might expect, T-Ray's ship advances on Lorca! He starts shouting "Mayday", and Mako tells Sark to prepare for emergency take-off.
Sark: We can blast off in four minutes, twelve seconds.
Walro: That gives us just enough time!
Mako: For what?
Walro: Come with me, quickly!
They all rush to quite a large room that I can't believe exists in a ship the size of the one they're supposed to be in. It contains an octagonal swimming pool with a raised platform around it, for diving from. Walro goes up on the platform but tells everyone else to wait below for the moment, and they're all concerned to know what it is that he's built. It makes me wonder if he's come up with odd and potentially dangerous inventions before.
Walro explains that for years he's imagined how they could all work and live underwater for long periods of time, and he has finally invented "a way for man to breathe underwater". This was one line in particular I was thinking of when I said the show doesn't distinguish the non-human members of the party in any way, as here he's using "man" in a way that you'd expect to mean "humanity" but it appears he's including everyone. He calls the pool the "Fish Tank" as he dives into it and presses a control on one wall. The whole pool lights up red, Walro is surrounded by light of all colours, and he transforms into... a walrus! Well, a humanoid approximation of one.
I have to note that he specifically said "breathe" underwater. Walruses live in water, but they can't breathe without air! Happy with his results, Walro tells the other TigerSharks to dive in. So they do, and they all get their own underwater forms! Now, if you couldn't tell from "Walro", the characters do all already happen to have names that match the forms they end up getting, in a case of extreme nominative determinism. Some of them don't have their names mentioned until this moment, which makes it even more obvious. The green lady is Octavia and gets an octopus form. Mako becomes a mako shark and Dolph becomes a dolphin. As for the humans, a blonde man called Bronc becomes a seahorse, and ginger woman Angel becomes an angelfish. No prizes for guessing what Lorca's going to be when he gets his new form!
Walro opens a hatch, letting them out into the water outside to try out their new forms. A couple of them ask Walro how they change back, so he leads them back through the same hatch and presses the same button from before, reversing the effect of the pool and putting them back in their usual forms. He emphasises that this is the only way for them to change back, so don't you forget it!
Their ship - which is both a water ship and a spaceship - takes off now. I mentioned already that it looked like a shark, but what we couldn't see when it was half-submerged is that it even has a fang-filled mouth painted on it. It's such a cool design. It raises its "solar sail", which makes it look like it has a huge back fin too.
Back to under the sea on Water-O, inside the manta ship, where T-Ray and his minions have Lorca and the Waterians in chains. T-Ray is demanding to know what Lorca is doing here, but he refuses to give any information beyond identifying himself. Lorca is, of course, the only person on board the ship who can't breathe in the water, so T-Ray threatens to pull out his suit's air supply if he doesn't talk. Evil. We don't get a chance to see whether that threat would have made Lorca give in, though, because at that moment an explosion makes the whole ship shake - another vessel on top of the water is firing lasers down at them!
This ship is much more like a traditional boat, with a sail and an open deck. On board is an alien in a naval uniform who introducers himself as "Captain Bizzarly". He's accompanied by the dragon we saw getting unfrozen earlier, and he broadcasts a message down to T-Ray's ship to "thank" him for freeing him, so this was apparently another one of the beings trapped in the ice. T-Ray responds positively, but after the call Bizzarly turns to his dragon friend and:
Bizzarly: When you see them, Dragonstein, incinerate them!
It took me several viewings to notice, but Dragonstein visibly has bolts in his jaw and stitching around his neck, suggesting he is the dragon equivalent of a Frankenstein's monster - is he made from several dragons? The manta ship takes off from the sea floor and breaks the surface, and immediately Dragonstein breathes fire at it for the second time this episode. Amusingly, T-Ray takes this betrayal to mean he can trust Bizzarly, because it means both of them are villains! Excellent cartoon logic.
T-Ray presses a button that makes his ship raise a white flag(!), and he broadcasts another message to Bizzarly, suggesting an alliance. In this conversation, Bizzarly refers to T-Ray as "fish-man", drawing my attention to the fact that I don't actually know what kind of species Bizzarly is. Not a fish, apparently, but this should be evident from the fact that he's breathing above the water. The two of them agree that evil is best and enjoy an evil laugh in unison, the way villains should.
Now, in space, the shark ship is almost at Water-O. Unless their travel is faster than their communication, it's presumably been more than twelve hours? They've tracked Lorca's last known position and can see the two ships above the water. As they "land" on the surface, the manta ship dives again, so some of the team decide to transform and investigate. Walro, Mako, and Dolph slide down a pole at the upper level of the ship that dumps them into the Fish Tank - did Walro also install that without everyone else noticing? The whole transformation thing is much sped up now that we've already seen it once - Walro presses the button and then they're out of there in their alternate forms.
Immediately, the manta ship opens fire on them, launching several missiles that look like metallic eels, made of small segments so that they are as flexible as real fish - another cool design. Mako points out that, if those missiles reach the Sark and destroy it, they'll all be stuck in their fish forms without the Fish Tank. Apparently, he's more concerned about this than whether his colleagues on board survive!
So, they have to fight the eels. Dolph grabs one, but it wraps around him and starts squeezing. Walro's cane is apparently for more than just walking - he fires a laser from it which destroys one of the eels! And Mako slices another eel in half with the shark fin on his head, which looks really slick, although electricity visibly sparks from it and you'd think that would give Mako a bit of a shock? Oh well.
Dolph exclaims that he's running out of air, and Walro points out that dolphins need air to breathe. So not only have the writers apparently realised that the thing about breathing underwater didn't quite work, but they haven't yet noticed that it also applies to walruses? Or is it just that they don't expect it to be a problem until something as suffocating as this eel attack? Anyway, Mako and Walro are able to pull the eel off Dolph so that he can surface, and Mako crushes the eel in the jaws of a convenient giant clam.
But there's one eel left, and it's getting uncomfortably close to the Sark! Mako thinks they won't be able to get it in time, but now Walro reveals another ability of his cane - it can turn into a propeller, lifting them all up! Just how many features does this cane have?
The situation wasn't as dire as it looked, anyway. On board, Octavia commands Sark to activate the "steel net", which appears as a glowing grid all around the outside of the ship, and then to "reverse electric field", which repels the eel. Big "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" energy. Another laser blast from Walro then destroys it. He says to Octavia "Thank you, Captain" - it wasn't very clear up until this point that Octavia is the captain of the ship, since Walro always seems to act like he's in charge!
On board Bizzarly's ship, T-Ray is paying him a visit. Since T-Ray can't breathe in air, he's using Lorca's bubble, this time with water inside and air outside instead of the other way around. Bizzarly tells T-Ray to ready his soldiers and T-Ray goes underwater again, and then Bizzarly says something to Dragonstein about how much of a sucker T-Ray is and Dragonstein breathes fire in response. He's always doing that - you have to imagine that stuff gets accidentally burned on Bizzarly's ship all the time!
Back on the Sark, with the trio who fought the eels now back in their ordinary forms, the crew make plans: Angel and Bronc are going to follow "that weird ship" (T-Ray's or Bizzarly's?), but first, they're all going to make contact with the Waterians to try and find Lorca. Of course, a couple of Waterians are missing too - I don't know if the TigerSharks know that yet.
There's an establishing shot of the Waterians' city. All the buildings are sort of rounded cone shapes? The city is on land - don't forget that the Waterians can live just as easily above or below water - which is convenient for the TigerSharks! The rulers of the Waterians introduce themselves, and the specific characters are not going to be very relevant here but I want to look at their dialogue briefly anyway:
Pappagallo: I am called Pappagallo.
Hydra: My name-form is Hydra.
Goby: And I am known as Goby.
Um, Hydra, what's a "name-form"? Is this something specific in your culture, or are you just saying "name" in a weird alien way? Speaking of aliens, Goby has kind of an "E.T." voice whereas the other two just sound like people. The TigerSharks say they're looking for their friend, and the Waterians warn them that they've heard that region is under attack by "Mantanas". How the Waterians know the name of T-Ray's race I have no idea, especially since they then explicitly say that they've never encountered them before.
They also know that the Mantanas have freed Bizzarly and Dragonstein from the ice, but that's much more understandable because that would have been quite visible. In a flashback, Pappagallo explains that the Waterians' ancestors froze all their enemies in ice, and we see one of their vehicles chasing after Bizzarly and Dragonstein and all manner of other creatures and firing ice beams at them. This happened in an icy part of their water-covered planet, which was therefore named "Sea-beria". Love that they named their land with a pun on a place they almost certainly would never had heard of, unless even the time of their ancestors was after humans had started exploring space. Dragonstein almost breaks free of the ice with his dragon breath but another blast of ice seals him away properly, which is a neat detail.
Back in the present, Bronc and Angel go windsurfing. I mean, they are actually looking for the villains, they didn't just randomly do this for fun. But it's still a bit jarring to cut straight to it after the Waterians fretting about their worst nightmares coming back from the past! The two of them are still in their human forms since they're operating above water. I think it must be Bizzarly's ship they were sent to follow, because they'd have to be underwater to follow T-Ray's.
They spot a cave mouth in a nearby cliff, and it leads to Bizzarly's base. It looks like a big dragon skeleton - I wonder whether it's just shaped like one or whether it really was made from the remains of an animal much, much bigger than Dragonstein. Bronc and Angel decide to contact the other TigerSharks as we get to see inside - Bizzarly is sitting on a throne and he now has Lorca and the Waterians chained up, illustrating that he's now the villain in charge out of him and T-Ray.
T-Ray and one of his minions come up from the water through a lift in the floor - they're now wearing helmets filled with water. I love all the different solutions this episode comes up with for having land-based and water-based characters interacting with each other. I also love how T-Ray's big manta wing things, which are on the sides of his head, stick straight out of the sides of his helmet!
After all this, T-Ray hasn't yet properly introduced himself to Bizzarly, so he does, explaining he's in charge of the Mantanas and proposing that his underwater army and Bizzarly's above-ground troops could together take over the planet and destroy or enslave the Waterians. Bizzarly agrees and takes the opportunity to let us know just how much he loooooooathes the water. I guess he's not going to be that pleased about working with a fish, then.
T-Ray mentions they still need to unfreeze the rest of Bizzarly's crew. Hey, why hasn't Bizzarly just had Dragonstein do that yet? Oh right, they're all the way in Sea-beria. He also still wants to know who Lorca is, and whether he's brought any friends along, at which Lorca quickly claims to have come alone. Suspiciously quickly. And unbeknownst to any of them, Bronc and Angel are witnessing this, poking their helmeted heads up from the water nearby. They weren't wearing suits when we last saw them, so they must have somehow carried those with them - can their regular clothes turn into diving suits or something? Bizzarly says they will leave for Sea-beria soon, and T-Ray communicates with his forces on his ship. He orders two of his men to bring the "Saw Bill" with them - we'll see what that is soon.
The TigerSharks on their ship, who must have received an update from Angel and Bronc, are heading towards their location. But Sark detects a vehicle, so Dolph and Mako (again!) rush off to investigate. They slide down the pole to the Fish Tank, but they don't notice that this time they're followed by the ship's dog, Gupp! I am pretty sure he isn't seen before this point. So Gupp ends up turning into a half-dog half-fish as he follows them out there! I suppose, since we've already seen the Fish Tank's power affect a bunch of aliens that definitely aren't human, we shouldn't be surprised that it would affect dogs.
Dolphin-form Dolph and shark-form Mako realise who's following them and are amused by what's happened. But then they spot the vehicle, a kind of underwater bike with a chainsaw at the front, driven by two fish-men - this must be the Saw Bill. The two minions are complaining and grumbling about everything as they drive along, like that the water is too cold. And one of them says he's getting "seasick"! How does that happen to a fish?! I guess Mako and Dolph can tell that those are some of T-Ray's men since they're not Waterians, so they immediately throw the two minions off the vehicle and drive off, leaving the two of them to get menaced by Gupp! Gupp has really pointy teeth in fish form, so he does look pretty dangerous!
Dolph and Mako catch up to Bronc and Angel, who tell them what Lorca's situation is. They also specifically make sure to mention that the room is full of air - in other words, Mako in shark form isn't going to be able to come, so he gets off the bike and lets Dolph go ahead. It is becoming clear that there are a lot of logistics to sort out when you're plotting a show with so many differences regarding who can breathe where!
In the aforementioned room full of air, Bizzarly orders Dragonstein to incinerate Lorca, but Lorca, despite being chained in place, is able to duck out of the way. That dragon must have terrible aim.
At that moment, Dolph on the bike-thing zooms out of the water, heading for the chained-up prisoners, the chainsaw on the front cutting all three of them free. The Waterians dive straight for the water, and Dolph stops, Lorca now seeing him in his transformed form for the first time. Remember, Lorca hasn't been told anything of what's going on with the rest of the TigerSharks, so he's seeing one of his friends as a dolphin-man with no context at all! He's confused, but Dragonstein is still rampaging, so he has no time to do anything but climb aboard. They go into the water, Dragonstein on their tail. And Bizzarly, left on his own (T-Ray and his friend just slip away without saying anything), declares the situation to be "bizarre", as if that's supposed to be a clever play on his name.
Under the water, Lorca is running out of air, so Angel lets him have a breathe of her air supply. Dragonstein breathes fire at them all, and they've really put thought into this as well, because the flame becomes a huge jet of hot water instead! Bronc dodges it and uses some kind of handheld lassoing device out of nowhere to put a rope around Dragonstein's horns. Well, maybe his name at least was already appropriate before he gained a seahorse form!
Mako shows up again to tie the other end of the rope to a rock, and everyone flees back to the Sark. On board, Lorca gets to see Mako and Dolph change back, and they show Walro what his invention did to Gupp before he changes back too. Lorca is impressed by what Walro has done, and Walro bashfully says that it "only took a few years of tinkering". What, and they really didn't notice he was doing anything in all that time?
Everyone encourages Lorca to get in the Fish Tank and find out what he will become. As you probably guessed, it transforms him into an orca.
I enjoyed this show a lot! And I found so many little things to appreciate about it on the rewatch! This is one that has really had a lot of thought put into it. It did give me the impression of being a toyline-based show, what with introducing so many characters in just the first episode, and it may well have been intended that way, but apparently it only had a small short-lived toyline. I would have liked to see more action from the underwater forms of Octavia, Bronc, and Angel, who didn't transform again after the initial test of their powers. But I guess I will need to watch more episodes for that!