A funny thing happened when I received this DVD in the mail. I immediately called my brother and, chuckling with sadly predictable Gen X smartass irony, told him what 80s TV show box set I had in my hand. His revealing response: “What the hell is that?”

My bro was the target audience for Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors when it debuted in 1985, and he had no memory of it. I was a couple years older at the time and remember specifically avoiding the show because it looked so epically lame.

This was in the mid 80s — the heyday of TV cartoons for licensed properties — and poor little programs like Jayce had to fight with unstoppable juggernauts like Transformers, G.I. Joe, Thundercats, Voltron, He-Man, Robotech, and dozens of others vying for the attention of little dudes all over the country. To say Jayce had an uphill battle to capture eyeballs and wallets is a vast understatement.

So here we are, 20-plus years later, and the appetite for relatively obscure 80s cartoon nostalgia remains apparently still somewhat unsatiated. Shout! Factory would never of produced this box set if they didn’t think they’d make some cash off of it, right? Meaning, there are a couple thousand folks out there who were clamoring for a box set of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. It must have a following of some kind, as does J. Michael Straczynski, one of the main creative forces behind the show.

Said “following of some kind,” god bless ‘em, comprises the only group I’m guessing that would be able to sit through every episode of Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors collected in this set. I won’t lie, during the opening credits to the show I did get a brief nostalgia rush for those halcyon after-school afternoons. But Jayce, a somewhat ambitious space opera, is oh-so-deeply flawed in the same way most shows from that fondly remembered era are.

The premise (hopelessly convoluted, of course) goes something like the following: when a sudden solar flare mutates his experiments into evil plants who call themselves the Monster Minds, space botanist Audric is forced to flee his space laboratory to space parts unknown. But before he leaves, he creates a magical root to fight the Monster Minds and gives half of the root to his son Jayce. Jayce soon sets out into the open galaxy with his motley collection of wacky space friends — and sweet-ass space vehicles — on a quest to find his father while the Monster Minds and their evil leader, Saw Boss, are close behind with their evil space-plant vehicles. No shit.

There you have it folks. So, the reason Wheeled Warrior characters like “Oon” and “Dr. Zorg” aren’t mentioned in the same worshipful ironic tones as Panthro and Robeasts? Evil plants. I don’t care what age you are or where you grew up or if you were in 4H, no kid wants to watch an action cartoon about goddam evil plants.

Regretfully, and despite a laudable…I guess…attempt to give the show a more epic feel than most, Jayce unfolds much as you would expect from a mid-80s cartoon property: sluggishly. The more I see these cartoons I grew up with, I have to admit, the more I can’t believe we ever sat through these things. They are so relentlessly dull, predictable, cheap, overloaded with exposition, awash in faux sincerity, and paced like a grade-school safety lecture.

But hey, back then we didn’t know any better. And now we do. And it’s time to move on. That said, anyone know how Real Ghostbusters holds up…?

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