A long time ago in a previous Saturday Night Showcase I brought you the first two episodes of Defenders Of The Earth, a show where King Features Syndicate brought together some of their greatest action heroes. Flash Gordon, Mandrake The Magician and his loyal companion Lothar, and the Phantom (though this being set in the future they jumped to the 27th Phantom…which doesn’t explain how Mandrake and Lothar are there since Lothar is a mortal even if Mandrake isn’t) joined together to face Ming The Merciless. Each brought their own kids while Dale was turned into the supercomputer Dynak-X. (Long story…two episodes worth in fact.) While Hulu, where I got the embeds from originally, stopped doing embeds for websites (thus dropping one of the features that benefited their sites…they get the ad revenue, I get the readers and no money) I recently learned that King Features created their own “Comics Kingdom” YouTube channel. The name comes from their online comic strip archive.
Through this channel I was able to update the Saturday Night Showcase entries on the Saturday Morning Flash Gordon cartoon I grew up with and is still my favorite Sat AM show (at least in season one), as well as The Legend Of Prince Valiant, the Family Channel series adapting that comic. Sadly they don’t have Phantom: 2040 up there as of this writing, so to highlight this channel I have another Defenders Of The Earth episode, which actually guest-stars Prince Valiant and his son Arn (named for his friend as seen in TLOPV). In this episode Ming tricks the Defenders into a time warp with a mutant parasite monster to destroy Earth and his enemies in one shot. The heroes team with Valiant and Arn to stop the monster as well as rescue Valiant’s wife from an evil sorcerer seeking the power of the Eternity Stone. I didn’t even remember this episode existed. Enjoy!
