I thought I posted this one at the same time I posted the Substack version, but apparently, I just saved it as a draft. My bad…
As I tell thee of the Days of High Adventure! the early 1990s, I recommend that you listen to this playing on a loop in the background:
And, if possible, start forging a sword…
Much like our favourite Cimmerian when faced with some eldritch thing that has crawled out of the stygian void beyond the stars, my mind cannot comprehend what I’m seeing here as I watch Conan the Adventurer.
Why is there a Conan cartoon?
And how did it end up this good?
Robert E.Howard is one of my literary idols and Conan is by orders of magnitude his most famous creation — posthumously, at least (we almost certainly owe that to the movie); his most popular stories in his own lifetime were comic Westerns starring a dude named Breckenridge Elkins.
Perhaps not actually that surprising given that Howard was from Texas…
Howard’s stories don’t usually pull any punches when it comes to content and subject matter. It sort of comes with the territory writing for pulp magazines. And the Conan stories have a propensity for being particularly lurid.
Not exactly the kind of thing that seem like a good basis for a kids’ show.
Yet here we are: not only is there a 65-episode Conan cartoon that ran for about a year across 1992 and 1993, not only is actually rather entertaining, it’s also shockingly faithful to the source material.
Conan the Adventurer necessarily has to change a lot of things for the sake of its audience — the violence and the, uh, shall we say, “mature” subject matter, and the unfortunate portrayals of non-white cultures and people are toned way down.
But the world — the cultures, the cities, the places, certain characters — was clearly being written by someone who did their homework.
Conan is still a Cimmerian who swears by Crom, he’s not Austrian (Cimmeria, incidentally, is supposed to be Fantasy Ireland), he’s still bewildered by the ways of civilised Men, he’s still not book-smart but immensely shrewd and clever, Set is still an evil snake god, wizards are still usually evil, the ghost of the sage Epemitreus still shows up to help Conan.
Some the episodes borrow their plotlines from the stories — though, again, delivered in such a way as to be appropriate for children and playing fast and loose with the specific details.
But, also, there are episodes where Conan and friends do stuff like fight giant tanks or learn to be ninjas…
Though, of course, it wouldn’t be a 90s cartoon if the hero didn’t have a goofy sidekick. In this case, a scatterbrained magic phoenix who lives in Conan’s shield. The bad guy has a goofy sidekick of his own, a bumbling snake-lizard-person … thing.
Again, in principle, this isn’t anything out of line with the established Conan lore. Conan’s phoenix is clearly a twist on the first-ever Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” where Conan gets empowered by receiving a sacred phoenix emblem on his sword.
Similarly, there are plenty of snake-things in the Conan-verse.
On the whole, I feel that Conan the Adventurer definitely a thing inescapable in the extent to which it happened…
The show is ridiculous in every possible way.
But, also, it’s glorious.
It’s sort like Professional Darts. It’s one of those things that I can’t quite tell if I enjoy sincerely or ironically.
But, either way, it’s an absolute trip blast.
And the cherry on top of this whole bizarre spectacle is that Conan the Adventurer is CanCon — that’s, uh, that’s short for “Canadian Content,” for those of you who may not be familiar with Canadian Telecommunication regulations.
Originally, I watched the series on Tubi. There’s still a listing for the series on the Tubi website, but it hasn’t actually been available to watch for a while, and I can’t find anywhere it’s currently streaming legally as of this writing, which is a bit of a bummer, because Conan the Adventurer feels like it must be seen to be believed.
And even then…
One slight silver lining here is that at least the theme song has been officially uploaded by Hasbro, so you can at least get a taste of one of the most bewildering pieces of Pop Culture from the 90s:
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