Swat Kats

A sunday morning, when most of your wing is sleeping and lunch is at least an hour away the only thing that is fitting enough to pass the time is watching some sitcom/cartoon. Also, living in a hostel makes you feel homesick at times, you start thinking of old times and how 'sweet and sunshine' they were. I immediately decided on one of my all time favourite cartoon shows; Swat Kats.

For those of you uninformed, Swat Kats is based on a metropolis inhabited by cat-like creatures called, as the name suggests, Kats. Basically, its the story of two kats who were laid off The Enforcers; an organisation much like the regular police department. The two Kats, T-Bone and Razor(Or Bade Miyao and Chote Miyao, depending on the language in which cartoon network was aired on your T.V. Personally I find the hindi version of the names cooler), like all heroes, were all also very intelligent and highly skilled, so they decide to come up with a jet fighter plane of their own(Ohh and I forgot to mention, they were fighter pilots in Enforcers). What they came up with is something which captured much of my imagination throughout my childhood.  

The Turbokat was a twin seater fighter plane, much like the F-14 in appearance, but way cooler otherwise.

 TurboKat came with three attachments, Cyclotron; a motorcyle , the Turbo Mole; a vehicle that could drill holes and go underground and The HoverKat; A hovercraft. Apart from all this, TurboKat had some of the most innovative missiles and weapons. I dont exactly remember their names, but there were missiles which would follow an enemy jet untill it closes its engines!

Even the stories and villains were very creative. There is an episode in which they actually introduced an alternate dimension(Where they fight against themselves-the green Swat Kats-in the alternate dimension).
Now that I think of it, I find it absolutely brilliant on the creators part to introduce things like that in a series targeted for children of the age group 6-14 and pulling it off succesfully!

Alas, SwatKats survived only two seasons. The creators decided to stop it because they felt that it was encouraging violence amongst children. Seeing the cartoons they air these days, ShinChan and the likes, I pray that the creators learn something from Hanna Barbara productions and  stop these too; for encouraging dumbness in children! 

P.S SwatKats intro song was mindblowing! They say it was composed by Metallica. No wonder one of the villains were Metallikats!