Inhumanoids

Lore & Background

The series began as a slate of six-to-seven-minute shorts airing as part of the collective Super Sunday half-hour block alongside Jem and the Holograms, Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines, and Robotix. While Bigfoot had only nine episodes, the other shows ran to 15 episodes, telling a complete story across their installments, which were later edited together to form movies released on video. Out of the four, Jem proved to be the most popular, and was eventually made into an ongoing series that lasted for 65 episodes.

Reader's Guide

The series proved strange among children's cartoons of its time due to its strong narrative flow linking episodes in sequence with continuing storylines and suspenseful threading of subplots. Visually, the show was distinctive for its heavy shadow, use of split screens, and occasionally graphic content such as monstrous amputations or writhing deaths by toxic waste, which the article notes would be hard-pressed to appear in contemporary children's programming. A series of action figures based on the cartoon was produced by Hasbro and designed by David McDonald in 1986. The scientist figures each had an action power and all figures had glow-in-the-light features. The original series of Mutores included figures such as Redlen, Redsun, Redwood Race, Granok, and Granite Race.

Did You Know?

• The series began as six-to-seven-minute shorts in the Super Sunday block alongside Jem and the Holograms, Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines, and Robotix.
• The introductory movie was cut into five separate 22-minute episodes composed of three shorts each.
• The series subtitle 'The Evil That Lies Within' came from lyrics in the intro song.
• A tissue sample secured from Tendril during the first encounter mysteriously went missing at the end of the series.