Today I watched “Legend of the Hawaiian Slammers” written by Jeffrey Scott. There is only one episode (at least that I could find) released in 1994, and it seems to be a vehicle for selling more Pogs. Remember Pogs? If you’re one of our younger readers you may not know, Pogs were little flat cardboard circles and we played a game wherein you used a slammer (a slightly larger/heavier flat circle) to flip the cardboard circles over. Looking back on it I don’t quite understand why I loved it so much but I did. Maybe it was the collecting aspect, or the fact that every other kid was doing it, mass hysteria, government experiments, who knows. Or maybe, Pogs became popular because gods called “Slammers” who had been sealed in a stone chamber inside a volcano have been shifted and are awakening… who’s to say, it could have been anything.
See, the show doesn’t really have anything to do with Pogs. Yes, there are gods called “Slammers” and yes the kid uses some of his sweet Pogs skills to save the day, it all just felt so forced and out of place, but what did I really expect from a one episode cartoon designed specifically to sell paper circles.
A suspicious looking man cuts open an ancient artifact, he finds a metal disk inside and after dropping it (totally incompetent) he awakens the evil Shadow Slammer and goes in search of the other nine Slammers in order to control the world.
After blowing up part of a volcano to get to the second Slammer (more incompetence) the volcano erupts sending the Slammer away. A child stumbles across it, literally, and pries it from the stone. He too accidentally awakens the Slammer (acceptable incompetence considering he’s a child) and they begin their own search to find the others before the big bad guy can get his hands on them.
Will they save the day? Will they find the Slammers before their adversary or will the five Slammers of Light and the five Slammers of Darkness be awakened, sparking another 100 battle over the Earth? Tune in, and find out.
I’m going to go get more Fruity Pebbles.