The latest classic cartoon to enter the Hanna-Barbera Classic Collection DVD series is SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron, the two season series that would be the number one syndicated animated show of 1994.
SWAT Kats was an action cartoon series that originally ran on TBS as past of The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera. Set in Megakat City, the series was populated primarily with anthropomorphic cats (or “kats”) that made up the city’s political and law enforcement sectors, as well as a large portion of the city’s evildoers. The central kats, Chance “T-Bone” Furlong and Jake “Razor” Clawson begin the story as officers working for the Enforcers, the city’s paramilitary police. When their boss, the woefully inept and power hungry Commander Feral, botches the apprehension of the villainous Dark Kat, T-Bone and Razor crash their aircraft into the Enforcers’ headquarters building. Feral demotes them to work at the city salvage yard to repay the city for the damaged building.
From within the salvage yard, the heroic twosome pieces together a secret base and a new jet fighter, with which they begin patrolling and protecting the city under their new secret identities as the SWAT Kats. Each of the 26 episodes in this new 5 disc set sends the Kats on a new adventure to defend Megakat City from robots, mutants, and more. The cartoon ran for two full seasons before its cancellation, at which time it was one of the most popular animated series in syndication, and all the Kats’ adventures are collected here.
The new DVD release is exclusive to WBShop.com and is part of their “manufacture-on-demand” series. As with the rest of the classic releases getting the Warner Archive treatment, the video and audio show great improvement in this release, and there are no bonus materials beyond the episodes themselves in the collection.
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I am posting this information here too. I thought Warner Bros did a terrible job with the release of SWAT Kats DVD. I don’t know if anyone noticed this.
Warner Bros put the same end credits (The credits of The Metallikats) for first season. And the credits for A Bright and Shiny Future for most episodes of second season. And other episodes of second season has credits of end credits of The Metallikats. Check the voice credits for Second Season as an example. And the visual quality on DVD is poor too.
My Advice to everyone is if you have Boomerang recordings and Old Cartoon Network Recordings of the show, then please stick with that. Those recordings are far better than this version that is released on DVD.