Lost Cartoons | Galtar and the Golden Lance: The He-Man knockoff that stole an eight-year-old's heart anyway

3:30 pm meant time for Galtar and the Golden Lance.

(Full disclosure: At the age of eight, I assumed the name was Goltar and not Galtar, and I didn’t realise this error till my thirties when I suddenly decided to search for the show on a whim). 

Eight of us would arrive at school each morning already mid-argument about the previous day's episode. The theme song did the recruiting: scored by Hoyt Curtin, the veteran composer behind so many Hanna-Barbera worlds, it announced a hero, a quest and enormous stakes before the story even began. I didn't let it rest at just classmates; I barraged my harrowed parents about the show with my limited vocabulary at that age.

The truth is, we couldn't have explained the premise, even if we tried.

We could have told you exactly how it felt, and you could guess from our loud, frazzled arguments, interspersed with sound effects as we attempted to sing the theme song.

Google, decades later, has filled in the gaps, and it turns out we were watching a surprisingly grim little revenge saga.

The story: Tormack, the tyrant seized the kingdom of Bandisar, and killed Galtar's parents. Our prince sets out for revenge and meets Princess Goleeta, who has also suffered catastrophic consequences under Tormack, with her younger brother, Zorn. Tormack wants Galtar's Golden Lance to pair with Goleeta and Zorn's rightful Sacred Shield, because whoever holds both cannot be beaten in combat.

The lance, which all of us tried to make out of sticks in school, was a short staff until Galtar raised it overhead. The blades extend from both ends, splitting into twin swords. And, he had a loyal horse named Thork, along the way. There were enough characters to do a full role-play, and of course, we did.

I only remember the show now in fragments, which is rather frustrating, and a YouTube search hasn't provided me with much help beyond the theme song and a few clips here and there. How do you stitch together a show that once filled some of the happiest hours of your childhood?

But I do remember one episode vividly: An evil witch drains Goleeta's youth and beauty, leaving the princess a shriveled crone. Seven-year-old me had it right about that much, even if the finer plot points had already gone hazy. Goltar had to save Goleeta, and that's probably where my understanding of romance grew.

Those rescue episodes were the ones we dissected to the last dialogue. Eight eight-year-olds with fairly advanced damsel-in-distress issues, we adored the idea of a man saving a woman, (what is feminism to a seven-year-old in the 90s?) and Galtar racing off to save the princess gave us more romantic material than we knew what to do with. I am fairly sure they were the first couple I ever rooted for, without knowing what a couple was, or what rooting even meant. A quick search now tells me they were never a couple at all, just very good friends. My eight-year-old self remains unconvinced.

Galtar was for those of us who didn't watch He-Man. Or, more accurately, it was for those of us who hadn't warmed to He-Man. Give me Galtar, his Golden Lance and a horse named Thork and I was sold.

And as I see now, the show ran just 21 episodes, September 1985 to January 1986, part of Hanna-Barbera's syndicated Funtastic World block, before it was cancelled with Galtar and Tormack's conflict unresolved, Goleeta never got her shield and kingdom back. We only managed to watch it for a few months in the 90s on Cartoon Network in India.

To a child who didn't know much about cancellations or unfinished series, we just kept watching the reruns too. It was on TV; that's what mattered.

Apparently, it has since had a small afterlife: a 2004 cameo in Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, and a complete-series DVD from Warner Archive in 2015.

So, it exists somewhere, just out of our reach.

There's something about a quest that never finished, told to children who never quite understood it, and remembered decades later by one of them, still hunting for the episodes.