Episode 1
"Secret Ninja Team Nyanki Dispatch" or
"Stop Dragon My Cat around!"

The debut episode opens with Speedy and Guido competing to deliver a Tuna and Liver Meatball pizza to the lovely Lucille. The forth wall gets broken early on with Guido complaining that he has a clause in his contract preventing slapstick humour and Speedy greeting Lucille with the line "To other people you may just be a hand painted animated character but you mean a lot more than that to me".

The two cats squabble over who is best for Lucille and which is a Pinko or a Neo Fascist but their fight is soon interrupted by, as the narrator states, "... the most hideous creature our animators could draw." A giant metal dragon hangs in the sky and dances somewhat oddly before crashing through the nearby scenery. Buildings totaled in his rampage include "A retirement home for aging Ninja Turtles" (a robot turtle loses his shell and flees to the cry "Cowabunga!"). Trust me, that was edgy stuff to a nine year old.

A meeting of local shop keepers is called (actually the Tokyo Parliament). After a number of toe curling puns Big Cheese proffers that they prevent the attacks by making the robot dragon Vice President "... then we'd never see it again!" In the original dialog he actually remarked that Al Dente may be a "Homo" since he boasted of 'having men' who could solve the problem. No surprise that joke didn't get translated. To Big Cheese's annoyance the decision is made to send in the Pizza Cats.

The dragon attacks again, in a 60 second sequence of mostly reused footage and still images. The Pizza Cats are fired into action (literally) using the animator's old favourite - a stock launch sequence. They arrive just in time to find Mecha Dragon knocking over the same building for a third time while an identical set of onlookers flee once more. Who says TV anime is cheap?

Guido blinds the Dragon's operators with a bright light from his Sunspot Umbrella while Polly Esther burns the machine back to its skeleton with heart shaped Shurikens. Without their fearsome machine the Crows are left to fight alone but are no match for the Samurai Pizza Cats. During the battle a number of attacks deemed unsuitable for a Western audience hit the editing suite floor along with the only onscreen appearance of the narrator.

All that remains of the Dragon are its legs which attack independently (and in bright daylight) giving Speedy the perfect opportunity to unveil his signature finishing attack using his magical Ginsu Sword. At last the Dragon is completely destroyed and Bad Bird makes a quick exit.

News of defeat causes the Big Cheese to explode in anger. Something that happens with frightening regularity (at least once per show).

Episode 3
"Dig, Dig a Hole and Dig More!" or
"Underground, Underwater, Undercooked"

Guido and Speedy are once again racing to meet Lucille, this time at her tea house. The Pizza Cats are fortunately blessed with the ability to run without moving their legs, they speed-hover several inches from the ground thanks to 'Jet Hover Shoes'. It looks cool and it saved Tatsunoko a lot of time and paint!

Lucille is not home but left the boys a note (in Japanese in the original, paw prints for the rest of the world). Somehow Guido reads these two prints as saying "gone shopping". Elsewhere in Little Tokyo Lucille boards a subway train which is soon hijacked by the Ninja Crows and driven to a secret hidden location. News of the disappearance fast reaches the Pizza Cats who head into the tunnels to investigate.

"There could be a monster or UFOs or mutants. Who knows, this is a cartoon, they can do anything they want!" Guido whines.

Not far away Bad Bird's plan is being put in action. The newly recruited commuter slaves are being forced to assist his robots in digging a tunnel. A quick conversation between Big Cheese and Jerry Atric covers the plot details - the bad guys are tunneling to an underground safe full of gold that Big Cheese read of in a library book.

Back at the amateur excavation Bad Bird upsets Lucille (but not through whipping her - honest) and she unleashes a barrage of missiles, one of which reaches the Pizza Cats revealing her location. This scene also contains an example of the original's difficult to translate humour. In the Japanese script an old man asks for water and Lucille brings him a worm; worm and water being very similar words in Japanese. In English, the sequence has him asking for a firm body and being presented with a worm body.

After very little digging the vault is reached. Bad Bird presses a button to open the vault doors. Wait, why would the vault have doors facing into solid dirt? Never mind, the doors slide back to reveal not gold but goldfish. A giant one. It seems there was an all important word missing from that old book!

The Pizza Cats arrive and drive the bad guys away but find themselves blocked in. A distress signal is sent for one of the Support Team to assist and Meowsma O'Toole is soon on hand to dig them out. The Samurai catch up with Bad Bird and a short battle ensues destroying the villain's digging robots and teaching him a lesson for using slave labor.

Once more the narrator is given the final word..

"And so ends another day of crime fighting, crow bashing, robot wrecking and causing large rodents to self-destruct."

Episode 8
"Kind of a Drag" or
"Scary? Ko'on no Kami's Secret"

The Big Cheese is as incensed as ever, this time over an intruder he believes to have been a spy. Guido runs into the spy while out delivering pizza and with his help she avoids capture by the Ninja Crows. The secret samurai insists on walking the young woman home explaining "This doesn't seem to be a safe cartoon for you".

Lover boy is so besotted with Ruby that he doesn't realise they are being followed by Bad Bird. Big Cheese's lackey follows them all the way back to her broken down shack then races back to report its location.

The Big Cheese is reluctant to let on why he wants this girl so badly. In reality it's because she walked in on him as he was secretly dressing up as a woman and Cheese fears his terrible secret will soon be out. What he doesn't realise is that Ruby is far sighted and saw nothing. The writers claim this cross-dressing to actually be his costume for the lead in Sound of Music, but I don't believe them. Never the less Big Cheese orders one of his expensive, and soon to be junked, robots to be sent to Ruby's apartment block, Ginger Towers.

Word of this Mecha danger reaches the Pizza Cats who waste no time, except for the full one and half minute launch sequence, racing to her rescue. Falling short of their target, and the stairs proving too much for them, the team call in Bat Cat. The flying feline arrives just seconds before Ruby and her dad become cat paste and sweeps them to safety. With the innocent bystanders clear the Samurai Pizza Cats spring into action to take out the Ninja Crows before facing off against this episode's robot foe.

Speedy's Magical Ginsu Sword cleaves the wrecking machine in two leaving Bad Bird in a cloud of dust. Big Cheese saw the whole thing from his tower and as if yet another defeat wasn't already too much to bear, he catches sight of Ruby wearing her glasses and comes to realise this whole exercise has been needless from the start. Cue explosion.

Guido gets a disappointment too when Ruby's fiancee Bucketlips turns up, destroying his hopes of getting with the rescued maiden.

For a show that stated "They've got more fur than any Turtle ever had!" every week, it was hard for a young, radical Ninja Turtles fanatic to admit to himself that he enjoyed it. Maybe that is a good example of how great Samurai Pizza Cats was, despite the fact I wanted to hate it, I really couldn't. And what does that line mean, anyway?

It really has been fun rewatching this video. The daft humour is still funny and not at all dated or grating as I had feared it may have become over time. It's not often that a kids cartoon tries to be out and out ridiculous and manages it without becoming irritating, but Pizza Cats is one of the few! How many childrens cartoons can boast the phrase "neo-fascist" in their script?

When kids TV has got as safe as it has now, it's hard to believe that there was a time when a cross dressing, clearly gay, villain was ever allowed on Saturday mornings. Youngsters these days are really missing out! Fantastic fun as a kid and still good now, it's a shame it wasn't so well supported by home video. But now we have the internet so reliving the good old 90's has never been so easy. Quite simply, the best thing Saban has ever done.