This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. You can find all my work at MJMunoz.com.
Welcome to Red Panda Report. I am talking about and analyzing Red Panda Adventures Number Nine,
which was originally aired on April 29, 2006, written and directed by Greg Taylor.
And here is the copy. An ancient killer stalks the city through shadows and fog. Each night brings
new terrors, new victims. With each new dawn, there are more questions, more outrage, and the
lingering dread of the darkness to come. Who dares to hunt the hunter? To bring the light of justice
to a metropolis under siege? The city cries out for its champions, but can even the terrific
twosome of Toronto, the red panda and the flying squirrel, withstand the fury of the shadow hunter?
So I thought it was a little strange that, and by the way, of course, I will go into full spoilers
for this. So if you're not prepared for that, then go ahead and stop over at DakotaRingTheatre.com
to listen to this episode. It's very easy to find. It's from season one of Red Panda Adventures,
which like I said, is very easy to find. So I didn't like that the professor's notes, which
were ostensibly being read silently or to themselves by Kit and Red Panda, were spoken in his voice with
background music. So I liked the professor reading them because I think the voice actor did a good
job and he's in the beginning of the episode, but then he's indisposed and unable to talk. So they go
through his notes and they have, you know, Taylor had it set up so that the guy who did the voice for
the professor went ahead and read the notes in his voice and with his cadence and all that stuff,
which I think was really good. And I thought it sounded nice, but there was a kind of haunting
or like creepy, spooky background music aspect to it. And it just didn't really sit right with me.
I didn't think it was necessary. I thought it was good enough on its own, the performance. It didn't
need that kind of, I don't know, atmosphere to it or whatever you want to call it.
It was surprising to me. I think by the end of the episode, there's a total of nine victims of
the actual attacking beast that is called the Shadow Hunter, not within the episode, but outside
of the episode. And that's shocking. It isn't that Red Panda always saves everybody, but they
usually don't go into it as much as they could. And where the circumstances are a little different,
where the supervillain, he would be able to pull out a more dramatic, desperate victory that ends
up saving hundreds of people in an auditorium, for example, and then proceeding to defeat the
bad guy. And in here, we have this tragic thing where there's this man turned into a monster or
an animal, really, and you don't get that grand superhero versus supervillain sort of thing going
on. And you get all these people who are left dead in the wake of it. And it's kind of an
interesting take and it's an interesting set of losses to give to Red Panda and Flying Squirrel.
And it's different from your run of the mill episode or even your run of the mill superhero
story, which is good. So I'll stop beating around the bush. I called this episode, Essence of Smilodon,
because it turns out that there is a saber-toothed tiger that has been brought back from extinction
in the form of a man. Think of it as Dr. Connors injecting himself with lizard DNA to grow back
his arm, and instead it's the mad doctor, the mad doctor, the mad doctor, the mad doctor,
it's the mad doctor Steven's... Steven's? Steven. I don't know. Dr. Steven injects somebody else
with Smilodon or saber-toothed tiger DNA and forces a transformation on that guy.
As the shadow hunter, as the saber-toothed tiger terrorizing Toronto,
the intelligence is retained of the lab assistant, Derry, who's the one infected with this thing and
who becomes this creature at night. And he is smart enough to use his animal
capabilities as directed by a human. So he has this full human intellect, despite the fact that he
wants to hunt, attack, and murder, and I guess eat women who have been killed by the
human. Attractive women. And it's his animal urges. The more attractive they are physically
to the man Derry, the more they appeal to the saber-toothed with manimal intelligence
to attack and kill for whatever reason. And that's kind of interesting. It was really neat the way
that this fusion of the power of an animal with the intellect of a person was able to
really outdo and corner Kit and put her in a bad position, which it totally makes sense if you
had all the ability of an animal, but the mind of a person, I would imagine that would be quite deadly.
Okay. Let's see. Oh, there was something really cool in the episode, which is you could tell if
you were with Flying Squirrel or Red Panda when they were using the radio rings based on the sound
design. It was layered in such a way, there was a distortion in such a way that you could hear
Flying Squirrel's voice very clearly, and then you would hear the radio effect on Red Panda's
voice in that scene when you switched over and you were with Red Panda, you could hear Kit's voice
distorted over the radio ring, and that was really clever and it added a lot to the episode.
Which later on at the end near the climax, they are outside in the middle of the night in a park
and it's dark, and there are a bunch of crickets going off chirping and making their noises in the
night, and that also added to the ambiance. It made it feel like they were outside and I thought
that was a really good audio design aspect of it as well. I did think it was strange.
Well, I hadn't planned on talking about the nature of this transformation thing, but basically,
there was this abandoned healing technology serum drug type thing that was meant to help humans
regenerate, but it was stopped by light. So if you've ever seen Dark Man, just think about that.
It was stopped by light and Dr. Aster Steven combined that with
saber-toothed tiger DNA and tried it on, I think animals probably, but eventually he decided he
had to try it on dairy because the regenerative
formula was tailored to human physiology and that's what it would work with. So he got the
bright idea that if he injected a human with the stuff, it would turn them into a saber-toothed
tiger. And I don't know if the transformation was supposed to be permanent at some point or not,
like if over the course of a year or a month or whatever, he would become the saber-toothed
tiger 100% of the time and have this intellect of a man. But it was a very interesting idea.
But the body of an animal, I don't know if that's how it was intended to work or what, but it was
really interesting that because of the way that it interacted negatively with the light, that meant
that he can only transform when darkness came, when darkness fell, when it was nighttime.
And therefore, we learned that during the days, Derry was trying to figure out how to reverse
his transformation so he could stop turning into the hunter, the killer at night, and he was
unsuccessful. But then at the end, the red panda basically lures him into a trap using
flying squirrel as bait and has all these bright lights turned on and the creature
stops being a saber-toothed tiger and it turns back into dairy. But somehow, that ends up killing
him and I don't quite understand how the photons reacting at night when he was fully transformed
ended up causing his death versus during the day. It just causes his transformation to cease and for
him to revert back to a normal human. That doesn't really make sense. I don't think there was an
attempt to explain that. We got new gadgets this episode. I talked about the radio rings already,
but this is apparently the debut of them, episode nine. So that's a pretty cool idea. They might
have been in a book before this, but this feels the way it's talked about here. It definitely feels
like it's the first time that he introduces them to Kit. So I'm pretty sure this is the actual
debut of the radio rings. I think that's really cool. So you'll learn more later as time goes on.
And maybe it's in the books specifically, but you press a jewel or a ring because there's
like contensive circles on the radio ring, kind of like the logo of Red Panda or Dakota Ring Theater.
So you push one of those and it activates a beacon or it activates the ability to talk or
whatever, which is pretty cool. Let's see. Oh, so about the villains. So technically, Derry
was a villain because he turned into the Saber Two Tiger and then was killing women
all over the city. But really, Dr. Astor Steven is the villain because he forced this transformation
upon somebody and I guess he got eaten for his trouble. So they ended up finding the remains
of his body in a trunk in the lab somewhere, which is, he got his comeuppance, I guess. So
yeah, that's interesting. So I really liked this episode. I don't have more to say about it. So
I'm going to go ahead and stop there. And yes, you hear that meowing? I think I've got my own
Saber Two Tiger to take care of. So I'm going to go ahead and get out of here. I thank you for your
time and attention. I hope that you are well. And until next time, this is MJ signing out.