About This Figure
Gordy International item No. 616, Yonkers, New York, made in Hong Kong, copyright 1986. Released in France by Masport as the CosmoCats Arme de Pantero under the same item number. Card front reads AUTHENTIC NUMCHUCK and CLIP ON THUNDERCATS BADGE.
Every other ThunderCat carries something a toy company could hang on a peg. A sword, a whip or a set of claws goes on a card unchallenged. Panthro swings a nunchaku, a weapon children’s television standards departments were restricting on screen at the time the licence was being cut up.
Gordy International of Yonkers, New York made it anyway. Item No. 616, copyright 1986, produced in Hong Kong: two plastic sticks, one blue and one red, capped at each end and joined by a length of real chain. A round Panthro badge and an embossed silver ThunderCats plate ride in the blister beside them. The card promises an “AUTHENTIC NUMCHUCK”, spelled that way, in blue type sitting directly under a caution line about small parts. The example scanned here still carries the shop’s own row-hook sticker at a dollar twenty-nine!
This is a rack toy, the kind of thing bought at the till, and it sat on American pegboard in the same years that British censors were taking the same weapon off British screens. The BBC ran the early episodes close to uncut, but it changed its mind once the Turtles arrived, and from 1990 Panthro’s fight scenes were trimmed on the way to broadcast. “The Transfer” was never shown in Britain at all. The likeliest reason is how much of it Panthro spends with the sticks in his hands, and our ThunderCats in the UK feature has the dates and the cuts. A British kid could not buy the toy, and from 1990 could not watch Panthro use them either.
Masport handled the Gordy line in France and put out the same set under the same item number as the CosmoCats Arme de Pantero, with the bullet points translated and the sticks moulded in the same blue and red. Gordy’s wider ThunderCats range was rack-toy stock: sunglasses, a bubble gun, a play knife, four colours of puffy stickers and a target set, with Charan Toy licensed to handle Canada.
Bandai came back to the idea in 2011 with a moulded roleplay set, and Factory Entertainment has since made a scaled prop replica, built to be displayed rather than swung. Both are safer objects than this one. Gordy did it in 1986, for a dollar twenty-nine, with a chain that rattled.
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