Ultra-Nostalgia: Thunder Sub

In the summer of 1985, my family bought a VCR. It wasn't long before we were recording programs from the handful of channels our antenna picked up out where we lived, and that came in handy as autumn arrived. One of the local stations had long shown cartoons at noon, but now, instead of waiting for rainy lunch hours and obliging teachers providing a rare treat for a classroom of students stuck inside, I just had to hope my parents had remembered to set the timer. In keeping with the times, the cartoons the channel showed were shifting from two decade-old reruns to the phantasmagoria of mid-1980s syndication, and that season they showed a different program every day of the week. Right in the middle on Wednesdays, after Transformers and The Lone Ranger (I looked forward to the former a bit more than the latter) and before The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show and the "He-Man-like" Blackstar (again, I liked the first more than the second), there was a show called Thunder Sub. It started off in a peaceful future rudely interrupted by the "Death Force," arriving on board "Terror Star" from "the dead planet Gotham," and Earth's last hope was the enormous and eponymous submarine. Something about the show caught my attention, and part of that might have been the actual continuing plot, even if that was tricky to follow when we didn't happen to have recorded the episode that week. However, there was a larger snag...
( The snag... )

( ...and how I got past it, two and a half decades later )