Bottom Feeder: How T-Ray from the Tigersharks Failed to Become a Legendary 80s Villain

In the vast catalog of 80s animated villains, you’re bound to find bad guys better than others. Some are cooler than others, some are richer or more powerful, smarter or funnier. The differences could be subjective or quantifiable. One of the former is competency – how much of a threat are they to the heroes, how close they’ve come to victory. In that regard, it’s hard to argue that anyone is better than Venger from Dungeons & Dragons. He’s the biggest threat in his world by far. His only weakness is a multi-headed dragon that breathes five different ways to kill you. The kids he fought never beat him; they escaped him.

On the other end of the scale, however, one character reigns supreme – T-Ray from Tigersharks. As leader of the Mantanas, T-Ray commands a crew of Little Mermaid rejects with names like Carper and Weakfish. While his henchmen might not look impressive, T-Ray does have a decent look; he might be on par with fellow Rnkiin-Bass bad guys like Mumm-Ra or Mon*Star. Unlike those, he doesn’t have an upgraded form as far as I know, so he’s stuck looking like this the whole time. Instead of any powers besides swimming really well, T-Ray gets a whip, a weapon that is more useless underwater than even a random stick.

In the first episode of Tigersharks, T-Ray leads his crew through the stars to the planet Water-O after their own had dried up. Finding it covered with water and ice, T-Ray, for no reason, has his pilot, Wall-Eye, fire on an iceberg. The shot happens to free some things from the ice – Captain Bizzarly and his pet, Dragonstein! Was that T-Ray’s intention? After Wall-Eye says they almost look alive, T-Ray says to “blast them to make sure.” Sounded to me like he meant to kill them, but I’ve really got no idea.

Dragonstein thanks him for their freedom by breathing fire on the Mantana ship, forcing them to retreat. T-Ray does capture Lorca, an underwater salvager, but the show has so little faith in his abilities that it skips the whole capture scene. We see Lorca swimming away from the Mantana ship, and next time we see him, he’s on the ship in chains. Even the writers couldn’t figure out a way to show T-Ray being a competent threat.

Before T-Ray could do anything to his prisoner, Bizarrely blasts his ship as an invitation to talk. T-Ray accepts for some stupid reason and is again attacked by Dragonstein’s fire as soon as they surface. T-Ray considers it a trusting moment and, for no purpose other than “evil”, decides to broker a truce with Bizzarly, flying the white flag. Literally, he presses a crystal that pops up a white flag on top of his ship. He’s got a dedicated surrender button!

Unfortunately, T-Ray doesn’t do anything else in the first episode besides helping Bizzarly free the rest of his crew from the ice (I’m not sure why the captain didn’t do that as soon as he was freed, but this is about how dumb T-Ray is, not Bizzarly). His ship is attacked by the Tigersharks’ Sark, creating a crack in the hull that allows air to enter, and T-Ray takes an order from one of his subordinates to submerge. And that’s the last we see of T-Ray!

What an absolutely pathetic display from the show’s primary villain in his first appearance. I had hoped for some kind of confrontation between T-Ray and Mako, the leader of the Tigersharks, but it’s not apparent if they even see each other in this episode. And I have no real way of seeing if he gets any better throughout the series, as YouTube only has four of the twenty-six episodes produced.

There’s another thing that has limited his villainy, and it doesn’t have anything to do with T-Ray himself. Unlike its predecessors, Thundercats and Silverhawks, Tigersharks didn’t get its own cartoon. Instead, every story was split into several episodes of a show called The Comic Strip and packaged with other cartoons like Karate Kat and Street Frogs. None of the other shows came close to matching the style of Tigersharks, so if you caught it during one of those other shows, you’d have no idea something like the other Rankin-Bass cartoons even existed. The Comic Strip signaled the end of Rankin-Bass’s animated empire, going out with a whimper instead of a bang.

Would Tigersharks have been more successful if it had its own dedicated cartoon instead of being packaged with goofy cartoons like The Mini-Monsters? Who knows, but I’m not sure it would have helped T-Ray’s image. I do hope that T-Ray accomplishes more in the episodes that haven’t surfaced online, but it doesn’t bode well for him when he’s sharing screen-time with a second bad guy starting in the very first episode. At Least Mumm-Ra and MonStar held the top villain spot in both their respective premieres.

Things are looking up for the watered-down bad guy, though. Super7, after getting through the rest of Rankin Bass’s catalog, has finally announced Ultimate Tigersharks after teasing it a year or two ago. Mako, Octavia, and our guy T-Ray are in the first wave, and I have to say he looks pretty impressive. I can’t wait to see him standing next to his big brothers. After I give him a little white flag to wave, of course.