Battle of the Planets: Museum of Mystery

Back when I was a wee lass I loved Battle of the Planets. It's right at the beginning of my cartoon repertoire, before Dungeons and Dragons, before Ulysees 31, before Dogtanian and the Three Muskahounds, before even Touche Turtle (surely due for a live action remake?) Mainly I liked it for the following reasons:

- It had a robot dog.
- Princess had brown hair. And so did I.

Do not underestimate the significance of Princess having brown hair. In general, in cartoons and in the TV of that era (think Charlie's Angels, think Scooby Doo), being female and having brown hair meant that you were the less glamorous but more intelligent of the female characters, and who wanted to be intelligent? Not me. Princess, though, appeared to be the only female character in Battle of the Planets, though I experienced some confusion over Zoltar (voice of a man, wore lip gloss and a long cape), which meant that she had both glamour and brains - well, brains enough to come a close third in brain power after Mark and Jason and before the fat one and the mentally retarded one. I love cartoons.

Anyway, it's been a long time since I've watched Battle of the Planets, but there was one episode that always stuck in my mind. In it, Princess for some reason had been thrown out of G Force, and Zoltar was taking the opportunity to capture her by using - and I remembered this very clearly - some kind of competition which involved having to step through a Princess-shaped door. Thre was something deeply sinister and yet oddly seductive about the Princess-shaped door. I was terrified as to what was going to happen to her on the far side of this door; and yet I too wanted a Marie-shaped door, or better yet, I wanted to fit through the Princess-shaped door myself. But what would happen next? What? Well, I had no idea, because my mother made me go to my piano lesson. Perfidious mother! And it is no exaggeration to say that I have never stopped wondering what happened on the far side of that door. I have asked many people, Battle of the Planets watchers all, but none of them could remember that episode. I began to wonder if I had dreamt it or made it up.

[As an aside, I do wonder if the impact of the Princess-shaped door episode represented some kind of Freudian anxiety on my part, regarding both fear of adolescence and latent interest in sex, as I knew that one day I too would be Princess-shaped - though unlikely to ever ride a big yellow motorcycle in white high-heeled thigh boots - and I both desired and feared what I would experience on the far side of that transition. But I think that is for an entirely different kind of blog.]

Cut to this weekend, spent in the warm Windsor (not Barbara Windsor) bosom of the family of He Who Has A Big Mouth. I was shown to my delightful attic room and there I saw a complete DVD box set of Battle of the Planets. At last! Finally! Ultimately! Etc!

After quite some time of going through the episode titles and trying to guess which might be the Princess Door one (unlikely to be 'Attack of the Space Terrapin', disappointingly not 'G-Force Defector' etc) we found an online episode guide and there it was! 'Museum of Mystery'! Reader, I watched it.

OK, so first thing's first, I am slightly surprised that I have spent the last 25 years obsessing over the Princess-shaped door and yet I had completely forgotten the leading role played in the episode of a giant woolly mammoth. Nevertheless, it was with delighted recognition that I recalled how Princess, in battling the mammoth, lost her magic shoe, which was then recovered by Zoltar and discovered to have the ability to create a clone of Princess when blasted with radiation. Obviously. So. Princess loses her shoe. As a result, she is expelled from G-force. Zoltar uses the cloned Princess to create a Princess-shaped door. Princess and some other, slightly less attractive, Princess-shaped women go through the Princess-shaped door. At this point I am anticipating a whole panoply of further tests which will narrow the group of Princess-shaped women down to the one true Princess (iris recognition, fingerprinting, having to sleep on a bed with a pea underneath, etc.) But no. They gas them and put them in a cage, and then G-force come to rescue them, and they find the shoe, and then there is a really long battle with the woolly mammoth, which they win. The end.

So, a slight anti-climax. I cannot deny it. And yet a huge weight off my psyche, which has been blaming my mother and the piano all these years for ruining my life (cartoon sub-section of). Sorry mother. Sorry piano.

So while I am healing the wounds to my young telly-watching soul: does anyone have a DVD of The Watcher in the Woods? All I can recall is: Bette Davis. Woods. Eyes. But I am convinced it is the most terrifying film ever made. Or at least, my six-year-old self is. Can anybody help?