The groups of Limbo

The SilverHawks

Partly metal, partly real, and assembled in a hurry.

The SilverHawks are older than the squadron this series follows. Something under that name has been fighting the Mob and the outlaws of Limbo for at least three hundred years, which is why Stargazer and Condor are SilverHawks too and why neither of them has wings.

The show gives a date for the rest. On the fortieth day of 2839, during a Moon*Star burst, Mon*Star took the light and used it to break off Penal Planet 10, then went back the same day and freed his crew. Stargazer called Earth. Federal Interplanetary Force 1 fitted five chosen people with cybernetic bodies and sent them out.

The enhancements are not uniform and the differences matter. The 2839 bodies carry shoulder, arm and heel jets, talons, wings and smoke jets, rated to roughly half a million degrees. Bluegrass is the exception on the combat side, because he is the pilot and nobody thought he would need it. The Copper Kidd has a computer in his metal arm and slots at the hips for the laser discs. Steelheart and Steelwill were given mechanical hearts because there was something wrong with their real ones. Hotwing carries an extra laser in his forehead. Flashback runs to eight or ten million degrees and can move through time. Moon Stryker is the newest fitting and the only one with a self-propelled turbine.

• Commander Stargazer Commander 65 eps
• Quicksilver Field leader 59 eps
• Bluegrass Pilot 53 eps
• Steelheart Engineer 56 eps
• Steelwill Strength 56 eps
• The Copper Kidd Navigator 55 eps
• Hotwing Joined at episode 21 16 eps
• Flashback From the future 11 eps
• Moon Stryker Joined at episode 57 9 eps
• Condor Recalled from retirement 8 eps

A curiosity from the other canon: Stargazer was to become Fastback in comic book issue 6, and left before the fitting.

Mon*Star's Mob

A crime syndicate run on fear, unpaid invoices and one very large light bulb.

The Mob is the show. Mon*Star is in sixty-three of the sixty-five episodes and his crew are in most of the rest, and the whole machinery of the series runs on him being pointed at the Moon*Star once a week and coming out bigger.

It is a less stable organisation than it looks. Melodia mutinies twice, once with Yes-Man and once with Poker-Face. Hardware turns on Mon*Star twice over money. Mon*Star takes every one of them back with no consequence at all, which is either weak management or the only way a syndicate survives sixty-five episodes of a toy-driven cartoon.

• Mon*Star The boss 63 eps
• Yes-Man Works the transformation chamber 58 eps
• Hardware Engineer and armourer 46 eps
• Melodia Gunner 29 eps
• Windhammer Weather 22 eps
• Mo-Lec-U-Lar Disguise and infiltration 21 eps
• Mumbo Jumbo Enforcer and driver 22 eps
• Buzz-Saw Enforcer 25 eps
• Poker-Face Runs the Starship Casino 15 eps
• Timestopper Recruited after the breakout 8 eps
• Sky-Runner Mon*Star’s mount 34 eps

The Fighting Hawks

Sixteen birds, ten on one side and six on the other, and an arms race in miniature.

It starts with one bird and an inheritance. Stargazer has had Tally-Hawk for some time, and when the squadron reach Hawk Haven he hands the control wristband to Quicksilver. The Steel twins see what it can do and decide to build more.

Hardware answers with Sky-Shadow, built to be an inverted Tally-Hawk: red lasers against blue, wing claws against talons, part metal and part living thing. Whether he built the original or found it is never established. From there both sides keep adding, and the birds become the clearest expression of what this series actually is, which is a toy line with a story attached.

Condor is the only SilverHawk who never gets one. Kenner packed his flight pack as a Weapon Bird called Jet Stream anyway, and it is not a bird in a single frame of the show.

• Tally-Hawk Quicksilver 40 eps
• Sly-Bird Stargazer 7 eps
• Mayday The Copper Kidd 8 eps
• Sideman Bluegrass 6 eps
• Stronghold Steelheart 4 eps
• Rayzor Steelwill 3 eps
• Gyro Hotwing 3 eps
• Backlash Flashback 3 eps
• Tailspin Moon Stryker 1 eps
• Sky-Shadow Mon*Star 15 eps
• Mass-Produced Sky-Shadows Fabricated on Automata
• Prowler Hardware 5 eps
• Volt-ure Mo-Lec-U-Lar 4 eps
• Shredator Buzz-Saw 3 eps
• Airshock Mumbo Jumbo 1 eps

Two scaled-up versions exist as well, the Super Tally-Hawk, which uses Tally-Hawk as its brain and carries two SilverHawks, and the Super Sky-Shadow, built like a heavy vehicle.

The Bandits Mob

Three low-level outlaws who drink on Fence and lose money at the casino.

Not part of Mon*Star’s organisation and not a threat to anybody. Space Bandit, Spike and Cyclops turn up in the background of the Sini*Star Diner and the Starship Casino across the run, driving a red limo and getting into trouble that is somebody else’s plot.

They are useful precisely because they are nobody. A galaxy with one prison and one crime boss needs a few people committing ordinary crimes, and these three are it. Their best moment is arriving to rough up Poker-Face at a bus stop for cheating them, only for the Space Hack to take all four of them in at once.

• The Space Bandits All three under one entry 15 eps

Wikipedia calls them the Three Outlaws and names Space Bandit, Rhino and Cyclops. The ThunderCats wiki calls them the Bandits Mob and names Space Bandit, Spike and Cyclops. None of the three has an article anywhere, so we carry them as one entry and print the disagreement.