Ulysses 31

ULYSSES 31
Made by: BRB International
Shown on: BBC1
Years shown: 1981, plus repeats

This is one of those weird cartoons that most people don’t talk about, because they can’t be sure that they didn’t imagine the whole thing. Ulysses 31 was set in the 31st century, and was loosely based on The Odyssey. Ulysses himself was a Barry Gibb look-alike (but ginger), who was orbiting the planet Troy with his son, Telemachus, and had to return to Earth before his wife, Penelope, married someone else. But Telemachus was kidnapped by worshippers of the Cyclops, and when Ulysses attacked and destroyed them, the gods were angered, and cast Ulysses’ ship into the far reaches of space, deleting the databanks on board, so he became utterly lost. The gods also put his crew in a permanent state of suspended animation; they were in a coma, and hung lifelessly in mid air on the ship. When Ulysses rescued Telemachus, he also saved an alien girl called Yumi, and her brother, Numinar, but Numinar is also placed under the coma curse, and his sister can only visit him and hope that he will recover. So the series was basically the long saga of Ulysses trying to find Hades in order to release his cursed crew members, and there was also a little red robot, No-No (short for ‘no, no, please don’t put the robot in the series’), belonging to Telemachus, who had helped saved his master, but was mainly there as the court jester. Ulysses 31 was a giant among kids’ cartoons, and it certainly had me gripped when I was six; I was intrigued and fearful of the comatosed ship’s crew, and used to have nightmares about it happening to me. It was one of those odd cartoons that could never have originated from the UK, and indeed didn’t, but life after school was richer because of it - and little did we know, we were actually watching an interpretation of classical mythology out of school hours.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 9/10

(Thanks to www.alvarezperea.com for the borrowed pic)