Forgotten Childhood: Bucky O’Hare
I’m almost willing to bet a substantial amount of money on the possibility that I’m the only one on this entire staff, let alone the readership that remembers this show. Even as a child, self-absorbed to the point of self-rectal-disappearance, I was painfully aware of how unpopular it was. I mean, sure it was popular in a big picture way, and like everything else any animation studio spat out between 1990 and 1999, it has found a cult following of ironic millennial devotees, but even they’re surprisingly few in number. You won’t see Urban Outfitters flogging Dead-Eye Duck cowl-necks anytime soon.
Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars (or Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Menace in Canada, because Canada), was a French/American animated TV series based on a kind-of-but-not-really popular comic book by Larry Hama and Michael Golden. The plot was basically this; the world is so vastly different to the one we live in that it’s populated almost exclusively by anthropomorphic animal creatures and their subservient robots but there’s still war because war is the natural state of conscious life and because mammals and toads are just destined to never get along. Ask 
anyone who’s tried to have a pet Frog and a pet Rabbit and they’ll vouch for this. Bucky O’Hare did not talk down to its audience.
To be honest I don’t remember much about the show. I know that I loved it, but I also know it was more about the toys than anything else. I wanted them all and at one stage in my golden years I think I nearly had them all. Toy stores in Ireland weren’t exactly on top of their game when I was a kid, the whole notion that kids could ever want more than a pat on the back and 20p for cola-bottles was still hanging in the air like a some kind of pre-americanization caustic celtic mist. I still remember the day I got Dead-Eye Duck, the hot-tempered, four-armed weapons specialist, and the day my Dad made my fucking day by giving me Blinky, the cyloptic servant robot, completely out of the blue for no reason other than how awesome both he and I clearly were. There was also a dog who wore like a french military uniform, his action figure stuck around longer than the rest. His name clearly didn’t.
Possibly the best thing about the show, and this is where Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars fits right in next to its 90s TV brethren, was its opening theme song. Jesus what happened to kids TV themes? Why aren’t we just calling the funkmaster-maestro’s who wrote this and the X-Men and Botsmaster themes and just getting them to write everything? That’s something we should be doing. I’m willing to invest in that. This theme song has got everything you could ever want and more. Let’s break it down, shall we? Firsty, it’s got some slick ’80s synths. 
Secondly, it’s got not one, not two, not even three but four key changes. Four. Thirdly, don’t dare forget who this show is about, asshole, and just in case you do, we’ll repeat his name like 400 times in 1 minute 11 seconds. Honestly, they should teach this in schools. All schools.
Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars might not be remembered fondly by many, and it certainly isn’t remembered very much by me, but I blame it wholly and completely for the fact that I can’t walk by a resin figurine in a shop window without twitching violently and calculating all the ways I can’t afford it before buying it anyway. I remember the need to have all those characters. The gaping plot holes in my figure adventures, always reminding me what I didn’t have. Sure nobody really wanted Willy, but I could be Willy. He was just a normal kid. We didn’t need him. But that desire, that itch, that drive; it was real. It was more real than anything school ever gave me that’s for sure. And I’ve spent the rest of my life chasing that feeling. Thank you, Bucky O’Hare. Thank you for making me the man I am today.
Come to think of it I never thought to check on Ebay…
