I Do Not Like Mondays

Appropriately as I write this, lightning is flashing and thunder is shaking the walls as a storm is hitting here in western Connecticut.

Now nearly four decades ago as a nine-year-old kid watching Saturday morning cartoons (that was a thing, once upon a time), I was a little shaken up at something I watched.

It was an episode of Dungeons & Dragons. No, not the well-known role-playing game, this was a cartoon series by Marvel Productions and Takashi that ran from 1983 to 1985. This particular episode, “The Winds of Darkness,” aired on Saturday morning, Dec. 7, 1985, almost at the very end of the series.

In this show, six kids go on an amusement park ride and find themselves transported to the realm of Dungeons & Dragons, from which they try throughout the series to escape. This was before computer animation, so it was done the old-fashioned way — it was drawn.

The plot for this particular episode has our group of heroes stumble into a wraith-like creature called the Darkling. The creature appears every three decades, as the story goes, and kidnaps three victims, and has been doing so for the last 1,000 years. The Darkling — who is described in the episode simply as, “he is darkness” itself — produces an evil fog that traps his kidnappees and imprisons them.

The Darkling is building toward 100 victims, and once he’s got all those, he’ll release the Winds of Darkness upon the realm and will engulf it forever in his evil grasp. (You can watch the whole episode on YouTube, but I’m linking to and focusing on a pivotal scene below; but read on to find out more before you check it out.)

The episode opens with the group of six’s leader, Hank, being taken by the Darkling. Hank becomes victim No. 98. Even Dungeon Master, the powerful wizard who guides the kids in the series, is powerless against the Darkling.

But one person might be able to help: an elderly, unassuming woman named Martha who’s apparently some sort of sorceress of light, I guess you could say, but is shunned by all the people in the preyed-upon towns because she always seems to be around when the Darkling is. So the people believe the two are connected.

Only problem is, Martha doesn’t want to help; she’s outmatched by and afraid of the Darkling.  

The Darkling attacks again, and this time, Martha’s pet, a little furball of a creature named Gweekin, becomes the Darkling’s 99th victim. Our group of five remaining Earth kids decides to face the Darkling once more, but Martha has turned tail and run away.

Martha ends up changing her mind, and just when another of the kids is about to be taken by the Darkling and become his hundredth victim, she turns on her light magic as best she can, challenging the Darkling to come and take her instead.

Now, again, this whole thing was making quite the impression on nine-year-old me. I remembered Martha’s line here to the Darkling as this:

“There is no darkness so great that the light of a single candle cannot chase it away!”

…I would remember it that way my whole life. Many years later, I purchased a DVD of the entire series just to chase down this particular episode, and I found I was wrong!

Well, only slightly. I was pretty close. The line that Martha actually says is, “There is no darkness so powerful that a single candleflame can’t chase it away!”

The line, at least as I had remembered it, left such a mark on me that I had an all-brass Zippo lighter made up at one point engraved with the words, “Light of a single candle” and my initials, “AGJM.” I still carry it sometimes, and it’s very well-worn now, such that the engraving is difficult to make out. See if you can still read it in these photos.

This certainly wasn’t the only thing I watched back then as a kid that left an impression on me, but it was part of what made me who I am. You stand up to bullies, even when they’re bigger and stronger than you, and you defend what is right, even when you are afraid — even when it’s hard to believe in yourself.

We protect those who need our protection.

That, to me, is what a real hero does, how a real hero acts. And that’s what fictional, cartoon Martha — the somewhat intimidated, self-doubting sorceress of light — was to one American kid watching Saturday morning cartoons in a small town in upstate New York back in 1985.

Way to kick his ass, Martha!

Content © Aaron G. Marsh