Skysurfer Strike Force – 30th Anniversary Retrospective

“When a mysterious explosion destroys an artificial intelligence lab, Adam Hollister is framed – his son, Jack Hollister sets out to prove his father’s innocence that someone else had caused the explosion and had stolen an experimental computer brain; merging it with his own brain, he transforms into the master criminal known as Cybron. To fight Cybron and his evil Bioborgs, Jack Hollister becomes Skysurfer One, leader of the Skysurfer Strike Force!”

So starts the opening narration to the 1995 cartoon Skysurfer Strike Force. You may be wondering, what is such a boyish cartoon doing here on a site dedicated to Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders? If you look back at the 1995 Amazin’ Adventures programming block that aired both shows, you can see that for Jewel Riders’ “girl” cartoon it was double-billed with the “boy” action show Skysurfer Strike Force. One of the other main links between the two shows is that they shared children’s meal toys during the same period at Long John Silver’s restaurant. Girls could get Gwenevere, Sunstar, Archie, and Spike, and boys could get Skysurfer One, Crazy Stunts, a hoverboard, and Cybron.

Skysurfer Strike Force is an…interesting show. It follows the Skysurfers, a sort of paramilitary group of vigilantes that seem to be fully focused on hunting Cybron and foiling his plots. No explanation is given to who funds their amazing technology, and none of them seem to have jobs outside of being Skysurfers. Each member of the team has a car that, when activated by the “digitrans” watch-like device (think a Power Rangers communicator crossed with their morphers), transforms the car into a hoverboard. I find the transformations interesting here, as the show was animated in Japan and the transformations bear all the hallmarks of a magical girl or super sentai transformation. Suits and weapons seem to appear from nothing, and with no explanation.

Skysurfer One is Jack Hollister. Birthdate July 9th, 1974. He’s a sort of generic all-American 80s/90s-looking guy with a blonde mullet and square jaw. When he transforms, he has a fire/laser sword weapon.

Crazy Stunts is Micky Flannigan. Birthdate June 18th, 1976. His style is a weird mashup of sailor and cowboy, and he sports the trademark ‘90s male ponytail. (Seriously he is a dead ringer for Jason in Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic). He wields two pistols that shoot grappling cables that he can send electric currents through to shock his foes.

Sliced Ice is Kimberly Sakai. Birthdate December 24, 1975. Kim is both the token female of the team and the “science smart” Asian girl. She has a punk rock style, and her headband incorporates the rising sun motif of Japan. Her weapon is an amazing bifurcated sword that can shoot ice and snow.

Soar Loser is Brad Wright. Birthdate June 26, 1975. Possibly the most ridiculously named of the team, Brad has a grunge style, and strangely when he transforms his hair turns from its normal brown color to an olive green. His weapons are boomerangs, most notably the huge one he has strapped to his back.

Air Enforcer is Nathan James. Birthdate March 31, 1974. Nate is the tank of the team. He’s ex-military, and probably the second smartest in science after Kim. He is outfitted with every manner of rocket launcher and artillery, and somehow never seems to run out of ammunition.

The villains of the show consist of “criminal mastermind” Cybron, and his apparently-human daughter Cerina. They lead the Bio Borgs, humans who have been given cybernetic enhancements by Cybron in exchange for their service. They include Lazerette (a woman who can shoot lasers from her eyes and mouth), Replicon (a shapeshifter who often turns his arms or head into weapons), Grenader (he blows himself up then reconstitutes to his original form), Noxious (a Spawn-looking character who uses gases and poisons), Dr. Five Eyes (has eyes on front, back and sides of head, as well as chest), Chronozoid (time manipulation), and Zachariah Easel (can bring any art he creates to life).

Voice acting was done at the Ocean Group studios in Vancouver, CA. Many of the voices will be familiar to listeners, especially fans of ‘90s anime and cartoons such as Beast Wars, ReBoot, Exosquad, X-men Evolution, He-Man 200X, Gundam, and Ranma ½. Their work has been some of my favorite voiceover and dubbing work for many years, and they do a lot of the heavy lifting to get good performances out of these stock characters.

I realize I’m talking about a ‘90s cartoon writing here, but the characters suffer from being underdeveloped. Remember, this is the same era that gave us both Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series, so I know some people out there were doing good character writing work. The characters on this show all have their ‘thing’; Sliced Ice is something of a scientist in addition to the token girl, or Crazy Stunts is kind of a womanizer. But I can’t help but think there was a lot of room to develop these characters beyond the ciphers they remain for the run of the show.

Can they just kiss already.

The show actually has at its core a central story with high emotional stakes about Jack trying to clear his father’s name and unmask Cybron. While developments in this case are teased out over the 26-episode run, the mystery sadly remains unresolved by the show’s end. There’s even an ongoing Batman/Catwoman style romance between Skysurfer One and Cybron’s daughter Cerina that could have developed into something really interesting had any of the show’s writers been interested in the characters instead of explosions every minute.

The plots in this show are wild. Bizarrely, most of them seem to start with one story, then totally pivot to a different plot halfway through. It’s like each episode is almost frankensteined together out of different plots that got mashed together. Take for instance this plot summary for the episode “Cyber Magic:”
“When a two-bit magician is transformed by Cybron into a borg he finds he can now perform real magic. Promising him even greater powers, Cybron tricks the magic-borg into stealing an ancient mask that has unlimited mystical powers. The Strike Force battles the magician to recover the mask, but Cybron gets it first intending to use its incredible magic to personally destroy Skysurfer in a final showdown.”

It’s not enough to have a story focused on the transformation of this magician into a bio-borg and pitting him against the Sky Surfers. It has to turn the dial to 11 and end with a mask that has unlimited mystical powers. (To be fair, this could be because Jim Carrey’s “The Mask” debuted a year earlier in 1994.)

Or the episode “Alien Attack:”
“In this cosmic thriller, Cybron comes into contact with two alien criminals sentenced to life in a floating prison spaceship. Cybron agrees to set the aliens free if they help him capture an even larger prison ship in another galaxy. Cybron plans to intensify his evil powers by using criminal minds from all parts of the universe to take over the world. The Skysurfers race against time to prevent the alien ship from landing and unleashing the greatest evil ever known to man.”

It’s apparently not enough to just have a story about a literal floating prison spaceship (with, y’know, actual aliens). It has to lead to using criminal minds from across the universe! The universe! The constant upping of the danger in the third act of these episodes is wild.

While the show always has high stakes (literally everything from overthrowing governments with USSR nuclear missiles, trying edge in on drug lords’ operations, civilizations of underground snake people; and occasionally some lower stakes like extorting sports team owners), the show could definitely have used a tighter focus on plot throughlines and investing each of the stories with higher emotional stakes by tying things to the characters. As someone who occasionally dabbles in fan fiction, there is a part of me that can see the good bones this story has; especially the connection between Jack and Cybron, the mystery of Adam Hollister’s death, and the not-quite romance between Jack and Cerina. That’s some grade A soap opera setup and I truly wish it had been exploited more.

At its best, the show’s story craziness feels like a combination of something like the X-Men animated series, with its ability to flip from space epics with the Phoenix Saga to the prehistoric Savage Lands, and the Super Sentai gadgets and transforming uniforms of something like Power Rangers. But it never quite manages to synthesize these into a unified whole, leaving something that feels a bit less than the sum of its parts.

We have been able to get a draft script for the episode “Water Hazard,” which became the final episode “The Water Beast” if you are interested in comparing the draft to the final show!

Skysurfer Strike Force Script – Water Hazard

Ruby-Spears / Bohbot Entertainment / Ashi Productions

The series was produced by Ruby-Spears Productions (a spin-off studio from Hanna-Barbera, made by “Scooby Doo, Where are You?” creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears. Ruby-Spears produced other notable titles such as Rose Petal Place, Sectaurs, Centurions, Dragon’s Lair, and Thundarr the Barbarian. Of note, this was Ruby-Spears final animated production before they were absorbed by Turner, and then Warner Bros.
https://www.stusshow.com/archives.php?y=2012

Bohbot Entertainment, now under the moniker 41 Entertainment, still owns the rights to the show.

Allen Bohbot of Bohbot Productions (also behind Jewel Riders) was an executive producer and distributor. Animation was handled by the Japanese studio Ashi Productions, the studio behind GoShogun, Magical Princess Minky Momo, and the Japan-only Transformers Beast Wars anime, “Beast Wars II: Super Life-Form Transformers.”

Often in the 1990s, animation was outsourced to Japanese animation studios (see things like Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series). It was not only cheaper for the US studios to produce animation this way, but they could take advantage of Japan’s highly-developed animation industry that was cranking out gorgeous and technically-detailed animation during this era. There’s no mistaking the gorgeous Japanese-animated cybernetics, hoverboards, and technology-related items in Skysurfer Strike Force.

We were recently able to acquire this amazing packet of production materials from the episode “The Crawling Horror.” It’s a real treat to see the gorgeous artwork and sense of design that went into the series on the Japanese production side. Click the link below to see the full PDF!

Skysurfer Strike Force Development Materials

Media & Memorabilia

Much like Jewel Riders, there were several VHS tapes released during the initial run of Skysurfer Strike Force, though not the whole run of the show. Much later in the early-mid 2000s, Digiview Entertainment released most (but again, not all) of Skysurfer on their $1 bargain DVDs sold through Walmart. This was the last physical media release of the show; now, you can find it streaming in full on various platforms such as Tubi, Pluto TV, Amazon Prime Video, and of course on YouTube.

Check out the full series, available in this playlist from the JRA’s Youtube channel!

The following gallery is courtesy of toy designer Garrett Sander’s Flickr account:

Like I mentioned early on in this retrospective, one of the things that has always linked Jewel Riders and Skysurfer Strike Force together in our minds here at the JRA was the shared release of Kid’s Meal toys for Long John Silver’s. The Skysurfer toys included Skysurfer One, Crazy Stunts, a skyboard, and Cybron (the one and only villain figure produced among all merchandise).

It’s hard to look at Cybron’s Bio-Borgs and not see the toyetic hope they were designed with. Each of them practically screams “action feature” whether it’s Grenader’s blow-apart gimmick, or Replicon’s ability to transform into weapons. I could see them producing a light-up Lazerette, or an Easel with some kind of color-change feature. Noxious obviously would have had a scent, etc. The fact that none of them got figures is surprising, especially considering they are the crazy gross-out characters that boys’ toys action figure lines of the era are practically known for.

While the merchandise seems spare for Skysurfer Strike Force, I think it’s important to remember that there were many other shows of the era that got no merchandise whatsoever, so the show had to have some level of popularity behind it.

Thirty Years of Sky Surfing

It’s hard to not look at Skysurfer Strike Force through the eyes of 2025 and think that it could have been so much more. The core of a strong story is there, and I think if the series had focused more on that instead of going off onto wild tangents we could have seen something as good as the X-Men animated series of the ‘90s. Like all authors, especially those who have written fan fiction for any property, we see the cracks in the stories we enjoy as possibilities. Avenues that could be explored, if only someone had the time or inclination to see more within the story than its shallow exterior. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to explore the world of Skysurfer Strike Force, and find out how the mystery of Adam Hollister, his son Jack, and Cybron ends.

But what we have is still enjoyable, especially if you can enjoy splashy explosions and XTREME sky surfing that is the absolute most distilled ‘90s thing to possibly exist. If nothing else, stay and enjoy some of the lovely Japanese animation that brought this story to life. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go hop on my Sky Board and see what adventures await in Computopia.