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Man and Machine, Power Xtreme!
This was quite an easy show to miss as it only appeared (as far as I know) on the Saturday morning show Get Fresh with the snotty green skinned alien Gilbert and Gaz Top. I caught it from time to time and I know others have - plus I had a couple of the toys. So that was a definite tick in the box for the marketing boys..!
So, the Centurions. What was it all about? Well, basically it was classic episodic fare with the bad guys coming up with a master plan which the good guys had to thwart. The hook? Well, the good guys have exoframes onto which a variety of land/sea/air themed weapons systems can be attached. These weapons systems are beamed down to the lads from their orbiting base, Skyvault (opposite).
As I mentioned, the suits are land, sea and air based. So on land you have Jake Rockwell, sea is Max Ray and air is Ace McCloud. The weapons systems attach to connectors on the suits which tend to get carried around in briefcases, similarly to Iron Man's armour.
Jake Rockwell,
rugged land operations specialist!
Max Ray,
brilliant sea operations commander!
Ace McCloud,
daring air operations expert!
Of course, the weapons systems were a big draw for me as a child because they had such cool names! So for example, you could have "Wild Weasel", "Depth Charger" and "Orbital Interceptor". Although they all had a main function, they could also be mixed and matched to achieve a specialised function. The full beam down animation was very good - the version in the intro below is a little diluted, so here's a better example.
Fireforce
Wild Weasel
Detonator
Hornet
Cruiser
Tidal Blast
Depth Charger
Skynight
Skybolt
Orbital Interceptor
So, why the need for all this firepower? Well, it's all down to an antisocial bloke called Doc Terror and his assistant Hacker. Both are cyborgs. With the help of various flavours of robotic drones and newly created cyborgs, Doc Terror seeks to exact vengeance on the world. Unfortunately the Centurions have a nasty habit of beaming into the combat zone, shouting Power Extreme very loudly and promptly making mincemeat out of his troops and mothership.
Doc Terror
Hacker
A Dinoborg (!)
Strafer
Traumatizer
Doom Drone
So, those are the combatants. But, lest I forget, you also had Crystal Kane up on Skyvault with her Orangutan Lucy along with Jake Rockwell's dog Shadow which had its own exoframe and mini weapons system (don't try that on the household pet kids!). Remarkably, there isn't really a RAC on this show as the pets are actually quite bright.
Crystal Kane
Lucy
Shadow
Apparently the show did better in the States than in the UK and two more team members were added, Rex Charger and John Thunder, who I don't remember seeing in the UK version. What I hadn't remembered until watching a video bought from eBay was that each show did a little educational segment at the end based loosely on the events of the episode; rather like He-Man or Seaquest DSV in the early days. So it was 20 minutes of out and out action followed by 30 seconds of education. Seems fair to me! Couple of tapes appear from time to time on:
Finally, here's a video of the intro for you plus a link to more sites. For, ah, "technical reasons" (!) in order to watch the clip you'll need to right click on the link, select "save target as" and rename the file so that it ends in .wmv rather than .sfxb. The video format is Windows Media Video which modern versions of Windows Mediaplayer will play.
Downloads:
Centurions intro video, WMV format - remember to rename! (3 MB)
Links:
Skyvault
Feel free to discuss the show on the forum.
Last updated 14 December 2013
