The nineties were filled with superheroes created by lab accidents or green ooze, and Toxie was one of the better ones. You figure turning one of the most gruesome cult movies of all time in to a PG rated cartoon would be disastrous, but “Toxic Crusaders” actually works well. It’s a fun and funny take on the original source material that embraces all the madness and absurdity of the Troma movie series, and I find it to be a great little companion piece to the original film.
“Toxic Crusaders” is essentially like the original movie. We meet young Melvin who is tricked by a gang of punks in to meeting a girl in a tutu. After being pranked he falls in to a vat of toxic waste and becomes a super powered mutant with superhuman size and strength. Using his powers and his ability to sense danger, he transforms in to the Toxic Crusader and uses a local junkyard as his home base. He’s set to fight the evil Dr. Killemoff, who is a masked being intent on plunging the Earth in to pollution Armageddon since he is from an alien race very similar to roaches.
Toxie finds a purpose in defending his city against Killemoff’s henchmen, all the while falling for a young blond girl named Yvonne. “Toxic Crusaders” was one of my favorite cartoons as a child and I loved collecting the toys. It was the extent of the knowledge of Troma Films, and it was a fun gateway drug to Lloyd Kaufman’s utterly demented concepts. Along the way, Toxie is greeted with other heroes with superhuman size and strength including Nozone, a superhero with a giant nose who can sneeze with immense wind gusts.
There’s Major Disaster who can control plants of all kinds to do his bidding, Headbanger who is a deformed scientist combined with the body of a dimwitted surfer, and Junkyard, a half man half dog. All are products of Tromaville’s pollution, of course, but they use those mutations to battle Killemoff. The animation is still fairly good considering the low budget of the series, and “The Movie” takes some of the better episodes of the series to combine in to a solid movie. For Troma buffs looking to give younger fans a bit of a soft core introduction to Troma, “Toxic Crusaders: The Movie” is a fun and weird course.