Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is in theaters now, and by all accounts, it’s a really gruesome, terrifying horror movie that updates the mummy genre for a new age (and has nothing to do with the Brendan Fraser franchise). That’s all well and good, but in case you’re not into that level of gore, allow me to recommend some late-’90s mummy material that’s a bit lighter — and arguably overdue for a reappraisal.
The Mummies Alive! animated series debuted in syndication in 1997, airing on weekdays on different channels across the country. The main character is a San Francisco kid named Presley, the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Prince Rapses. When Presley visits an Egyptian museum exhibit about Rapses, an evil living mummy named Scarab discovers the kid’s connection to the long-dead pharaoh. Scarab was once Rapses’ advisor, before stealing his life force in order to live for centuries. Now, he’s after Presley, to steal his life as well.
To protect Presley, four mummies who were Rapses’ guards come back to life. There’s Ja-Kal, the leader; Rath, the sorcerer; Armon, the strongest of them; and Nefer-Tina, the group’s only female member, who’s also the most acrobatic of the foursome.
DIC, which produced Mummies Alive!, is the same production house responsible for 1980s hits like The Real Ghostbusters and Care Bears. Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman executive produced the series, which was DIC’s first collaboration with Reitman since The Real Ghostbusters ended in 1991. Recent CalArts graduate Seth Kearsley, a 23-year-old who only had minimal television experience at the time, was the showrunner. Kearsley did have some pretty accomplished writers, though, like Eric and Julia Lewald, who’d worked on X-Men: The Animated Series and Gargoyles, and Mark Edens, who’d also worked on X-Men and many other cartoons, including the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Online, Reitman and the Lewalds’ involvement has invited comparisons to their other works. The show’s theme of the dead coming back to life leads some viewers to compare it to The Real Ghostbusters. And the story about ancient protectors arisen in a modern-day city invites, Gargoyles comparisons. But really, Mummies Alive! stands pretty well on its own. It has plenty of action, and the Egyptian-influenced designs, which have a Universal horror aesthetic, were unique for the time. The look of the main four mummies is especially strong: They’re heroic, but they don’t resemble other superheroes of the era, much less characters from Real Ghostbusters or Gargoyles. And while the main mummies each represent basic character archetypes, they’re are all different, and clearly defined. That may sound like faint praise, but lots of shows in the 1980s and 1990s — like Transformers and Street Sharks — centered on characters where nearly everyone looked the same and/or had similar personalities.
The Egyptian influence not only gave Mummies Alive! its own distinctive look, but its own stories and personality, too. Many of the characters who popped up throughout the series were derived from real Egyptian mythology. For example, many episodes involved Scarab summoning various Egyptian deities, like Geb, god of the Earth, and Apep, the god of chaos. While I assume any person with deep knowledge of the subject matter (or actual Egyptian heritage) would scoff at the show, these kinds of glancing mythological references were exactly the kind of thing that fueled my interest in exploring the real history behind TV characters when I was a kid.
Mummies Alive! only lasted one season, but that did contain a whopping 42 episodes. Kenner launched a pretty decent little action-figure line along with the show, too, so it seems DIC thought it would be bigger than it became. Alas, Mummies Alive! was canceled due to low ratings.
Just a few years later, a similar fate befell an animated spin-off of the Brendan Fraser Mummy films, in spite of the franchise’s blockbuster box-office success. Perhaps that just means there never really was a market for mummy-based cartoons, as opposed to creepy gorefests like Lee Cronin’s new take.
Mummies Alive! is streaming on Cineverse.