I used to love the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Actually, I still do. I’ve got the entire series at home on DVD. Sure, it’s cheesy: that damned unicorn ruins every single chance that Hank the Ranger, Eric the Cavalier, Diana the Acrobat, Presto the Magician, Sheila the Thief or Bobby the Barbarian have to get home, and Venger comes across more prissy than wicked to me, but what the heck, it’s part of my childhood and I’m nothing if not nostalgic.
One of the things that my wife and I noticed during a recent rewatch is that the series’ other big-bad, Tiamat the Dragon, seems to be friggin’ everywhere: just beyond the next hill, just above a cloud, hiding behind a door, under a rock, in an envelope, sitting at the bottom of a cup of coffee….well, maybe I made up a couple of those, but the point is that she has a habit of popping up near constantly. It reminds me of the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon where Bullwinkle pulls a rhinoceros out of his hat: “Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!” ROAAAAR! We joke about it all the time at my house, referencing this little bit of cartoon absurdity by opening the silverware drawer or hall closet and loudly exclaiming, “Oh, no! Tiamat!”
I can thank the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon for introducing me to Tiamat, even if the first impression I got wasn’t very accurate. The funniest thing about Tiamat’s representation in the cartoon is that it differed wildly from her in-game counterpart. In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Tiamat is the five-headed evil goddess of dragonkind. She’s so bad-ass that has her own layer of the Nine Hells. She’s not the kind of entity that one would casually encounter – especially behind every corner. It would be like strolling into a seemingly empty bathroom stall only to find Satan himself hunched up on the commode, New York Times crossword puzzle in clawed hand.
Tiamat is probably my favorite dragon or dragon-like creature in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Her five heads – red, black, white, blue and green (I didn’t even have to look this up! I’m such a fanboy.) – blast adventurers with fire, acid, cold, lighting and poison, respectively. Her tail is tipped with a poison stinger, she’s got wings and she’s humongous. Tiamat is like something that should have fought Godzilla over the flaming ruins of Tokyo. She’s evil incarnate, kaiju style.
I’ve never fought against Tiamat in my gaming career, not even in my adolescent power gamer phase when my Mountain Dew swilling cohorts and I regularly slapped around gods and demi-gods. (Well, except for that one time when a Mezzodaemon picked up and strangled a pal’s Anti-Paladin, but that’s a different story.) The Dungeon Master sometimes threatened us with her, and I always imagined that she’d put up quite a fight, but perhaps Tiamat’s greatest strength wasn’t to be found in her size or powerful breath weapons; rather, it was the long shadow she cast over our adventuring party and the knowledge that were we to ever round the corner and encounter her face to face(s), we probably wouldn’t be as lucky as Ranger Hank and company.
