Escape From the Treacherous Mountain, the third volume in the Teddy Ruxpin VHS series, is a tape I didn't own, but I remember renting one time. It was the summer of 1993, my siblings and I were staying at the apartment of a friend of the family for the weekend while my parents moved us out of our townhouse in the city to an old, but refurbished, log house in the country and the friend of the family rented this tape for us. My sister doesn't remember this, being she was only three years old at the time, but I remember it quite vividly because it was the first Teddy Ruxpin tape I saw that wasn't one of the four that we owned. Plus it was the day we moved out to the country where I'd live for the next 23 years.
Like the previous volume, Escape From the Treacherous Mountain contains a single episode, with no editing of the episode itself. Though the live action outro is of course edited into the end of the episode like they are on the other tapes. Within the context of the TV series, The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, "Escape From the Treacherous Mountain" is the fifth episode of the series, and the final episode in the original five part pilot arc for the series, the one based off "The Airship" and "The Missing Princess" from the book and tape series for the original talking toy.
Because this is the finale it's also the most action oriented episode of the first arc. The Gutangs attack the airship and this battle takes up almost the entire episode. Even though Teddy and his friends don't have rocks or arrows, Grubby's root stew is a more dangerous weapon since it can gum up the propellor on the Gutangs' airplanes or cover the visor on the Gutangs' helmets, preventing them from seeing where they're going. Which is unique since it could be a lethal weapon depending on how the Gutangs react. Most, if not all, of the Gutangs we saw in their planes on screen bailed out so they either landed back at the Hard to Find City, or there were tons of them in the wooded area near the Treacherous Mountains when Teddy and the others landed in the airship to help Wooly. Which doesn't explain why the Gutangs didn't attack the group on the ground once they were down there.
The intro and outro to this one doesn't really have a theme that Teddy talks about like there was in the first two volumes. He talks about the crystals a little bit and then shows us the in box extra for this volume, which is a blank Family Tree that the child could fill in at some point. Which is kind of cool, because that was something we did at school when I was a kid. Of course because I didn't own this tape, I've never seen the Family Tree in person. Which is pretty much the same with all of the tapes aside from Guests of the Grunges as my original copies of Take a Good Look, Grubby's Romance and Tweeg Gets the Tweezles were actually rental copies that didn't include the extras inside the boxes and I didn't own the other tapes.
Overall, watching this tape again was pretty fun. As I mentioned before it was one rented for me during the transition from living in the city to living in the country, and it's the only one aside from the ones I owned that I ever saw growing up. The episode itself though I've seen numerous times as it was one of the episodes my dad taped off TV for me when I was really little and I have it on DVD as well, so I've watched it multiple times despite not owning this tape. Next week I'll be looking at a tape that I did own, Take a Good Look. Bye for now.
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