Sports fans throw the word "hero" around pretty carelessly. Sure, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky and Bo Jackson were phenomenal athletes in their respective primes. (Boy, some primes are longer than others, hunh Bo?) But true heroism entails more than just excellence in sport. True heroes should fight crime, too.
That's just what the jocks did in "Pro Stars," a largely forgotten and wholly forgettable Saturday morning cartoon dating from 1991. As with any great team, each member of this triumvirate of sports titans had his own distinct part to play: Mike was the brains of the outfit, Bo was the muscle, and Wayne provided the comic relief — a role for which, as student columnist Mark Polishuk correctly observed in the University of Western Ontario Gazette, the real-life Great One would have been very poorly suited. He was also hungry all the time.
The Pro Stars lived in a gym with their mom, "a quasi-Yiddish and Jewish mother stereotype" who supplied them with strange inventions to help them on their adventures.
What was this all about? Well, it was "all about helping kids," as [the voice actor portraying] His Airness proclaimed at the end of the theme song. Ah, the theme song, that's another weird thing about this already weird-from-top-to-bottom show.
The original version — if you can call it that — was based closely on Queen's quintessential stadium anthem "We Will Rock You," with the refrain "we are, we are Pro Stars."
Listen to it here. A revised version still used the stomp-stomp CLAP form, but didn't ape the Queen song note for note. You can hear that one over this
video of the opening sequence. It seems the editor couldn't find good footage of a Gretzky slap shot: The lyric "Wayne's hot, slap shot!" instead accompanies a clip of the Great One flipping a little backhander into the goal.