Trivia / The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nóg

• Creator's Favorite Episode:
  • For Lochlann O'Mearain, it's the pilot.
  • For Vincent Walsh, it's "Angus on Trial".
• Dueling Works: The show aired during the same 1998-1999 timeframe as Young Hercules, and reportedly was made out of fear of the latter eating into sales and viewership of Power Rangers (even though all three shows aired on Fox Kids...) That said, Young Hercules was not an in-house Fox Kids/Saban show — it was from the people who were producing the parent show at the time, Studios USA^note the renamed form of Universal Television after it was bundled with the USA Network and sold to media mogul Barry Diller and Renaissance Pictures, so presumably that also played a factor.
• Executive Meddling: Shortly before cancellation, Joel Barkow recalls the network demanding "more action", and even wanting "The Trial of Angus" to open with a random battle scene.
  "And it’s like, 'Apropo to what? I’m not sure how that would work with the story.' 'Well we don’t care, we want a battle scene.'"
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • A long out-of-print VHS was this series' only home video media release in North America. It has never been released on DVD because of Disney's buyout of the Saban library. It has, however, seen DVD release in Germany, of all places. It can be found online if you look but the only existing copies of the English version are heavily compressed and degraded rips from broadcast recordings that are nigh-unwatchable, making the show a particularly unfortunate version of the trope (Saban not reacquiring the show from Disney when it took back Power Rangers from them doesn't help matters).
  • Thankfully, a much cleaner rip of the German dub surfaced and there's been extensive efforts from the Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog Preservation Project to restore the original version of the show by syncing the audio from the low-quality english rips back to it.
• Kids' Meal Toy: McDonald's sold a set of eight figures in 1999. These consisted of the four knights (Rohan, Angus, Deidre, and Ivar) and the four villains (Queen Maeve, General Torc, Midar, and Lugad). Each villain came with a piece of the Dragon, and collecting all four pieces would allow one to build a figure of the Dragon.
• Prop Recycling: The Spectres of Banshee Woods seen in episode 24 are made up of Shellator and Fangula's bat monster form from Beetleborgs and two unadapted monsters from B-Fighter Kabuto.
• Real Song Theme Tune: The German broadcast had a version sung by The Kelly Family.
• Screwed by the Network: The reason the show ended so quickly was because the merchandise wasn't selling. Production of the second season was just beginning when the order came down. The remainder of the show's budget was funneled into Power Rangers Lost Galaxy instead. Which might have been for the best, that series had quite the Troubled Production and they probably needed to stem their budget bleeding.
• Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy: Early toys show Ivar as being white, suggesting that Justin Pierce's casting was a case of Ability over Appearance.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The second season would have been called Mystic Knights: Battle Thunder and would have a sixth Mystic Knight named Liam, the Mystic Knight of Lightning.
  • Recent material uncovered by Mystic Knight of Spirit (who was responsible for spearheading the aforementioned Preservation Project) also suggests that there would have been a villainous Mystic Knight named Seanin, the Mystic Knight of the Swamp who would have been allied with Maeva. He would have been portrayed by Joseph Barton (archived images here◊ and here◊.)