Stone Protectors was a toy line and 1993 animated series. The whole thing was made in an attempt to market troll dolls to young boys. It was fairly unsuccessful.
The premise was that five members of a terrible band called the "Rock Detectors" stumbled across some strange magical stones, which are sought by Zok, an evil music-hating reptile-like creature. Princess Opal of Mythrandir split a powerful magic stone into six pieces, and Zok only has one. He wants to gather them all and reforge the original magic stone in order to become all powerful. The crystals make each band member gain awesome powers (none of those powers being playing well), and they are whisked away to Mythrandir to help save Princess Opal's land form Zok.
This rather obscure show only lasted 13 episodes. It was released onto some VHS tapes in 1994. A video game was also produced, which got better reviews than the show did.
Tropes:
- All Trolls Are Different: In this case, they're a literal Five-Man Band who protect magical stones from an evil troll using The Power of Rock.
- The Big Guy: Chester was the muscular wrestler with super strength.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Guess which stone the bad guys ended up with? The Onyx — the black one.
- Cursed with Awesome: The Stone Protectors feel this way. On one hand, they're trapped away from Brooklyn. On the other, they've got badass troll bodies instead of scrawny human bodies. And for some reason, being trolls also made them good at playing their instruments.
- Dark Is Evil: The Onyx. Technically the Onyx itself isn't evil, but it's black and it's the Stone of Power the bad guys got.
- Environment-Specific Action Figure: Sports figures. They did those instead of a Princess Opal.
- Fake Band: The Rock Detectors.
- Improbable Weapon User: For some reason, Chester's toy and game version use a partially-disassembled rotary phone as a flail.
- The Lancer: Cornelius was the vocalist and while the theme song itself identified him as "the front of the band;" his ego, Primadonna attitude, and lack of actual ability to take charge made him more of a Leader Wannabe.
- The Leader: Maxwell who despite being only lead guitarist was more likely to take charge of a situation than Cornelius.
- Magical Land: Mythrandir. You didn't expect a Tolkein reference in this context, did you?
- Make Me Wanna Shout: Cornelius gained supersonic vocals as his power. The time they got their powers switched, Maxwell got the supersonic vocals and enjoyed them so much he screamed himself mute in about 10 minutes.
- Minion with an F in Evil: One episode has Zok recruiting the legendary villain Blackheart the Terrible. Turns out he's actually a cowardly incompetent who just pretended to be a terrifying villain so people would stay away from him.
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The enemies are all reptilian.
- Rollerblade Good: Maxwell
- The Smart Guy: Angus and Cliff combined to fill this role - Angus was a gadgeteer genius and Cliff used his climbing skills for scouting. However, there was no weak nerdy character to singularly fit this role.
- The Smurfette Principle: The only major female was Princess Opal, and she wasn't based on a toy.
- Teenage Mutant Samurai Wombats: It was a cartoon clearly following Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) with trolls instead of animals.
- Toyless Toyline Character: Princess Opal was not based on a toy. She wasn't even going to be adapted to the second wave of them. Some villains were also like this, including several bosses from the video game, who seem like they were based on scrapped toy concepts. Also, Opal's Soldiers.
- What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Three of the five band members got cool powers — Cornelius became a skilled samurai, Chester became a wrestling expert with super strength, and Angus became a skilled soldier who could turn anything into a weapon. Maxwell got super-speed, but he needed to wear rollerblades to use it. And Clifford only got the ability to climb things. Granted, he could climb anything and came in useful regularly, but it was hardly cool compared to the other powers.
