Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves has a cute cameo from the 1983 D&D Saturday morning cartoon — but we asked the directors whether the movie ends as badly as it seems to for Hank the Ranger, Sheila the Thief, Diana the Acrobat, Eric the Cavalier, Presto the Wizard, and Bobby the Barbarian.
When Paramount Pictures released a short clip from an action sequence late in the D&D movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, a certain subsection of legacy RPG fans immediately jumped on one detail. As the film’s protagonists face a deadly gladiatorial arena built around a changing maze full of monsters, Edgin the Bard (Chris Pine) notices another group of adventurers being dumped into the arena as well: the party of displaced kids from the 1983-1985 Saturday-morning cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons.
It’s a little in-joke for some of the game’s older fans. The cartoon is hard to find legally these days — it isn’t streaming, and all previous DVD releases are out of print, though there are plenty of YouTube uploads out there. But a generation of fans remembers the show so fondly that multiple lines of toys are still being made to celebrate the cartoon’s characters. More recently, a virally popular Brazilian car commercial brought the characters to live action, and finally got them home again.
The ’80s characters’ appearance in Honor Among Thieves isn’t just a one-off sight gag, either — they recur throughout the scene, and they don’t do so well in the gladiatorial combat that follows. Polygon talked to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein to find out what happens to those kids after their big-screen cameo.
[Ed. note: Spoilers for some action in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves follow.
