By Jonathan Klotz
| Published

The legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table has endured for centuries and countless adaptations. Some, like Excalibur, are classics. Others involve Charlie Hunnam.
Yet the strangest adaptation found inspiration from Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in which a modern man from 1889 winds up in Camelot. 103 years later, instead of one man, King Arthur and the Knights of Justice sent a football team back to save the past, a choice that makes no sense in the first episode and gets worse as the series continues.

The real King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are trapped in ice by Morgana, deep beneath her castle. Merlin’s magic finds replacements in modern times, a man named Arthur King, the quarterback for a football team called the Knights, and transports them to the past. The modern-day Knights impersonate the real Knights thanks to Merlin’s magic, including Arthur King striking up a romance with Queen Guinevere, and it’s best not to think about this too hard. Or how all of a sudden, the Knights include a “Sir Wally.”
To its credit, King Arthur and the Knights of Justice turns the “football team out of time” into a plot point in multiple episodes, including a Season 2 episode where they use judo techniques developed after the 10th century to defeat The Purple Horde. Other Knights use their knowledge and skills from the future to create weapons, solve riddles, and outwit Morgana’s Warlords. Please don’t ask how they all immediately know how to ride horses and fight in full armor, it’s uh magic.



The biggest influence on King Arthur and the Knights of Justice isn’t Arthurian legend, it’s G.I. Joe. Each of the Knights has a different gimmick, including a personal weapon and a magic crest that lets them summon objects, from bricks to King Arthur summoning a gold dragon. The Warlords are also defined by their series of gimmicks, under the leadership of Lord Viper, and including the “evil guy who flies” and Warlord Axe, who uses an Axe, or Warlord Spike, who uses a long spike, or, as it’s more commonly known, a spear.
King Arthur and the Knights of Justice is a weird mishmash of ideas and concepts, tossed into a blender, and poured out as a collection of every early ’90s American animation trend, for good and worse. Over 30 years later, I will still defend the opening theme song, which kicks off with an instantly iconic guitar riff that’s the dying gasp of 80s metal. The lyrics are dull and describe the entire plot of the series, but that guitar puts it up with the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme in the cartoon Hall of Fame.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries
Against all odds, despite being the weirdest adaptation of Arthurian legend ever, the series also turned into a hit, complete with action figures, a SNES video game, and a Marvel comic tie-in. It’s the comic series that makes the most sense, as the executive producer behind King Arthur and the Knights of Justice is Avi Arad, who went on to become the CEO of Marvel Comics and the founder of Marvel Studios. The bizarre Arthurian adaptation was Avi’s first produced series, kicking off a run that includes every single Marvel cartoon of the ’90s, every Spider-Man movie, and Bratz.
Every time I go to find a cartoon I loved from my childhood, I’m surprised to learn that instead of a multi-year series with a hundred episodes, it ran for 2 seasons and maybe 20 episodes. Like my other fantasy favorite, Pirates of Dark Water, King Arthur and the Knights of Justice lasted 2 seasons and 25 episodes, not enough to finish the storyline of the quest for the magic keys to save the original Knights. Instead, if you want the whole story, you must play the tie-in video game.

King Arthur and the Knights of Justice may have an insane premise, but it’s a fascinating relic of the early ’90s, and you can stream Season 1 for free on services like Peacock, Tubi, and Pluto.