Do the kids from the ’80s D&D cartoon die in Honor Among Thieves?
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.]
In the gladiatorial-arena sequence, Daley and Goldstein follow Edgin and his party as they dodge a displacer beast, a mimic, and various traps through an ever-changing maze full of traps and weapons. The ’80s characters — Hank the Ranger, Sheila the Thief, Diana the
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