Awesome / TaleSpin

TaleSpin has many Moments of Awesome, if only because Baloo, Kit and company are just that good at saving the day.

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• Special mention, of course, goes out to "Plunder And Lightning," which is pretty much a Crowning Moment for everyone involved. Kit for stealing Don Karnage's secret weapon single-handedly, Don Karnage, among other things, for being at his most menacing and laying siege to Cape Suzette with a giant Lightning Gun, and Baloo for stopping said Lightning Gun by ramming his beloved plane directly into it, plus a ton of Heartwarming Moments along the way.
  • Not only that, when he finally catches Kit trying to sneak on board his ship again, Don Karnage throws him overboard from thousands of feet up in the air. Baloo uses his new but damaged overdrive to fly miles in the span of a few seconds and catches him a foot before he would have hit the ground.
  • The opening scene where the air pirates corner a cargo plane. The normally incompetent Mad Dog harpoons the plane and they rappel down and make a dramatic entrance.
  • The Cliff Guns get a great introduction when they blast several air pirate planes out of the air, showing why Don Karnage has to stay away from the city.
  • When Karnage attacks Cape Suzette with his Lightning Gun at the end of the pilot movie, several cliff gunners remain at their stations and keep shooting at the Iron Vulture even as the lightning destroys gunnery posts left and right and many of their colleagues flee. Two gunners stay to fire a few more shots even after a near miss strikes the ground next to them.
  • After the Lightning Gun is destroyed, Khan sends the city's remaining Air Force planes after the Iron Vulture and they run Karnage out of the city.
• "Stormy Weather": Baloo takes down Daring Dan Dawson for nearly killing Kit just for the sake of pleasing his fans.
  Baloo: "Don't worry Dan, it's only part of the show!"
  • Before that, Baloo is approached by a cop who confirms his suspicions about Daring Dan: Dan is wanted for getting people hurt with his reckless stunts. Baloo doesn't even wait for the cop to finish his explanation before he takes off to save Kit, delivering one of the most bad-ass lines in the series:
    Baloo: "Wait 'til I get through with that guy. He'll be able to count all his teeth on ONE FINGER!"
• The end of "Bygones". Don Karnage thought no one would be stupid enough to attack the Iron Vulture head on. He was wrong... about the stupid part.
• Baloo does pretty well in "My Fair Baloo", saving the passengers of the Spruce Moose from two attempted hijackings, a plane crash and being stranded on a desert island, and just to top it off effortlessly saves Rebecca from a giant Kaa-esque snake. Even with all that under his belt however the true CMOA is arguably given to Rebecca herself who, after the crew chews out Baloo for ruining the party with his heroics, basically tells them to stuff it.
  Rebecca: "Wake up, you weasels! That man just saved our lives. He may be crude and 'rough around the edges', but I'd take him over all of you put together!"
• Myra's Beware the Nice Ones moment from "In Search of Ancient Blunders", in which the friendly Adventurer Archaeologist is finally pushed far enough to deliver an epic rant to the cursed mummy who's been chasing the heroes through his pyramid for most of the episode.
  Myra: Will you knock it off?! What is your problem?! It's not our fault you built the lousy pyramid upside down! We didn't put the curse on you! We're trying to help you! You can stomp around all day growling like an idiot, or you can give us a hand. Now look — that pirate's stealing the pyramid. Are you gonna let him get away with that?
  Mummy: (growls "No!")
  Myra: Then get out there and do your thing!
  • This leads to yet another Moment of Awesome, as the mummy single-handedly throws Don Karnage and his Air Pirates out of the pyramid — which results in his curse being broken.
• Shere Khan gets one in "From Here To Machinery"; his plane is under attack by Don Karnage, and the robot pilot won't deviate from the flight path. Does he panic like the professor who invented said robot pilot? No, he shrugs it off as a minor annoyance and calmly signals for help. For extra awesomeness, when Baloo manages to board the plane, Shere Khan offers him a drink... only for machine-gun fire to penetrate the plane, smashing the glass in Khan's paw, and he seems more annoyed at the mess made to his suit.
• Rebecca outgambitting a sexist pilot who attempts to cheat against her in a scavenger hunt in "Feminine Air" as well as managing to knock off a magnet immobilising the Sea Duck. Extra mentioning for Baloo's "Barrel House Backwards Roll" saving Rebecca from falling to her death (while Disguised in Drag no less).
• "On a Wing and a Bear" is a New Job Episode, in which Baloo's license expires and he fails to get it renewed when an Obstructive Bureaucrat insists he do everything alphabetically and leaves him confused to the point of causing disaster. The bureaucrat and/or his granddaughter (and once both of them) continue to haunt him through the episode and cost him several more jobs because of the same approach. After a pep talk from his friends that details how he once managed to take off backwards and land in a volcano, Baloo goes on another flight with the examiner when the Sea Duck comes under fire. He then gets fed up with the guy's methodological approach to everything and takes over, pulling off another piloting stunt the group had talked about earlier and that he was a bit infamous for. It's summed up in this one line and that's only the start:
  Baloo: B is for Baloo!
  • Baloo manages to perfectly pull off the stunt because he figured out what went wrong originally and the bureaucrat calls it the most brilliant flying he's ever seen, landing Baloo a renewed license.
    Baloo: Pelican dive, don't fail me now!
• In the first episode, Wildcat unknowingly saving his own job qualifies; when Rebecca asks what purpose Wildcat serves, implying she plans to fire him if Baloo can't come up with a good reason to keep him on, Baloo smashes the phone with a mallet and tells Wildcat there's something wrong with the phone. Wildcat proceeds to restore the busted phone to perfect working order; despite her continuing dislike of Wildcat's Cloud Cuckoolander mannerisms, Rebecca admits that he's a brilliant mechanic if nothing else and keeps him on.
• In "The Bigger They Are, The Louder They Oink", Baloo spends the whole episode suffering physical and verbal abuse from an exceptionally pushy Rebecca. How can a male get perfect revenge on a female in a kids cartoon? With one word. "Bacon".
• In "A Star Is Torn" Rebecca not only essentially performs a Heroic Sacrifice to save Baloo from a booby trapped stunt plane, but afterwards subverts the Easily Forgiven formula of the Cassandra Truth trope, and dresses down Baloo for so easily distrusting and ignoring her, making him lament what a crappy friend he's been.
• In "The Incredible Shrinking Molly", after they and the Sea Duck are shrunk to ant size, Rebecca using Kit's airboard to save Molly from a (to them) giant rat.
• In "Last Horizons", the Panda-La floating forts take out almost all of Cape Suzette's Air Force with one cannon volley. However, one plane avoids that first volley and then dodges a second volley aimed entirely at him before bringing down one of the floating forts. Then, when they fire a heat-seeking missile at him, he displays Baloo-level flying skills in a vain effort to avoid it before his plan is hit and he has to bail out.
• Baloo outflies the heat-seeking missiles (filling the Sea Duck with cold stuff) and once his plane warms up again, he successfully outflies the heat seeking missiles and turns them against the Pandas by flying through their fortresses.

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