Jonathan Chase (Simon MacCorkindale) and Ty Earl (Michael Roberts) are at Aqueduct Racetrack watching the races. At one point a skydiving act is in the middle of a performance when one of the divers is having trouble with his parachute. Then he appears to be unconscious. Chase turns into a hawk and flies to him. Using his talon, he pulls the spare chute and saves the divers life. Everyone on the ground believes the Hawk was trained and was part of the show.
During the next race, a woman, Kathy Bonann (Tracy Scoggins) makes a claim that the winning horse is not Pappa’s Lad but is in fact Splendid Dancer. Kathy owned Splendid Dancer, but it was stolen a while ago. When she couldn’t pay the ransom, the horse was supposedly killed. She then accuses Carl McGhan (Peter Brown), the owner of Pappa’s Lad, of being the one that kidnapped the horse. The racing officials check the horse and find that it is Pappa’s Lad. At that time Chase sees McGhan’s horse trailer slip away.
Chase believes that McGhan did have Splendid Dancer and switched the horses during the failed parachute demonstration when no one was looking. After the race he put Splendid Dancer in the trailer and had one of his minions drive away. He assures Kathy that he will help her find the truth. Chase, Brooke and Ty come up with a strategy to find and return the horse, but things don’t go as planned.
Transformations include a hawk and panther, on screen, and a horse off screen. In the laboratory Chase now has a sea lion, a tiger, a lioness and a cougar behind the glass enclosures.
By now you realize that the only transformation footage is of the panther and the hawk. All the others are off screen. Also, it is, for the most part, the same transformation footage. The panther is the one used the most. To do the transformations Stan Winston’s studio had to create a series of masks based on Simon MacCorkindale’s features that showed the progression of the transformation. A series of camera dissolves were used between each mask. Repetitive, yes, but still cool.