So Long, Stan

My first memory of comics god Stan Lee was his narration of the 1982 Saturday morning cartoon The Incredible Hulk. Sure, I'd seen his creations before, in the form of reruns of the 1960s cartoon Spider-Man, and during the original run of the late 1970s live-action TV show The Incredible Hulk, but the 80s 'Hulk cartoon (along with Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends — later combined into The Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and the Incredible Hulk Adventure Hour) was the first time I'd heard Lee's name and voice, and his intense voiceovers permanently cemented him to the those iconic comic characters in my memory. My appreciation for the actual comic books that had given rise to these characters (as well as the character of Stan, in the fan and larger public perception) would come years later.

When I read the news about Stan's death earlier today, I have to admit, it didn't come as much of a shock. He was 95, and, from the news and internet coverage over the years, it seemed as though he'd been in decline since his wife's death. Time passes, as do our heroes.

And Stan certainly was a hero to many. One of the creative forces behind so many of the superheroes and superhero teams that have been a part of our nerdy lives and fan culture conversation (along with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others), a pop culture figure who interacted with fans at conventions and other venues, and, in a larger sense on the pop culture stage, a reassuring voice that told us it's okay to like this stuff, and that our comic book characters and the stories they tell have real, meaningful value, beyond a few minutes or hours of entertainment. That value was especially evident in Marvel Comics' presentation of normal, later diverse, characters with identifiable lives (beyond — sometimes influenced by, and sometimes influencing — their superheroic adventures) and problems that we, as readers, can understand and have experienced. Peter Parker has to try to hold down a job outside of his costumed vigilanteism because, you know, food and shelter; and he worries about how to attract the girl he likes. The X-Men deal with discrimination, infighting, self-doubt, depression, and strained romantic relationships. Bruce Banner, in struggling to deal with the Hulk within, has to grapple with stress and emotional control, isolation, and the consequences of being persecuted and living without a home. Even the gods (and god-like alien entities) have problems in Marvel's universe. Thor has family issues, and, over the years, has made more than a few bad decisions. Galactus is alone — the sole survivor of not only his race, but his universe — and has to battle superheroes because, in order to survive, he needs to feed on the life force of planets (perfectly understandable and justified to the star titan, not so much to the inhabitants of Earth and other worlds). Thanos just wants Death to love him, and is rejected. Thus Stan's legacy of crafting characters with recognizable challenges and flaws is clearly present not just in his own creations, but in those of other Marvel writers and artists. And, beyond the empathy factor, it's this attempt to create three-dimensional characters that made Stan and Marvel's heroes — and villains — more interesting than their counterparts (at least until DC — and other publishers — started to catch on and flush-out their own characters' lives — internal and external).

Beyond the comics, cartoons and conventions, Stan was also a highly recognizable figure thanks to his media interviews and cameos in everything from Kevin Smith's Mallrats, to The Big Bang Theory, to the various Sony Marvel-related and official Marvel Universe movies. The overall impression was of a friendly, if occasionally curmudgeonly old guy. The loveable grandpa of comics. How true-to-life that was is up to those who knew him to say. But to the rest of us, it was the perfect representation of that person we'd always imagined was cobbling together the comics we loved.

Thanks for everything, Stan.

Excelsior!

Saturday Morning Cartoons - Grin and Bear It

Saturday morning cartoons saw their share of anthropomorphic animals: dogs, cats, horses, apes, even sharks. But bears had their place in the lineup too, and they did more than just steal pic-a-inc baskets. In this episode of the 'rewatch, I'm bear-ly able to suppress the bad puns as I present to you: The Gummi Bears and Pandamonium.


Imagine an evil, inhuman force from beyond our world hell-bent on controlling the universe, who one day turns its attentions on Earth. The thing's less like Cthulhu and more like Sauron — in that it's got a fascination with hunting down pieces of some ancient relic — but not really, and likes to mind control people for shits and giggles. And the only people who can stop it are two American teenagers and a trio of pandas. This would be Pandamonium. Why these kids are the only people in the world who seem to be able to bear-up under the badguy's Jedi Mind Trick is beyond me (perhaps because said badguy has already lulled me with its psychic attack — excuse me while I run for my tinfoil helmet), but the real mystery is the bears. They're not like your normal pandas. They can speak (for some reason, I have a vague memory of the pandas being a kind of Three Stooges rip-off, but I may be wrong), at least one of them wears a hat, and strangest of all, these pandas do more than just laze around eating bamboo all day in a Chinese zoo. They actually participate in the adventures, and possess the ability to combine, Devastator-like, into a single, larger (sort of) entity known as Poppapanda who is better suited to take on the villain. In terms of animals to hinge the plot on, it didn't really have to be pandas to make this show work. It could have just as easily been hamsters, except then the title of the show would've been something like Ham-fisted or Hamstrung, and neither has the ring to it that Pandamonium does. Anyway, here's what Pandamonium looks like:

If you'll bear with me (See, I didn't stop. I could have. But I didn't. And you love me for it.), there's another pinnacle of ursine animation to experience: Disney's The Gummi Bears. For several seasons, The Mouse's machine cranked out this story about a small group of intelligent, bipedal, half-sized bears having adventures in their forest as they hide from a nearby medieval human civilization and an army of dangerous, if stupid, ogres commanded by a rogue human duke. They're joined by a couple of trustworthy human friends. When confronted by enemies, the Gummis have a bit of an advantage in escaping (and sometimes fighting), thanks to the magical gummiberry juice they always keep on-hand.

And yet, for all of Disney's attempts to make these stories fun, there's something deeply disturbing about them if viewers (even kids) pay attention to the backstories and some of the settings (not unlike Adventure Time with Finn & Jake episodes): the Gummi bears of Gummi Glen are (more or less) the last, isolated members of a fallen civilization. Each episode features the bears reading from their precious Book of Gumm, a collection of the history and lore of their people, and every time it's a reinforcement of what the Gummis used to have in the past, and what they no longer have now. We see them travel through the vastness of Gummi Glen, clearly some sort of former city or large outpost colony, with its echoing, but empty tunnels, shafts, and rooms. The half-dozen or so Gummis who are left occupy only a tiny section of the settlement, and frequently have to go out on repair missions to maintain its failing infrastructure, even though there's no-one else to use it. Eerily, we never really find out why Gummi Glen is empty, or why they're the only ones left. Sure, there are episodes that reference other Gummi communities, and sometimes other Gummis wander out of the woods to join our heroes, but never in any great numbers, and never for very long. There are episodes telling about some great past migration of Gummis over the sea, but the Gummi Glen residents never go this new land, and there's no armada of triumphantly returning bears set on re-taking their ancient holdings. Instead, we have just this small group of survivors barely hanging on in the face of human encroachment and ogre attacks. With two of the Gummis being old, and the younger generation consisting of a handful of males and just one female, you know it won't be long before the breeding options become limited, inbreeding sets in, knowledge is lost, and Gummi Glen finally sits dark and empty. This is a really a post-apocalyptic story of a dying people trying desperately, though ultimately futilely, to hang on, cooking up their performance-enhancing substance, living amidst the failing ruins of their civilization, and dreaming of better days.

Saturday Morning Cartoons - Artifacts of the 80s

There are some lost artifacts that are better left buried. Some hidden relics of the past that, while they are statements about the nature of their time and culture, are just too terrifying to behold.

I'm going to dig two of them up and show them to you anyway.

This time on the Saturday Morning Rewatch, we're going to inflict some very specifically 80s pain on ourselves, in the form of Rubik The Amazing Cube, and Kidd Video. Admittedly, we've rewatched some questionable Saturday morning fare in the past, but these two cartoons may just be enough to make you regurgitate your dried marshmallow-augmented cereal.


Admittedly, you can make the argument that music videos have been around for many decades in various forms. After all, what were Frankie & Annette's beach movies, or Elvis' flicks, but extended music videos where thin plots bridged multiple songs? But music videos really came into their own in the 80s, with big budgets and flashy sets and locations, bands putting an emphasis on style as much as (sometimes more than) talent, directors and extras making names for themselves – or big names coming in as directors or extras. And the videos and their video shows were goddamn everywhere. Everywhere. I remember you couldn't turn on the TV in the early-mid 80s on a Friday or Saturday night without seeing a music video show at some point on nearly every channel; there were music videos available for rent on videotape in just about every video store; and, of course, entire TV channels dedicated almost entirely to music videos were launched. And kids weren't exempt from the marketing madness of music videos: even if you didn't have older siblings or babysitters watching music video shows in the evening, the record company promoters and TV producers still found a way to start cultivating the younger crowd: some channels ran music video shows on Saturday mornings after the cartoons were finished. These were somewhat tamer than their night-time counterparts, although while they ran most of the same charting videos, they withheld the ones that might have been considered a little too sexually charged – although they didn't apply the same standards towards frightening subject matter... I still remember the morning when they broadcast Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, and it scared the shit outta me. But what does all of this have to do with Saturday morning cartoons? At some point, a group of TV producers and record label types decided to take this marketing drive to its ultimate end – it wasn't enough to show videos after Saturday morning cartoons. No. They had to put the peanut butter in the chocolate. In 1984, they decided to put pop music and music videos into the cartoons. In 1984, they created Kidd Video.

Kidd Video was the story of four teens who had a band in the real world, who, one day, were magically transported into a cartoon world called "the Flip Side" by a record-company-boss-like badguy called Master Blaster (no relation to the Bartertown duo from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome) and his trio of anthropomorphic cat henchmen. Saved by a pixie who looked like she was fresh from a high-impact aerobics session, the group wandered the Flip Side trying to find a way home. Every episode would feature a segment from at least one well-known real-world pop/rock song, and some episodes ran segments of real music videos from well-known groups. I seem to recall the idea with some of the clips being that they real bands had been captured by the Master Blaster, and the kids had to do something to free them. Was there any interaction between the characters and the actual musicians from the videos we were all watching Friday nights? Of course not. It was just a plot device concocted to play charting and generally popular music to kids to program them into wanting to buy it. Every episode also ended with a full-length music video featuring the real-world versions of the Kidd Video cast. I didn't like the blonde kid. I think he stares at himself in the mirror when they're singing just a little too intensely.

Anyway, here's Kidd Video:

Another classic artefact of the 80s was the Rubik's Cube. The puzzle became so popular that it gave rise to a whole series of variants, including a sphere, a pyramid, and a long snake-like thing. It also spawned a truly terrible cartoon – and utterly transparent marketing gimmick – called Rubik The Amazing Cube.

The show is about a group of kids (It's always about a group of kids, isn't it? I mean, it's never about a gaggle of middle-aged janitors on their coffee break, or a squad of elementary school lunch ladies or something.) who find a magic Rubik's Cube that sprouts a greyish-blue head and feet – or maybe it's a normal Rubik's Cube that's been possessed by some kind of minor demon – with a truly annoying high-pitched voice that sounds like it's being squeezed out of a cockateel's sphincter. The kids and this armless, multicoloured horror then have adventures.

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Rubik's Cube puzzle itself because I was the first kid to have one in my little country elementary school. But that doesn't change the fact that this cartoon was a complete piece of shit, and a little unnerving. I mean, maybe there was a reason little Rubik was trapped in a chest in the back of a fleeing wagon. Maybe he wasn't supposed to be unleashed upon a group of helpless kids and an unsuspecting world.

So, Rubik The Amazing Cube for any who dare to look:

Saturday Morning Cartoons - Robotech

Once in a while, an anime series explodes into global consciousness in a way that gets everyone talking, and becomes a benchmark for a generation. In the mid-late 70s, it was Star Blazers (originally Space Battleship Yamato to the Japanese audience), a show that made a huge imprint on my mind as a little kid; meanwhile, in Quebec, they had Captain Harlock the space pirate; later, Battle of the Planets (a.k.a. G-Force on our schoolyard playground, and Gatchaman originally in Japan) was all the rage, though I remember it being on after school, rather than Saturday mornings. But by the mid-80s, it was Robotech that had invaded just about everyone's TVs.

Brought to North America and other markets by Harmony Gold, Robotech was actually an extended combination of three separate Japanese series: The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, The Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada. The first group of episodes (using the Macross series) followed the lives of a group of people aboard a huge starship called the SDF-1 — originally an alien vessel that had crashed on Earth and been refitted by humanity — as it fled across the solar system in an effort to escape the alien Zentraedi forces (giant, cloned humanoids bred for war in the service of their creators) who claimed ownership of it. The second instalment (built off of Southern Cross), involved the next generation of heroes — specifically the daughter of two of the characters from the first instalment — now allied with the Zentraedi and trying to defend the Earth from an invasion by the Robotech Masters, the creators of the giants. The third part (using Mospeada) took place years later, during a human rebellion against the Invid, another alien force that had taken over the Earth in an attempt to reclaim the flower of life/protoculture stolen by the Robotech Masters centuries earlier and carried to our world by renegade Zentraedi aboard the SDF-1. (Convoluted enough for ya? Well, this was the simple version of the plot summary!)

What made Robotech different than other Saturday morning fare — indeed, more than many other anime series that have been exported to North America in the decades since then — was that the plot revolved around something more than just fighting badguys in a battle-of-the-week scenario. Instead, the story was truly about relationships between people (the love triangle between pilot Rich Hunter, second-in-command Lisa Hayes, and pop singer Lynn Minmay/Minmei in the first instalment — though I can't remember the characters and relationships in the second and third parts), and the power of music and emotion. And notably, music and human emotions — at least in the first instalment — proved to be more powerful weapons than the squadrons of transformable fighter plane mechs or space cruisers. It was also a series that — flying in the face of tradition for science fiction and action cartoons — had the guts to take a break from the action and give its characters quiet time to pause and reflect on their lives, relationships, and emotional states. Sure, the relationships between the characters (especially Rick and Minmei) regularly descended into melodrama (though the portrayal of Roy Fokker and Claudia Grant's partnership was actually very mature), but there was a serious attempt to make these people three-dimensional, and even the melodrama is somewhat understandable when put in the context of many of these characters being teenagers or in their young twenties. Even supporting characters, like the SDF-1's Captain Gloval, or the aliens Commander Breetai and his advisor Exedor, seemed well thought-out and believable. Aside from the occasional tediousness of dialogue that's sometimes top-heavy with excessive compound sentences (again, probably forgivable in light of the production team having to sync the English script over animation patterned for a Japanese script and speech patterns), overall, Robotech was a pretty good show (good enough that I picked up the first instalment on DVD a number of years ago, and still watch the odd episode on occasion).

So why dust this old chestnut off for the Saturday Morning Cartoon Rewatch all of a sudden? Recently, I read that a sub-unit of Warner Brothers is taking a run at producing a live-action movie based on Robotech. Now, like all Hollywood gossip, this is something that fans can't put a lot of stock into, especially since there have been rumours of Robotech projects before. Basically, you've got to put it out of mind until an official trailer is released, and even then you've got to keep your cool until the real deal hits the big screen, because anything could happen to sink the project, or, even if it's produced, delay or prevent screening. And yet, this newest rumour provides us with a good excuse to look back at the original TV show, and remember why it was good enough to cause all this fuss in the first place.

With an action figure in one hand, and a bowl of cereal in another, it's time to watch an episode of Robotech! (part 1 of episode 27, "Force of Arms")

Saturday Morning Cartoons - When Video Games Ruled the Airwaves Part 3

Our stack of quarters is running low, and the cereal box is nearly empty, but we've got enough left to get through two more video game-inspired Saturday morning cartoons. And then home gaming systems and home computers will radically improve, and society in general will just sort of shift, and arcades will become unpopular and less and less profitable, and Saturday morning cartoons will fall by the wayside, and none of this will have any relevance anymore. [shudders] Yeah.

But we'll make it all relevant. Just one more time. Here on the Saturday Morning Cartoon Rewatch:



Everybody knows who Mario is. But do you remember a simpler time in the digital plumber's life? A time before he started traipsing through rows of magic mushrooms, skipping over turtles, and grasping at gold hanging just above reach in the sky? Before his brother Luigi started tagging along? Before the spinoff go-cart races? When he wasn't even the one on the branding?

Remember when it was all about love?

There was once a game called Donkey Kong, where Mario was focussed on one thing, and one thing only: rescuing his girlfriend from the clutches of an over-sized, demented ape holed-up in a construction site.

That game inspired a Saturday morning cartoon. A cartoon which was not remotely about love. Instead, it followed the simple, tried-and-true Saturday morning formula of pursuit and the evasion of capture. Donkey Kong the cartoon followed the adventures of Mario and his coworker/girlfriend Pauline as they chased the giant titular gorilla across the country, trying to recapture him after his escape from a circus. Once in a while, the big guy would grab the girl, but Mario would always manage to free her, and Donkey Kong would always manage to get away. (full episode)

When Raiders of the Lost Ark whipped audiences into a diselpunk pre-War action frenzy in the early 80s, it wasn't too long before various copycats did their best on TV and in the movies to pick up where Indy left off. The realm of video games was no exception. Atari brought us the vine-swinging, crocodile-dodging thrills of Pitfall, and so when cartoons started using video games as inspiration, it was a given that this one would make the cut. Pitfall! was about the adventures of Harry, a treasure hunter, who would journey around the world to, you know, hunt for treasure. He was joined by his niece and his pet cougar. Hijinks ensued. (intro)

And that wraps-up our series on video game-inspired cartoons. Join us next week for other (hopefully better) animated adventures. But that doesn't mean you have to stay away for a full week. You can always come to the blog more often to read other stuff. In fact, I hope you would! Though, admittedly, I wouldn't blame you if you didn't. Sigh. Excuse me while I drown my sorrows in another bowl of cereal...

Saturday Morning Cartoons - When Video Games Ruled the Airwaves Part 2

As I mentioned last week, the video game invasion of the Saturday morning cartoon universe was so massive that there's no way to fit all of them into one post — at least, no way to do it and keep the article to any reasonable length. So, jamming our pockets full of quarters, we'll continue our prowl around the arcade to see which games were fodder for TV.


We'll start with Q Bert, not because we want to, but because today's lineup is more or less universally weak, so, why not? Through the magic of Hollywood script grinders, a video game about a round thing with a trumpet-like nose/mouth/whatever that hops around a pyramid trying to change the colours of squares while avoiding snakes, became a cartoon about the same round thing and his friends taking on the roles of retro-50s highschoolers hanging out at a malt shop and doing... whatever. This show was so deeply odd that I couldn't remember a thing about it (only that it existed) before scrounging it up on YouTube, and, once I found it and watched a little, it wasn't good enough for me to watch enough to figure out what it was about. Perhaps you'll be a little more charitable than I. (intro)

Shifting gears now, let's take a look at Pole Position, based on the hit racing game. My friends and I used to spend quite a bit of time on this game in the arcade. Sadly, we had to settle for Turbo on our home gaming consoles, because we had Colecovision systems. And when the wave of video game-inspired shows hit the air, we had to settle for this odd Speedracer-ScoobyDoo hybrid. A couple of teens spending their days on a futuristic Nascar circuit, and fighting crime in the off hours. Throw in overly-cute younger sibling and cat for sidekicks, along with Knightrider-inspired onboard AIs for the cars, and you've got a show. Does anyone else think the cars' AI faces look a lot like the mug of the Master Control in Tron? (full episode)

And just as we're getting to the point where all of the stale marshmallows are gone and only a couple of soggy, hyper-sugared flakes or pops or whatever are drifting around in the milk at the bottom of our cereal bowls, let's finish off with an episode of Space Ace. Like Dragon's Lair (mentioned last week), Space Ace was one of those breakthrough video games to feature animation-quality graphics, and near-impossible game play. The cartoon put Ace and his partner Kimmi into the cockpit on a weekly basis to fight Borf the bad guy (a Blue Meanie escaped from the Beatles' Sgt Pepperverse and whacked on steroids), or whatever other substitute they wanted to use, and things would get complicated when Ace would transform into his slight and dorky alter-ego Dexter at inopportune moments. Funny thing is, just like with Dragon's Lair, I seem to recall the quality of animation in the video game was actually better than what they served up on TV on Saturday mornings. (full episode)

Saturday Morning Cartoons - When Video Games Ruled the Airwaves Part 1

The early 1980s were the golden age of video games as well as cartoons, so it was only a matter of time before TV networks and their animation production houses got the idea to merge the two in an orgy of marketing. For a couple of years, it seemed like every other show on Saturday morning was based on a video game, with some networks packaging them into hour-long programming blocks. Some were fun, others were typical cotton-candy storytelling, but because the games they were based on were so hot, everyone I knew watched the spinoff cartoons.

Video game-inspired cartoons were so popular that there were too many for me to include in just one post, so this is going to be a multiparter over the next couple of weeks.

Grab a stack of quarters and tell the kid behind you that you're gonna be a while — it's time for the Saturday morning cartoon rewatch!

First up: Frogger. How the writers and producers got from a game that was about getting a frog across a busy highway and hazardous river without getting killed to a show about a reporter and his sidekicks solving mysteries is beyond me, but that's the direction they went in for this spinoff. While I admit that I was a regular watcher of this show, I have to state categorically that it had no influence on my decision to be a reporter later in life. Of course, there were some similarities: the way the corporate end of the private radio industry in Canada works, sometimes I did feel like I'd been run over by a truck. (intro)

If there was going to be a whole new lineup of cartoons based on popular video games, there was no way producers would overlook the king of them all: Pac-man. Sure, by the time these shows came out, video games had become more sophisticated in terms of digital appearance and skill challenge, but Pac-man was a classic that still sucked down plenty of quarters at the arcades, and was a must-include when Atari first came out with its roster of cartridges for its home gaming system. At the arcade, I was always more of a fan of Ms Pac-man (especially if it was on a sit-down table model machine), but I didn't turn my nose up when Mr got his show on Saturday morning. I have to confess though, I have absolutely no memory of what the show was about, or what Pac-man did on it when he wasn't battling ghost monsters or hanging out with his family. (intro)

And to finish off with something slightly more cool, there's Dragon's Lair. This show was a rare example of double cross-pollination, where not only did the video game inspire the cartoon, but the look of the video game itself was inspired by cartoons. While this level of graphic illustration may be more-or-less commonplace today, back in the old days you would have seen huge crowds of kids clustered around the Dragon's Lair machines just to watch this slick-looking game. And so, when the cartoon version hit the air on Saturday morning, we all had to watch. Which was more fun than actually playing the video game itself. Over the years, pretty much anyone I've talked to about this arcade classic agrees that it was a total waste of money to play because the game never gave players much warning that it was about to shift from the extended animated no-play filler sequences to the actual player-controlled game sections; once the game sections did get under way, the control systems were very clumsy and the hero, Dirk the Derring, rarely did onscreen what the player was trying to get him to do; and the game-play sequences were very fast and inevitably fatal. Better to just save the effort of fighting through the crowd of bigger kids to get a turn to play, forget the joystick, hold on to your quarters, and watch the show on Saturday morning from the comfort of your own chesterfield in your own living room. (multiple episodes)

Saturday Morning Cartoons - Science Fiction Shows that Felt Like Fantasy

It's pretty common in the speculative fiction universe for the worlds of science fiction and fantasy to collide. Sure, there are the purists in the fan community that stomp their feet and insist on strongly demarcated lines between the two and stout defences to enforce that separation, but most of us are willing to accept the crossover as long as the story is good. After all, this kind of cross-pollination has given us Star Wars, Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories, and plenty of others that we could probably name if we wanted to take the time. And when it comes to the broader audience outside of fandom and its consuming of pop culture sf, nobody cares if their chocolate gets mixed with their peanut butter.

So it should come as no surprise that when mainstream production companies were manufacturing science fiction cartoons for kids back in the 80s (and in some cases as early as the 60s), it was pretty common to throw in elements of fantasy. That was just fine with me and my friends, because when we were re-enacting episodes in the school yard, or inventing our own stories based on those cartoons, everyone thought it was entirely appropriate to counter a laser gun with a magic wand.

This week's Saturday morning cartoon rewatch looks at a couple of science fiction-fantasy crossovers that I most enjoyed in the old days:


Thundarr the Barbarian. Set thousands of years in the future, after a cosmic near-miss caused natural disasters that devastated the planet, this show followed the exploits of the titular hero, Thundarr, with his light sabre ripoff sword, princess girlfriend, and wookiee-ripoff sidekick. Think Han Solo (with Luke's light sabre), Leia, and Chewie yanked out of Star Wars and dropped into a Mad Max/Canticle for Leibowitz-style Earth with D&D-style monsters and magic-wielding sorcerers thrown in for good measure. (intro)

Next, we head offworld to join the adventures of Blackstar. A sort of hybrid Flash Gordon-He-Man, Blackstar was about an astronaut who crashes on another planet, falls in with the 7 Dwarfs, er, "tiny Trobbit people", gets his hands on a magic sword, and fights a big bad guy for supremacy. Oh yeah, he's also got a cool reptilian pegasus. (full episode)

We'll finish with The Herculoids. I'm not sure if this one actually had magic in it, but I have a feeling it did, since, like the others, it was a Flash Gordon-esque throw-everything-including-the-kitchen-sink-at-the-story kind of approach to kids' sf. In this show, a futuristic family and their rather unusual pets fight to defend their world from a variety of monsters and maniacs. (intro)

And since you're probably already thinking it: yes, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe would be entirely appropriate for this post, but blondie's already had his day in another edition.

Stay tuned until next week, for another episode of the Saturday morning cartoon rewatch!

Saturday Morning Cartoons - Toy and Game Marketing Gone Wild

Ah, Saturday morning cartoons. When they weren't trying to get you to buy hyper-sugared cereals during the commercial breaks, they were all about encouraging you to buy the toys and games they were based on. (Mostly. To be fair, there were some shows that weren't based on pre-existing toys or games, and didn't have any merchandising developed after they went to air either, but those were very much in the minority.)

In this instalment, we have two shows that epitomized this:

Dungeons & Dragons (full episode):

...and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (full episode):