Aaah, '80s cartoons. Every day we had oodles and oodles of interesting stuff dancing before our eyes like a happy cutesy land of magic... Heroes, villians, damsels in distress (this was waaay before Xena Warrior Princess) and sidekicks with silly voices. Back then, imagination was a coin one could easily pay to enter the world of fantasy. They say you either love the fantasy genre or you hate it - there's no in-between.
I first rediscovered my much-missed childhood a couple of years ago, when I stumbled across X-Entertainment.com - Rainbow Brite, Bravestarr, the Thundercats even, came back to life. I remembered Transformers! I loved Bionic Six! And the Blinkins - I only ever saw three episodes. One day I shall have a lot of file-sharing to do. I subsequently discovered Purrsia's Return To Thundera homepage, with more stuff on it than you can shake a pair of colour-coded nunchucks at. The possibilities are endless! (btw, did you know there is more information in one newspaper than the average mediaeval peasant assimilated in a lifetime? So, with all the info on the web, I realised I could choose what to overload on... X-Entertainment's reviews of bad-trippy movies. Jelly moulds of Krang. Screeds of silly blog pertaining to same. Oh, and reviews of Thundercats eps. There's this thing called LFS - Lion-o Flake Syndrome. The stupid bugger was always messing up somehow).
I absolutely loved Rainbow Brite. I know all girls were supposed to, but I had this thing about the coloured sprinkles. They mined them and sorted them and packed them neatly in storage... I'd be the kid standing at the production line trying to optimise efficiency. Although I didn't know systems analysis even existed back then, and I was pers'nally a lot more interested in stealing Rainbow Brite's horse. At least her mining operation would have been so much more organised. No letting the little munchkin-lemmings punch in late, either.
Bravestarr was enjoyable but weird. It was like, all the villians smoked heavily, and coughed and choked and wheezed copiously. You knew the "bad guys" were the idiots on the flying bulls who smoked too much. The good guys, on the other hand, sat around cleaning their guns a lot, whilst making fun of cute little mining munchkin-lemmings with South American accents. What I learned from all this? All miners in the universe are small and furry and talk funny. If people talk funny or have a different accent, patronise them at will. Oh, Guns Are Fun, but Smoking Can Kill You. There was possibly a sub-theme to do with reversing the Lone Ranger/Tonto stereotypes, but this isn't Psych 101. We can skip that.
He-Man was a bad trip in a bottle. It's like they went out and found all the crackheads in California and got them to write kids' T.V. They then got a bunch of Japanese animators to animate same. The result? Cross-cultural weird. That is, if they went to the same people who did Thundercats. I think so, because the upper thigh-muscles of all the characters moved similarly. I also noticed that Gargoyles was animated in a way very similar to that of Thundercats - if you don't believe me, look at the fingers. Ex-act-ly the same. Yes, I've got serious similarities to Adrian Monk. It disturbs me, too.
Why, exactly, was the good guys's castle called "grey-skull"? Did it not make anyone else go eeeeeeeeuw? Too many dead bones around this place already? A grey skull is a symbol of death, and the bad guy was a walking skeleton! Didn't anyone else notice that he had no face? {{*gag*}} So he-boy or man-girl or whatever (someone sat down one day and said: we need a character with a manly name) ran around doing things "By the Power of Death! Haha!" I find it rather confusing. However, this odd show wasn't enough trippy for one decade - there wasn't enough girly in it, so they pinkified it (essential for the making of girly), added a horse (equally essential) that could fly, put in some more chicks with different colours of hair (mechandising opportunities, i.e. Barbie on acid), and created some really buggy-type villians. They then stuck it on another planet, and some really intelligent assistant manager ('ass man' for short) said: lets make the central character female! Girl + Horse + Villian trying to take over universe = Money!!! And the boys will buy the villians, especially Moduluk (rhymes with yuck), which will keep the little buggers amused for hours (thank goodness. Less spitting in our hair, for one thing. Or being chased with locusts. I learned to pretend never to be afraid of slimy animals; I can still pick up frogs and earthworms without flinching).
The same Ass. Man. (Ha... ha) then named his girly creation "She-Ra". I suppose "She-Woman" didn't have enough zing, and Egyptian sungods appeared quite frequently in the daydreams of afore-mentioned crackheads. Although why He-boy and weird-Girl were brother and sister, I'll never know. How did she end up in another dimension, anyway? Was it the THIRD dimension? {{*wild hilarity, and much biting of keyboard to stifle laughter*)}. Wa-hahahaaaa! Sorry. I know people are still wildly in love with the shows, viz the recent revival of MOTU (Matt on X-Entertainment was practically drooling, but boys do that a lot anyway - although usually over cars. In Grease, the girls sing about boys and the boys sing about cars. That's the difference between the sexes in a nutshell). Why is everyone so crazy about it? Drop me a line and tell me, wouldya. To me, it's so silly that anyone would even think it up as a concept. What bugs me, is the need to use over-the-top evil undead creatures as villians. (Oh, and Orco. What the...heck was Orco?) I mean, is it necessary to scare 5-year-olds, who already have monsters under their beds to deal with, by resurrecting the half-gooey undead? Yeurrkk.
Which brings me to Mum-ra (yup, crackheads dreaming about Egyptian sungods again. Note that they never used the giant dung-beetle god that rolled the sun across the sky as a supervillian. Too many teeth, probably). WHY, tell me, was it necessary to have an idiotic undead mummy flying around like the opposite of a deus ex machina to further terrify 5-year-olds (by now almost catatonic anyway) when the fink didn't even show up for half the episodes? Too busy watching pirated movies on the slimepit, probably. Purrsia calls him "Mumra the ever-spying". Haha. Calling on ancient evil spirits to transform him into the "ever-living". That's necromancy AND satanic occultism, then. Why pollute the innocent minds of children with this dreck? Surely they could've thought up a villian that wasn't part Victorian Prohibitory Monster (keeps the children in bed at night, as too terrified to put foot on floor - IT's under the bed, and IT's going to get ya...) and part Japanese temple-eating demon. Just look at Japanese Opera masks. There's Mumra, with red eyebrows.
If you think about it, why not just have a villian with living flesh on his bones? A mad scientist/bandit king/space pirate? There wouldn't have been much difference to the plots, anyway. He could've flown through the air on a mechanical sleigh like a mean, nasty version of Santa Claus, which is enough horror for any 5-year-old. Or, and here's a thought, how about a pretty, shiny, twinkly evil enemy? Like the Fairy Godmother in Shrek 2, or a twisted My Little Pony? (See 'Fake Chia Plot'). I think evil can be beautiful, like a high-fat chocolate cake. See how the sprinkles glitter... before you know it, it's got you hooked, and you're a sugar freak, like me. Or a caffeine addict (same). Although the whole concept of "catch-'em-with-shiny-twinkly-things" worked very well on She-ra, in spite of all the girly. It was just too damn girly, come to think of it. I like cartoons with some substance, like cake that has hidden layers of Caramel Treat (if you've never tasted caramel treat, I urge you, fly to South Africa now!!! Before they decide to stop making it!!! Hurry!!! - I could eat it by the bucketload. But I digress). Lady Lovely Locks was another show that just had too much girly in it. Pretty hair... Everywhere. Sounds like a shampoo commercial.
There should've been serious issues in all the girly cartoons, but NOT stupid morals to every story, don't misunderstand me. Teenage Mutant Ninja Horsies (oops, did I get it wrong?) and their Say No To Drugs Campaigns, or the whole Never-talk-to-Strangers thing sort of got on my nerves after a while. Kids are smart, after all. They're like tigers - they can smell fear metres away, and attack accordingly. (This is why I decided against becoming a primary-school teacher). Seven-year-olds shouldn't have to worry about drugs, especially ones like Prozac and Ritalin. Or be taught how to bloody-well use condoms - can you see Tygra and Cheetara trying to demonstrate condom use to Lion-o? If Lion-o was in a position to use them. We all know how odd the T-cats looked in the first episode. I don't know what Snarf would've said - he had a way of making penetrating (oops - sorry) remarks.
