The Cartoons That Shaped an 80s Childhood

A large number of the cartoons that defined the decade existed to sell toys, and this is not a cynical reading. It was the business model, openly.

Regulation of children's television advertising in the United States was substantially relaxed in the mid-1980s, and one consequence was that a toy line and a show could be developed together, with the show functioning as a half-hour advertisement for the product. Several of the most beloved series of the decade came out of exactly that arrangement.

The format was fixed by economics

Twenty-two minutes, a large cast, a self-contained plot, and a status quo that reset by the end of every episode.

The reset was essential. Episodes were shown out of order in syndication, so nothing could carry over. No character could change permanently, nobody could win conclusively, and the situation at the start of episode forty had to be identical to episode one.

The large cast was also commercial. More characters means more figures to sell, which is why so many of these shows had rosters of fifteen or twenty named characters, most of whom did almost nothing.

None of that produced good writing and all of it produced extremely memorable design, because when a character has four lines a season, the only thing carrying them is how they look.

The animation was cheap and worked anyway

Budgets were low and the techniques used to manage that are visible in every episode.

Reused animation for anything that happened repeatedly: transformations, vehicles launching, the same three-second sequence appearing forty times across a season. Limited animation, where only the mouth and one arm move. Backgrounds held while characters cycled through a short loop of frames.

Once you notice it, you cannot stop noticing it. And it did not matter at all to the audience, who were seven and were not evaluating frame rates.

The one place the money went was the opening titles, which were animated properly, at full rate, with the best artwork the production could afford. Those thirty seconds were the show's advertisement and everybody remembers them better than any episode.

The moral at the end

A number of these shows closed with a short segment addressing the audience directly with a lesson, usually unrelated to anything that had happened in the story.

This existed partly because it made the shows easier to defend against criticism that they were toy commercials. A programme with an educational component is a different kind of object to a regulator and to a concerned parent.

Children universally regarded these segments as the end of the episode and left the room. Nobody was persuaded of anything. They remain one of the most fondly parodied features of the decade, which is a strange fate for a compliance measure.

The characters were designed before the stories

Because the toy came first in a lot of cases, the design work was done to a completely different brief: does this read at seven centimeters tall in plastic, and does it look distinct on a shelf next to thirty others.

That produces very strong silhouettes, high-contrast colour schemes, and one memorable feature per character. It is essentially the same design logic as a good logo.

Which is why the character designs have outlasted everything else about these shows. Nobody can recall the plots. Everybody can draw the characters from memory, because they were engineered to be recognizable above all else.

Saturday morning was the whole distribution model

These shows lived in a block on one morning a week, or in a strip after school, and both were fixed windows with no alternative.

Miss it and you missed it. Which is why children woke up early on their day off, voluntarily, and why the end of the block was a genuine event in a week.

The scarcity is doing a lot of the work in how these are remembered. A show you had to be present for at a specific hour is a different object to a show sitting in a library available at any time.

Were they good

Mostly no, as television. The writing was constrained, the animation was cheap, the plots were repetitive by design, and the whole enterprise was structured around moving product.

What they were exceptionally good at was world-building at a surface level. A large cast, a clear conflict, distinctive designs, and a premise a child could immediately extend on a carpet with plastic figures.

That last part is the real achievement, and it was probably accidental. The shows were incomplete in a way that left room, and a generation of children filled the gap themselves for several hours a week. The cartoons get the credit and most of the actual work was done on the floor afterward.