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SUNDAY Morning Cartoons
By: Hoju Koolander
The 30 year period from the 1970s to the early 2000's where kids woke up early to watch hours of Saturday Morning Cartoons on their local network affiliates was a magical time that bonds many nostalgic hearts together. But what many grown up kids forget is that there was a whole weekend of kids programming available in those years and though Saturdays were definitely prime time, Sunday Morning Cartoons will always have a special place in my heart.
On Sundays from 6-9AM, I would cram in as many of these syndicated, b-level cartoon shows as I could before I was stuffed into a button down shirt and a pair of penny loafers for church. It's a weekly tradition I took part in through the latter half of the 80s and I'm excited to find out if you remember these shows as well.
Casper and Friends
While this friendly little ghost would eventually have an attempt at relevance with a couple of 90's live action films, Casper never had the same old timey cartoon star power as a Popeye or Woody Woodpecker in my mind. It's fitting then that he would be in the graveyard timeslot of my TV watching on Sunday mornings.
The short animated adventures of Casper unintentionally scaring the living were always accompanied by other C-grade Harvey Comics characters like Baby Huey or Little Audrey. The problem was that they all lacked the madcap laughs of Looney Tunes that could have made them memorable. I did always wonder why Richie Rich never had his own cartoon segment as part of this series, it would have really given Casper a popularity boost.
Spider-Woman
Everybody remembers the 60's Spider-Man cartoon and its iconic theme, but I never hear anybody talk about Spider-Woman from 1979. The character was introduced in Marvel Comics to secure the copyright for the name before someone else did, but aside from wall crawling, Jessica Drew (her alter ego) had a power set that was totally different than Peter Parker's.
Spider-Woman could fly, shoot energy laced Venom Blasts and communicate with spiders when she needed to. Of course she could also shoot webs from her finger tips, though they seemed to be more energy based. I especially remember the episode where Spider-Woman and Spider-Man teamed up to fight off a hoard of invading alien mummies as being a highlight of the series.
Fantastic Max
This clever animated adventure series about an infant with a wild imagination was worthy of Saturday mornings, so I don't know why the big networks never picked it up. It was one part Muppet Babies and one part Rugrats with a dash of Flash Gordon in the mix. It's the rare case of a main character doing a baby talk voice that I don't find insanely annoying.
Max had a robot babysitter made of blocks named A.B. and an alien doll named FX who could create magical objects by twirling his antennae. In fact FX was voiced by Nancy Cartwright, who would go on to legendary status as the voice of Bart Simpson for nearly 30 years at this point. If you've never seen it, you really should check out a few episodes.
Marvel Action Universe: Dino Riders/Robocop
Marvel Productions produced a few animated tie-in series for action figure lines and in this case combined them into a syndicated cartoon block called the Marvel Action Universe. This is where I first saw the Pryde of the X-Men animated pilot, but normally it was a double shot of Robocop and Dino-Riders.
Robocop was understandably toned down from the R-rated action of the 1987 film, but it still maintained the same setting of Old Detroit and futuristic bad guys. Even Murphy's partner Anne Lewis made the jump to this animated universe. The Robocop and the Ultra Police toys by Kenner were a pretty fun way to continue the action after that week's adventure was wrapped up. These Robocop figures featured cap firing sound effects and even glow in the dark armor, which was totally rad for 80s kids.
Dino-Riders was a toy line concept developed by Tyco where 2 warring groups of space people were transported back to prehistoric times and outfitted dinosaurs with futuristic battle tech. The characters on the show were unfortunately pretty generic and never quite caught my interest, but I played with the toys at my friend's house all the time. Episodes of this series were readily available at toy stores on VHS to enhance your play experience.
The Comic Strip
This block of cartoons produced by Rankin-Bass (best known for those old stop-motion Christmas specials) was thematically appropriate for Sundays, since that's when the "Funny Pages" showed up in the newspaper. Surprisingly though, none of these animated segments were based on existing comic strip properties.
TigerSharks is probably the best remembered of the 4 shows, since it had a similar look to Silverhawks (also produced by Rankin-Bass). It wasn't a total rip-off though, after all, the Silverhawks didn't have an awesome pool of water that transformed them into shark, dolphin or walrus people. It was a really neat concept, I just don't think the character designs looked cool enough to grab kids attention, especially that Octopus head girl, weird.
Karate Kat was actually a rip-off of Hanna-Barbera's old Hong Kong Phooey cartoon. All they did was swap out a Kung Fu janitor dog voiced by Scatman Carothers for a martial arts loving private detective cat voiced by an actor doing a poor Rodney Dangerfield impression. His catch phrase of, "I'm lean, I'm mean, a karate machine" was said so slowly, it always undercut the action. This was the weakest of the Comic Strip characters.
Street Frogs was a really hip (for the time) and entertaining little show which in retrospect plays like an animated version of Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing without the racial tension. It even had a female character named "Honey Love" who sounded like Rosie Perez. The stories centered around a crew of a hip-hop frogs who rapped, beat-boxed and break danced their way through wild adventures in their urban neighborhood.
Mini Monsters was basically Camp Candy mixed with fellow SCTV alumni, Rick Moranis' Gravedale High (if you remember that obscure animated show). Each episode featured a problem at Camp MiniMon where the campers were all children of the classic Universal movie monsters or mythical figures.The strength of this show was that all of the characters were distinct, especially the Mummy kid with a single boxing glove, I Ioved that guy. There was also a normal kid named Sherman, who was voiced by a young Seth Green.
The one glaring omission on this list are the religious kids shows like SuperBook or Davey and Goliath, which were in actuality the most appropriate for Sunday viewing. That being said, they were booooring. By the time these shows came on I was begging to go to church, so my exposure was limited to a single episode of each that somehow survived on an old VHS tape and were promptly fast forwarded through.
So which of these cartoons do you remember from Sunday mornings? What did I miss?
Follow me on Twitter @hojukoolander for more reminiscing about old cartoons.
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