Twenty Children’s Shows That Made An Impact On Me

It’s another holiday, so it’s time for another one of these semi-purposeless lists. When I was growing up back in the 1970s, the options for entertainment were slim for a kid. There were only three main broadcast channels, plus PBS and a couple of syndication stations. Nothing like today, when there are entire stations dedicated to running nothing but cartoons and streaming means that you can watch pretty much whatever you like whenever you like. Accordingly, over the years, there were a lot of shows that I watched because they were there as much as anything. But a number of these programs became important and fundamental to my mental make-up. So here, as a nostalgic effort if nothing else, are Twenty (couldn’t keep it to Fifteen) Children’s Shows That Made An Impact On Me.

1.GIGANTOR: I watched Gigantor as a very young child of maybe three years of age, and it was taken off the air before too long in the same crackdown against violence in children’s television that eliminated all of the super hero cartoons of that era. For years, I couldn’t even remember the show’s name, just that there was a kid with a box with two levers with which he controlled a mighty giant robot. Gigantor was the Americanized version of the Japanese cartoon TETSUJIN 28, imported, re-edited and dubbed into English. So it was my very first anime, unknowingly.

2. UNDERDOG: My first super hero show, I took Underdog very seriously at the age of three. And in fact, I can remember certain episodes terrifying me, such as the one in which Simon Bar Sinister replaces all of the phone booths in the city with his mind-controlling “Phony Booths”. This was a show that I loved and which stayed with me in a big way. It was clever, and its episodic structure (most Underdog stories were divided up into four chapters) was very compelling at a young age. I also liked the material from other shows that they mixed into the syndication package, in particular Tennessee Tuxedo and the commander McBragg shorts. I wound up inspired by the ethos of Underdog when we were working on UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL, and so Doreen’s tendency to help solve her villains’ underlying problems came directly from my memories of this show.

3. SPEED RACER: Speed somehow avoided the crackdown on animated violence for a slightly longer time, which meant that I had stronger memories of it as a program before it too eventually disappeared from the airwaves. It was another Japanese import, this one modified from MACH GO GO GO, and it was just about the most exciting cartoon there was at the age of four. Like every kid, I lusted after the Mach 5 with its built-in gizmos and sleek lines. The show was also an influence on me in that it puts forward what I tend to think of as a “sports manga ethos”; which is to say, in teh world of Speed Racer, there is nothing more important than automobile racing.

4. COURAGEOUS CAT AND MINUTE MOUSE: I clearly had a predilection towards super hero shows even before I started reading comics regularly. Courageous Cat was the creation of Batman’s Bob Kane–I say “creation” in the loosest of terms, though, because this show was literally just an anthropomorphized version of Batman. Courageous and Minute drove a Catmobile, headquartered in a Cat Cave, and flew a Cat-Plane, and they tangled with colorful villains, the best of which was the Edward G. Robinson sound-alike, the Frog. Rather than a utility belt, Courageous had a seemingly endless supply of specialty ray runs that he’d pull out of nowhere from beneath his cape. In all honesty, this is a pretty crummy cartoon–but I was a faithful follower of it at the age of four.

5. SPIDER-MAN: You couldn’t live in the New York area and not be familiar with Spider-Man, it ran in the afternoons on Channel 5 for more than a decade. Again here, i was a regular viewer well before I started following the comic books. Tellingly, when I first began watching the show at the age of four, I didn’t understand Spidey’s web-shooters. I imagined that he had rather strung up lines all around town from which he would swing like Tarzan. Hey, I never said that I was especially bright. This wasn’t a great show, but it was a good one, depending on which episodes from which season you happened to luck into, and these are still the voices that I hear in my head when I read a Spidey comic book today. And the theme song and incidental music remains epic. It drives me absolutely nutty that when the series was remastered for DVD release that the opening song was misaligned from the graphics–the beats are supposed to hit as the logo comes forward, as in this example.

6. THE ELECTRIC COMPANY: I was a first generation SESAME STREET viewer as a child, but it was really the children’s Television Workshop’s follow-up series devoted to teaching kids to read that I connected with. This was essentially Saturday Night Live but with phonics, and I loved the cast and many of the recurring characters, particularly Fargo North, Decoder and the animated Letterman. A season or two in, I was happy to see that Spider-Man had joined the cast–and I had no problem understanding that this was both the same character and a different iteration than the one in the cartoons. I outgrew the show before it went off the air, but not before I had plagiarized at least one sketch for a grade school assignment.

7. BATMAN: Similar to SPIDER-MAN, BATMAN played in syndication on Channel 11 for years and years and was welcome appointment afternoon viewing. And as a kid, like every other kid, I took it completely seriously. The show’s place in history has been positively re-evaluated in the years since it went off the air, but for years it was considered a mark of shame to admit liking it. But that was never something that I had a problem with. The best episodes remain the ones from the first season, when the format and formula was still new, but as a kid I can remember watching teh credits avidly every afternoon in the hopes that Batgirl would ride by on her motorcycle, indicating that she’d be guest-starring in that day’s episode. The Green Hornet crossover, on the other hand, I didn’t have a lot of love for. By that point, I was reading comics and I knew that the Hornet wasn’t a genuine DC character. That made him “wrong”, an impostor, to my mind, despite his credentials elsewhere.

8. ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN: Like BATMAN, this show played forever on Channel 11 and was just as much appointment viewing in my household. The color episodes got the most airplay–even then, the black and white shows didn’t attract as many young viewers. But it was exciting to me whenever they’d come around, as I hadn’t seen those stories to death as I had the color ones. In particular, it would be years before I’d finally get to see the second half of “The Unknown People”, the two-part pilot movie–circumstances caused me to miss it time and time again, frustratingly. This was a simple show that looks its age today, but the entire cast: George Reeves, Noel Neill, Jack Larsen and John Hamilton are the quintessential embodiments of these characters in my mind, even when I like other performers in the roles better. The episodes that were most often pined for by me, apart from the elusive Part Two, were the ones in which Superman would display some new power, such as becoming immaterial or splitting himself into two people. Canon? What’s that?

9. YOGI’S GANG: This one I don’t have any justification for, but I loved it at the time all the same. YOGI’S GANG grouped together all of the mainstay Hanna-Barbera characters into a single series. It started out as a made-for-TV movie in which Yogi builds a flying ark in order to transport himself and his friends to “The Perfect Place” where they can escape pollution. That film was successful enough that it was turned into a regular series. It was about as naked a propaganda piece as I’ve ever seen, with each episode containing not just an obvious moral message but also a plot that was overtly about combatting pollution or doing the right thing. Still, there was something about that flying ark ship and the fact that such a broad group of familiar characters (whose original shows were still being rerun in syndication) were all together in one place. It was kind of like a cartoon CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS.

10, SUPER FRIENDS: This show was just as nakedly message-based in its first season, but I really didn’t care. By this point I had started reading comics and so I was familiar with all of these characters and loved them unreservedly. I did feel a little bit talked down to by the Super Friends name–I knew that this was the Justice League of America and resented the kidification of that august body. There was no more exciting day in my young life than when the episode aired that guest-starred my favorite super hero, the Flash. The guest-appearance by Green Arrow was also welcome, but I bristled at Plastic Man’s cameo, irritated that they hadn’t used actual League member the Elongated Man instead. To this day, I still prefer the early message episodes over the later Wonder Twins ones, though I watched the show through a number of its evolutions, especially when favorites such as Green Lantern or Flash would be a part of the story. (I also had no patience for the home-grown heroes such as Black Vulcan, El Dorado, Apache Chief and the like. They weren’t “real”.)

11. THE LOST SAUCER: Saturday morning television used to be full of cheap low-budget live action programming as well as cheap cartoons. I wasn’t really into most of those sorts of shows, but every once in a while, one of them would connect with me. So it was with this Sid and Marty Krofft production starring Jim Neighbors and Ruth Buzzi as a pair of time-traveling robots named Fum and Fi who picked up a couple contemporary kids and wound up unable to get them properly home, leading to a string of wacky adventures in time propelled by their flying saucer. What most viewers remember from this series, outside of the stock footage use and the bad chromakey special effects was the “Dorse”, an alien pet that was half-sheepdog and half horse. In a weird sort of way, this show primed the pump for me to watch DOCTOR WHO years later, as the fundamental set-up is pretty similar.

12. WONDERBUG: When advertising began for the upcoming season’s big 90 minute program THE KROFFT SUPER SHOW, the segment I was most primed for was ELEKTRA WOMAN AND DYNA GIRL, of course–it was a super hero segment, of course. And I liked it well enough. But somehow, I wound up liking WONDERBUG even more. Possibly, that was because it contained a number of familiar elements. A junior-grade Mod Squad of kids (whose names I can still recall without looking it up: Barry, Susan and C.C.) find a magic horn that transforms their broken down old wreck into a supercar. Nobody ever questions the fact that the car is anthropomorphic even before its transformation, this is a kids’ show, all right? Looking back, it’s a pretty crummy production, but s with so many of these things, imagination took over from there to make it all work. The second year, when the segment had been rotated out in favor of the execrable MAGIC MONGO, I was devastated.

13. THE MAGIC GARDEN: Airing in the afternoon around lunch time, THE MAGIC GARDEN was a show that could only be enjoyed during summer break from school or on any day when you happened to be home sick. So that gave it a quality of specialness. It’s the kind of show that simply isn’t done anymore, in which a few performers with a couple of cheap props entertain children for a half an hour and impart some basic messages about living a good life and being a good person. It was very much steeped in the flower culture of the late 1960s. Hosts Carol and Paula were always cheerful and approachable somehow, and the low-rent storybook segments and puppet pieces worked despite those limitations due to a kid’s suspension of disbelief. It’s a thoroughly pleasant program, and I still find it charming after all of these years.

14. THE MARVEL SUPER HEROES: I was steadfastly not a fan of Marvel’s comics as a young kid, having sampled a few and found them to be not to my tastes at all. But it was still pretty exciting when my father told me that a new UHF station was about to start broadcasting the MARVEL SUPER HEROES cartoons. Despite my dislike, I watched the show faithfully, at least for the small number of weeks that the station (Channel 45) was in business. These were the crudest of the crude cartoons, largely made up of images from the early comics that had been slightly animated to make the mouths move. But that very faithfulness to the source material is what attracted me to them. I’d get to watch the run a lot more a few years later once the success of CBS’s live action INCREDIBLE HULK television show helped bring these cartoons back into syndication under the title THE INCREDIBLE HULK AND FRIENDS. By that point, I would follow along in my copies of MARVEL COLLECTORS’ ITEM CLASSICS and the like whenever a familiar story would show up.

15. FANTASTIC VOYAGE: But the big discovery on teh short-lived Channel 45 aired immediately after MARVEL SUPER HEROES. FANTASTIC VOYAGE was a wonderful synthesis of everything that was great in the 1960s, a cross between STAR TREK, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, MARVEL COMICS and of course the film about surgeons being shrunk to miniature size so that they can operate on an important diplomat from the inside. It was about a team of four special agents of the Combined Miniature Defense Force–Commander Jonathan Kidd, Guru (master of mysterious powers), Dr. Erica Lane and pilot Busby Birdwell–who would be shrunk down to tiny size in order to perform acts of counter-espionage and keep the free world safe from enemy aggression. This is another show that, for years after I saw it, I couldn’t remember its name, but the characters and its design sense really stuck with me. In particular, I loved the Voyager, which had a clean, simple design than almost resembled a paper plane. The opening title sequence is still about as cool and thrilling as anything produced in this era.

16. THE YOUNG SENTINELS: This was a pretty good super hero cartoon that aired in the mid-late 1970s during a time when programming had largely been handed over to cartoon animals and the like. It featured a trio of heroes, Hercules, Astrea and Mercury, who had been trained for years on another planet to become the guardians of our world. I remember it being a decent show, and played very straight as an adventure program despite the fact that each episode carried the obligatory pro-social message. It was initially released as THE YOUNG SENTINELS, but after STAR WARS became a massive hit, it was quickly redubbed as THE SPACE SENTINELS, which is how you see it above. I also seem to recall that for some reason Astrea tended to dominate the episodes, leaving little for Hercules and Mercury to do, but that could just be a trick of my memory.

17. HANNA BARBERA’S WORLD OF SUPER ADVENTURE: This was a catch-all syndication package put together by Hanna-Barbera at the point where the restrictions on children’s programming began to be loosened up. It covered just about every short-run adventure and super hero series the studio had produced in the 1960s, everything from the Herculoids to the Impossibles. But for me, the real reason to follow the show was for when the rotation would come around to the small run of FANTASTIC FOUR episodes that the company had produced back in 1967. I was a huge FF fan at the time, so getting to see these lost episodes was a big deal for me, and made it worth wading through weeks of lesser (though still somewhat entertaining) efforts.

18. BATTLE OF THE PLANETS: The success of STAR WARS opened up the floodgates of imaginative programming, which led to a number of releases that had a huge impact on me. The first of which was BATTLE OF THE PLANETS. Like GIGANTOR and SPEED RACER, it was a reworked Japanese import, this time of the 1972 show SCIENCE NINJA TEAM GATCHAMAN. But in order to make it seem like a space series, much of the action was said to be taking place on other worlds rather than on Earth. Additionally, the need to edit out the more extreme violence from the series led to the creation of interstitial material featuring the cute STAR WARS-style robot 7-Zark-7. Still, the new opening titles and music were good, and the show largely maintained the original GATCHAMAN score (though it often skips whenever an edit has been made, an obvious tell.) As a young would-be cartoonist, this show was a massive influence on my own efforts–all of my homegrown super hero teams for the next couple of years would fly Phoenix-inspired ships.

19. STAR BLAZERS: Likely the single largest influence upon me of any television series or film, I didn’t even like STAR BLAZERS when it first premiered. Next to BATTLE OF THE PLANETS, the designs looked crude and the space saga seemed difficult to understand or connect with. it wasn’t super heroes. it wasn’t until my family relocated to Delaware a year or two later that I connected with the series and its strong serialized storytelling. An Americanized version of the Japanese SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO, STAR BLAZERS kept the original music score intact and didn’t shy away from the serialized nature of its two seasons (the third season was dubbed years later by a different team and added to teh syndication package in teh few areas where the show was still playing.) This was also my entry into anime fandom, which opened up entire vistas of programming to me. And yes, the American lyrics are completely corny (and were often used to mock fans of the show) but I like the fact that they’re also so earnest and on-point as to the themes of the show.

20. MIGHTY ORBOTS: By the time that MIGHTY ORBOTS had come to Saturday mornings, I was already getting deeply enmeshed in the world of anime. But this co-production with Japanese studio TMS had great designs, some lovely animation, a strong score and a killer opening title sequence. It very much felt like the Metal Men crossed with a Japanese combining robot cartoon such as GODMARS, and I was there for it. Sadly, the show only lasted a single season, put out of business by the makers of GO-BOTS, who claimed that the similarity of titles would cause confusion in the marketplace. The individual episodes are often hit-or-miss, but any moment where they run one of the brilliantly animated combiner sequences is pure gold.