Now, this is an interesting thread idea. It's given me an excuse to go youtubing for some seriously weird shit from my childhood.
To make it even more interesting, I will restrict myself to only obscure and almost totally forgotten shows.
When I was in 4th or 5th grade, there was a show called
Saber Rider. Wow, the theme song was even more inane than I remember.
Now, in the 80's, there were a million giant transforming robot cartoons and they all had the same voice actors. This show was clearly a Voltron knockoff but with a silly cowboy western theme.
Why this show stands out for me is two things.
First, rather than coming on after school, like Transformers and G.I. Joe, this came on at like 6:00 or 6:30 AM. Even in 5th grade, that was pretty fucking early to be getting up. But Saber Rider was juuuuust barely good enough to get me to wake up and watch it.
Second, the part of the show that I always remembered, the phrase that has stuck with me through the years was that when the ship transformed into a robot, the cute chick would always say
"Ramrod will now take navigational control".
Holy shit, I just watched that for the first time in 20 years! God bless youtube! Anyway, in every episode she would say that. I don't remember the names of any of the characters, the premise, but I always remembered that phrase.
One of my earliest childhood memories was watching a show called
Battle Of The Planets. Jesus, this would have been around 1980. At least a couple years before kindergarden.
Not too obscure but there was a show on Nickelodeon called
Pinwheel. For some reason, I never liked it much. It was like Sesame Street but with a weird kinda avante garde vibe.
And the theme song sounded too much like
the comercial from Halloween III for my tastes. OK, looking back, they don't sound THAT much alike but at the time they did.
Listen up, kids... You see, in my day, we didn't have as many entertainment options as you got nowadays. These days, you got 3-4 cable channels devoted to nothing but cartoons. 24 hours a day. 7 days a week.
In my day, you had maybe an hour or two of cartoons that came on after school. Maybe a few a couple before school. But on Saturday mornings, shit... You had like five straight hours of cartoons. And not on UHF either. This was on the 3 major networks (we only had three back then)
Ask anyone over 30 and they will tell you. Saturday morning was a fucking ritual for a kid. They don't have Saturday morning cartoons anymore. Not as my generation knew them. It's a damn shame.
Anyway, here's some obscure saturday morning cartoons I remember.
Gilligan's Planet
All I can say is "Thank God For The Internet". Because for a good 15 years, I had people telling me that I was full of shit and that his show never existed.
And I would say "No! Seriously! There was this cartoon that had the characters from Gilligan's Island in it. Except rather than being on an island, they were in outer space!"
Now saturday morning cartoons came on at 6 am and went until around 11. The ones that came on after 10 were all horrible. And Gilligan's Planet was one of those 10:30 shows. It was horrible. But I remember watching it plenty.
Thundar The Barbarian .
This was another cartoon that came on pretty late saturday morning. They would never make this cartoon today. Or if they did, they wouldn't market it to children. It actually had a post-apocolyptic theme. Pretty bleek stuff for a kid. But, hey, I remember growing up thinking nuclear annihilation was inevitable. It was the cold war. It was a matter of "when" not "if".
Not that obscure, but I used to watch
Shirt Tales. I got all the stuffed animals from Hardees. They had a monkey on the show named Bogey who talked like Humphrey Bogart. Like 99% of the kids watching the show, that reference flew way over my head.
OK, everyone remembers the TV show Alf. What's not so remembered is the cartoon "Alf: The Animated Series". And what's even less remembered than that was the cartoon
Alf Tales.
That's right, kids! In his heyday, Alf had not one, not two, but THREE TV shows devoted to him! And strangely Alf Tales (a spin-off of a spin-off!) was the best of all three of them.
In Alf Tales, Alf would parody various well-known stories. One episode I can remember is Rapunzel with a hip hop theme to it. RAP-unzel, get it?
By the time Alf Tales came around, I was getting a little too old for cartoons. But this show was fuckin' funny.
Forgive the ranting. Alcohol. You know how it goes....
'd Raggy Dolls!