Cool, can't wait

Go ahead, sing along, I know you want to...



With a chorus more infectious than anything the NIH could help fund, cartoon #33 The Adventures of the Gummi Bears earwormed it's way into Saturday morning cartoon lineups starting on September 14, 1985 via the National Broadcasting Company. As the story supposedly goes, then Disney CEO Michael Eisner was "struck with inspiration" one day when his son asked for the Ursus Gelatinous. Thankfully, he wasn't eating Raisinets or anything equally chocolatey or that might've been a completely different looking cartoon...



"Hershey Squiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirts! Melting here and there and everywhere...." Yeah, not quite the same.



The Gummi Bears were kind of like the Smurfs, except entertaining. I'm just kidding, the Smurfs were alright. They weren't the Snorks, but they were still watchable. "At least before they added that Grandpa Smurf and those meddling kids!"



The Gummi Bears lived in a hollow tree called Gummi Glen, a magical tree filled with a vast system of tunnels and rooms that would make the Dulce Base look like a broom closet. The Gummies harvest Gummiberries used to make Gummiberry Juice a concoction first only known by the elder Grammi Gummi, until she later teaches it to Sunni Gummi. The juice is produced by adding six handfuls of red berries, then four orange berries, three purple berries, four blue berries, three green berries and one yellow berry. Then take one step left and one step right. One to the front and one to the side. Clap your hands once and clap your hands twice. And if it looks like this then you're doing it right.

Some of that my actually be a Lou Bega song.



The Gummi Bears consisted of the wisened Zummi Gummi, tough Gruff Gummi, Grammi Gummi, tubby Tummi Gummi, Sunni Gummi, and Cubbi Gummi, and like the Seven Dwarves you can guess who's who just by looking at them:



But similar to cartoons like The Venture Bros., in The Adventures of the Gummi Bears, the villain is often more entertaining. Enter Duke Sigmun Igthorn and his ogres.



Duke Igthorn, or Dukie, as he was often referred to by his underling, Toadie (hey, maybe there was a bit of the Hershey in here!) was a little bit Skeletor, a little bit Gargamel, a little bit of Captain Hook, and a little bit of you makes me your man.

Hey! Get lost already, Lou! Your fifteen minutes are up!



Yeah, you're right, it probably was more like five minutes. Minutes numbered five!

Duke Igthorn ruled Castle Drekmore and hunted the Gummi Bears to gain the secrets of their Gummiberry Juice to aid him in overthrowing King Gregor and conquering Castle Dunwyn where he once resided alongside his brother, Sir Victor. However, Sigmund was banished from the castle for attempting a coup, and found refuge amongst the ogres of Drekmore where he plots his revenge.

The Adventures of the Gummi Bears ran for 4 seasons on NBC, then moved to ABC for one season in 1989 where it ran in a block alongside the equally great The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.



Afterwards it moved to weekday syndication for one final season in the Disney Afternoon syndication package where it would form a formidable Voltron-like block of amazing cartoons that included Ducktales, Chip n Dale: Rescue Rangers, and the more meh Talespin.

But before all that the Gummi Bears cartoon was credited as Disney's first foray into the animated television series that was said to help jumpstart the animation boom of the late 80's/early 90's and help pave the way for Disney's conquering the world. Do you like Star Wars? Disney owns it. Marvel? Disney. DisneyLand? Disney. In another ten years the world's currency will probably be Bitcoin and Disney Dollars.



But before Disney began it's goose step toward world supremacy, there was The Adventures of the Gummi Bears. And for a brief few years the world was a better place for it. Dentists may disagree. Does anyone's dentist have an aversion for gummys or is it just mine? They're always telling me kids shouldn't eat gummies. Yeah, tell that to kids. Dentists are all sadists anyway, amirite?



It's a wonder Nicolas Coppola never tried to steal Steve Martin because he is a national treasure.





You can find The Adventures of the Gummi Bears on DVD in various forms, or if you have Disney+, you can watch all six season while you await the next Marvel or Star Wars series to begin.



You can try the search button, Dukie.

But let's all sing along one more time. Let's hear it from all you out there. You know the words, come on! Let's hear it from this side. That's no good. Let's try the other side. How about just the men? Come on. All right. The real men. All right. The women this time. No, the real women. You know who you are.



OK, you! YOU making all the noise!

And if you don't know all the words...CAPTIONS!





Put a little love in your heart!

Read the whole thing PB. I never followed nor watched the Gummy Bears but sure ate the heck out of'em them for decades Gosh that sounds horrible but I did like them in the movies of Goose Bumps Anyway I loved the Scrooged ending, one of the best Christmas movies ever IMO. Great stuff PB, keep it up

Yeah, Scrooged is easily top-5 Christmas movie for me. Were you able to see the videos too? Only a few more on the last list, after that I'll have to come up with another list. I'm open to suggestions, too, if there's a specific show you'd like me to write up.

Actually yes, I've been meaning to say about it but just haven't. It only shows up on My desktop, still not sure why. Acid, if your reading this where ever you are, just disregard any further action towards the vids not showing up situation, it's not a big deal.

OK, I might give it some thought, we'll see

Cool! I think the videos are half the fun, sometimes they tie in to the show, sometimes they're completely random. I was disappointed I couldn't find a youtube vid of that specific Scrooged ending. There were some that had that, but also the prior moments so you didn't get to that clip for 3 or 4 minutes so it didn't make sense to include them. Shame. Look for the next one soon...

No, the way you did it was fine, I think if you would have posted the vid it would have been messed up and not been as good as it is. OK, what's next

Ok, I promised this a few days ago so sue me, you're not my kids, I can break promises to you. Actually, that's probably backwards. I shouldn't lie to you guys. My kids? "Yes, there's a Santa Clause." "Yes, there's an Easter Bunny." "Yes, I didn't gamble away your college fund." Speaking of childhood, let's go back to the good ol' early 80's for cartoon #34...



What does Q*bert the game have to do with the 1950's? Hell if I know. Q*bert the arcade game debuted in 1982 and was a puzzle game where the player had to change the color of all the squares on a 28 square pyramid while avoiding snakes and other globular creatures in the process. As far as games go it was pretty simple for even back then and had no back story, you were just an armless big nosed orange ball. But if anything in Hollywood is king, it would be nostalgia, and most people are nostalgic for things from their childhood and tend to romanticize that period. Except for children of the 80's because that was clearly the best time to be a child. Experts agree. Case closed.



So if you're a writer or cartoonist in the early 80's chances are your childhood, or at least part of it, came from that greasy old period of I Like Ike and rebels without causes. Grease and Grease 2 were big hits at the box office and Arthur Fonzarelli was still banging...jukeboxes even though it was post shark jumping, so if you have an orange armless thing why not throw a Letterman jacket on him and pit him against some greasers? Q*bert wasn't a full length cartoon on it's own but instead aired as one segment of an hour long arcade themed show called Saturday Supercade on CBS that included other coin op superstars from Donkey Kong, Frogger, Pitfall!, and in season 2 Kangaroo! and Space Ace.



Monkey muscle, indeed And check out that Mario. Not exactly what we've all come to know and love, though I suppose we're lucky to even still know of Super Mario after this monstrosity,



Dear lord, if I were Princess Peach I'd go with King Koopa so I wouldn't have to watch these two goomba(h)s dance anymore. Nothing screamed for a rap intro like two Italian plumbers. Yeesh. Those guys make Vanilla Ice look like Suge Knight.



Interestingly enough, the creator of Q^bert regretted the * in his name as it was originally a hyphen (the name is derived from the combination of Hubert and cube) because the * would prevent the character from being used in word puzzles like the crossword and eventually the * would become a wildcard character in search engines, which at least was something you wouldn't consider when naming an arcade game in 1982. Q*bert the cartoon told the story of a high school Q and his q*friends Q*ball, Q*val, Q*mongus and girlfriend Q*tee, as they q*attended Q*Burg High School, where they had to q*contend with the q*resident q*bullies Coilee the snake, Viper, Ugg and Wrongway and after q*typing all that I want to q*stab the q*creator in the q*eye with a q*q-tip.



But unlike the arcade game, Q*bert and all his q*buddies had arms, and he used his enormous honker to shoot black balls from his nose called "slippy dews" that would burst into oil patches to slip up his transgressors--not to be confused with Bill Cosby who was a black man that slipped q*uaaludes to unsuspecting women.



See, Joe McCarthy wasn't the only one blackballing people in the 50's.



One of the interesting carryovers from the game, was that Q had a potty mouth. David Thiel was tasked with using a synthesizer to produce English phrases for the game. However, he was unable to create coherent words and eventually chose to string together random phonemes instead and thus Q*bert would shout "@!#?@!" upon failure, and that was transferred over to a kids show on Saturday mornings, and yes, it made me giggle as a six year old. Kind of makes you wonder what the Peanuts teachers were really saying. You're naughty, Charles Schultz!



Ironically enough, Q*bert would later go on to borrow the look of Coily and don the leather jacket as part of his stand-up comedy act where he went by his real name of Andrew "Dice" Q*lay. Actually, that's not entirely true, but maybe, just maybe, Q^bert would prepare the world for what would cometh with the Diceman a few short years later. Or maybe not. But speaking of Andrew Dice Clay, it took me a bit to reconcile the fact that the Diceman was also Crazy Larry on a childhood favorite of mine, Diff'rent Strokes. Here's the Diceman pre-Jack and Jill went up the hill...



And here's ten hours of Andrew Dice Clay's best stand up jokes...



HILARIOUS!

But I always remembered Crazy Larry because, well, that's my name (not the crazy--at least some say) and as a kid, Larry isn't exactly the most popular name so there weren't a lot of great Larrys on TV. I mean we had:

Larry Tate


Larry Dallas


Cousin Larry Appleton


Amazing Larry


Larry Burns


Larry Burns, coincidentally enough, was voiced by the incomparable Rodney Dangerfield, who also helped a previously mentioned comedian when he gave said comedian seven minutes of time on his HBO stand-up comic showcase, Nothing Goes Right in 1988, that would help launch the Diceman in to the national spotlight (That's called a callback--Bob).



So as you can see, growing up I wasn't blessed with a murderer's row of like named TV characters. I didn't have namesake heroes to look up to like the Mikes had Mike Brady or the Ralphs had Ralph Hinkley or the Cliffs that had Cliff Huxtable--oh, wait. But who's to blame?



RIP Norm MacDonald.



You can get the Best of Q*bert on DVD which is really the entire series minus two episodes since it only ran for 19 episodes. Strangely, the Saturday Supercade isn't available on DVD, but since the cartoons aren't really that great it might not be much of a loss. In the 80s it didn't take much to get a cartoon if you were a semi-popular video game, or popular comic book character, or a best-selling toy, or a...Vietnam War killing machine?



Surprisingly, Q^bert was one of the most marketed characters from the golden age of arcade games, falling only behind Pacman, Donkey Kong and a certain Paisan plumber, but we all can't have great songs written about us by Buckner & Garcia.





It kind of makes you wonder what nostalgia cartoons thirty years from now will chase. They'll probably all have characters with fists in the air and talk about their pronouns. That's assuming Big Brother doesn't mandate the elimination of cartoons--happy people are harder to control. But hey, global warming will kill us all before then anyway, right? I mean, we only have ten years to turn this thing around....they said forty years ago. Then thirty. Then twenty. Then ten. The best grifts are timeless.

You know who I blame?

Man, I feel like I'm using up my A material here. Maybe someday someone will stumble across this thread and say, "Wow, this is hilarious, we should hire this person to write for Cracked magazine!:

Just read it, this was really good. Loved the Mario and Rambo skit. I didn't know Q*Bert had that much stuff and I never could understand what he says . Yes, the 80s was the time to be a kid! Oh I loved TSMBSH

Oh I'm sure you got plenty more of material PB, just keep it up...just don't strain it

By the way, you do realize Cracked Magazine has been OOB for a long time now right I actually really liked Cracked, I have many magazines of them and I have some MAD Magazines too all from the 90s but I have always preferred Cracked over MAD to be honest.