Stay Tooned!!!--The End!?????

[packerbacker180]

If there's three things William Hanna and Joseph Barbera love it's talking animals, kids who solve mysteries, and talking cars. Enter cartoon #5 1974's Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch.



It's the early 70's and motorcycles are all the rage thanks to films like Easy Rider. So you get the Chopper Bunch, a ne'er-do-well gang of motorcycles ala The Wild One, as they seek to trip up our hero, Wheelie, and steal his main girl Rota Ree (oh the puns!).

Wheelie ran for 13 episodes, each containing three short story segments which made it a great show to air on a cavalcade like The Cartoon Express because you could mix in a five minute short here and there, so that's where I became familiar with it. So you've got Wheelie, the only character on the show who didnt talk, but instead communicated via horn, his girl, the Chopper Bunch compromised of Chopper (hey, voiced by Frank Welker!), Revs (voiced by Paul Winchell so it's basically a two wheeled Tigger), Hi-Riser, and Scarmbles, the littlest bike who always unsuccessfully tried to stop the bunch from getting into trouble, and then once their scheme inevitably failed, blasted the crew with his "I told you so! I told you so!" scorn. And then there was the police cars who always seemed to be around, a cruiser named Captain Tuff, and a bike named Deputy Fishtail.

One interesting tidbit, Charlton Comics ran a very short-lived comic of the cartoon in 1975 that contained the first comic work of a man named John Byrne. Apparently, after the first issue he was asked to make the series "mellower" because Hanna-Barbera execs thought it was "too scary" so Byrne quit after two issues and was sadly never heard from again. At least I don't know of anything he's done for the Big 2 since.



I honestly didn't remember the theme very well, but again, I saw it mostly on the Cartoon Express. I think Boomerang ran reruns back when it first came into existence, but he whole series is available on DVD. It's a pretty simple little show that I think even kids today would like. It's basically the same idea as the 80's Pacman cartoon. It seems cartoons really breakdown into two types, a hero and a gang of villains, or a gang of heroes and a villain. I don't know. You have to fill 22 minutes somehow. I guess there were some complaints about the show by bike enthusiasts back when it aired because they thought it negatively depicted motorcycles as "nasty", and that the show depicted bad social behavior (people didn't have Twitter back then to air their gripes and there were only a couple channels--get lives, people!) In the whole scheme of cartoons, it's pretty innocuos.

Beep beep!

[packerbacker180]

Still the best cartoon ever!
https://tinyurl.com/466d6usp

[OneNineSix]

Still the best cartoon ever!
https://tinyurl.com/466d6usp

lol. You got me.

[packerbacker180]

Still the best cartoon ever!
https://tinyurl.com/466d6usp

lol. You got me.

[packerbacker180]

If you're going through toon withdrawal, fear not. I'll be back again tomorrow to start again. Was a busy weekend. I wouldn't dream of stopping when it's sparked so much conversation. I'm a tree falling in the woods, baby.

[packerbacker180]

[packerbacker180]

In 1984 Punky Power took the world by storm as Soleil Moon Frye (an actual persons name) starred in NBC's Punky Brewster on Sundays at 7 PM. I remember the time pretty precisely because, as a 6 year old, I liked the show and it was often late or prempted because of that mean, nasty NFL football. And of course, Silver Spoons was on right after, and then Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories was on at 8 which aired a cartoon episode we loved called The Family Dog that would eventually lead to a very short-lived CBS Family Dog cartoon six years later, but that's another story...(but seriously, check out The Family Dog)



Anyway, Punky Brewster led to all kinds of tie-in merchandise like dolls and rainbow clothes and whatnot, so where else do you take a hot character? Why Saturday mornings, of course! So one year later It's Punky Brewster debuted on NBC Saturday mornings with this rocking 80's jam:



If that doesn't make you want to pull up your leg warmers, dowse yourself in AquaNet, and drive out to the local shopping mall then, like, you just might be dead inside. Grody.




So Punky and her faithful pooch, Brandon, follow a rainbow to it's end (who amongst us hasn't?) and meet a...raccoon/60's hipster poet/leprechaun(?) named Glomer who can do magic like the Great Gazoo and this leads to all sorts of crazy adevntures. The interesting thing about the cartoon is that many of the actors from the show voiced their characters including Soleil, Cherie Johnson, and Commandant Lassard himself, George Gaynes (once you hear him say "Punky" it's something you can't forget). And the new character, that wacky fuzzball Glomer, well who do you suppose voiced him?

If you didn't say Frank Welker then shame on you because you haven't been reading all the previous posts. Seriously, is anyone reading these? Hello...hello...hello..? Is there anybody in there? Maybe boobs will get your attention.





Like most cartoons back then, Punky Power was short-lived, going two 13 season episodes before getting replaced in 1987 by shows such as Fraggle Rock (eh), The New Archies (no!), and ALF: The Animated Series (good stuff).

But like most good things, or anything that's old and had once been popular and can be relaunched instead of creating new, good shows, Punky Power recently sparked a comeback with the Peacock's Punky Brewster folloing the now grown Punky. Whether Glomer will return in any form has yet to be seen. Last I'd heard, he was reading poetry slams in San Francisco and pooping in the streets. Oh, Glomer!

[OneNineSix]

I had the biggest crush on Soleil. Kind of crazy that they revived her show. I have not seen it.

[packerbacker180]

I think Sam from Who's the Boss was my first crush. Or Winnie Cooper. Or Eilzabeth Montgomery (she could wrinkle my nose).

[packerbacker180]

Did you miss me?

Well, it's the dawn of the 90's and kids are using all their hard earned allowance money to buy cardboard sports cards that are being mass produced at such an obscene level that thirty years later the majority of them will be more valuable as charcoal grill starters and bicycle noise makers than allowing middle-aged men to retire from their resale (I'm not bitter).

So sports were really hot with kids, and as we'e learned, when something is hot, what do we do? That's right, we make a Saturday morning cartoon. It didn't hurt that the era saw two of the greatest athletes ever from their respective sports, Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan. And then add in Bo Jackson. Bo Jackson? That's right Bo knows cartoons. Why? Bo was a two sport athlete at the time, and while he may not have been one of the greats of all-time, he could cover two the four main sports for a cartoon that was originally meant to air on ESPN. ESPN? Yep. It didn't hurt that Bo Jackson was the star of the popular Bo Knows Nike commercials.

And thus...cartoon #8...ProStars was born...



Yeah, that's a pretty terrible song for a pretty terrible show. So the three athletes apparently live their offseasons trapped in lockers at Mom's Gym and they only come out when a child has a problem so dire, so urgent, that they setup a camcorder and record a message on VHS and then mail it to Mom's Gym which is run by a tiny Jewish lady, who was so over the top she makes Watto look like Oscar Schindler, and her buxom assistant Denise, who are the Q and Moneypeny to our trio of James Blands.

Apparently mailing VHS tapes was a lot faster then, I don't know, dialing a phone?

What kind of dire situations? Why I'm glad you asked. In one episode an Australian girl mails a VHS tape to the ProStars (how the hell long do you think that woud take?) because a local gang that would make the Dreadnoks look like the Crips are terrorizing the town and her brother thinks they're so cool that he may just join them. Hell, by the time that VHS tape travelled the globe her brother should've looked like Auntie Entity. So the ProStars jump and their flying shoe (yes, you read that correctly) and travel down under to teach the gang and her brother a lesson. Some kind of lesson. I don't know, by then I stopped watching the show. In another episode a villain is taking over the All Sports Hall of Fame in a plot to kidnap (gasp!) the commissioner of Major League Baseball (maybe if he succeeded someone could've been in office to stop all the juicing in the 90's?), oh, their dad was missing or something, too. Details details.

I guess they meant well,there were live action question and answer sessions before and after each episode but apparently MJ was too busy betting on sports at the time or something to actually film these segments because only Wayne Bo knew how to show up for these. I remember hearing about this show and being excited for it and then watching it and being like, what the hell was that? I don't know. I was 13 or so by then so maybe I was expecting something a little more but this show was dreadful. I watched an episode the other day to see if maybe I were younger back then perhaps I would've liked it, but no, I don't think so. It's so over the top cloying and ham-fisted with it's attempts at teaching morals and caring for the environment, etc. that it makes Captain Planet look like Citizen Kane. The power is yours...to not watch this dreck. Plus, I'm pretty sure the writers never saw a person play an actual sport in their lives. None of the athletes voiced any of their characters in cartoon. And guess what, to the best of my knowledge, there are no voice credits to Frank Welker, I guess even he has standards.

So you got Michael Jordan who once dunked on someone with his tongue hanging out or something, so in the cartoon everytime Mike runs or jumps or thinks or farts he looks like Venom before Erik Larsen ruined him. And MIke can jump really high. Wayne Gretzky is probably the greatest hockey player ever, and he's Canadian, but because he played for the LA KIngs at the time he must talk like a surfer dude and he apparently either has a tape worm, smokes pot, or is Bulimic, because all he ever does is eat, think about eating, or talk about eating. And Bo Jackson? Well, I guess Bo knows how to say "Bo Knows" a lot. It's a good thing I was only 13 because if I played a drinking game involving "Bo Knows" I would not be here today. Go try it, I'll send flowers, I promise.

But, maybe I'm being overly harsh. Go watch an episode and let me know. As it is, I hated this show. I think it was the first time I watched a cartoon and felt a little bit like Roger Murtaugh. The animation was bad. The writing was worse. The character portrayals were terrible. Even the song sucked. Not surprisingly it ran for an abysmal 13 episodes before disappearing into the dustbin of history. I don't want to say this video killed the cartoon star, but it certainly didn't help. I guess even great things fall eventually, and perhaps ProStars began the slow demise of the Saturday morning cartoon. Hyperbolize much? Maybe. Maybe not. Saturday morning cartoons aren't around anymore so...

Lisa, I want to buy your rock.

"ProStars, it's all about helping kids." If that were true they should've shortened the season.


"Has anyone seen Bos ball?"