The Forgotten Lost Era of late 80s cartoons

Cartoons aimed at kids have gone through four big eras and I feel like we only discuss three of them.

Originally cartoons were just cartoons and there were ads on TV around them to sell stuff. Perfectly normal. Your Looney Tunes, Mickey Mouse shorts, etc.

Then came the likes of He-Man and G.I. Joe and Transformers which were devised ad half hour commercials for toys directly. They were so good at it, in fact, that new laws were passed regarding commercials themselves.

See, at first in the late ’70s/early 1980s, the commercials would have footage of the shows. But that was deemed to blur the line a bit too much and so you had to have just the toys in your TV commercials, that aired during, and around, the TV show that also acted as a commercial for your toy.

It’s easy to be dismissive of this period but because the companies just cared about the toys they gave creatives far more free-range with the shows than they might have otherwise. There were exceptions, in terms of content, of course. Plus they would dictate “Oh you have to use this new character so we can sell him, and cycle out these characters because we don’t make these toys anymore.” That could warp things, obviously.

After that big period there came an era of cartoons that mostly existed for cartoon’s sake, though, as well as others placed near them that lived or died on how many toys they sold. The shows without specific toy support were done much cheaper, and were considered filler, really. Think of a lot of early 200s shows on Cartoon Network, and the like. They were made for as little as possible.

A lot of great shows were made that should’ve been just filler.

But now, again, shows tend to make it or not based on merch sales. Now always, and of course on streaming platforms monetization is a different magical walled estate of darkness we don’t get to know.

We know that She-Ra and the Princesses of Power was given its 5 season full episodes order when they started, for example. There also were never many toys for it. But they got a lot of subscribers and eyeballs. Is that all Netflix needed? Seems like, at the time at least.

Young Justice was killed by Cartoon Network because of lack of toy sales, but revived for streaming and has two seasons there so far. They made shockingly few toys of the show overall, and they seemed to just sit there, leading the network to use that as their reasoning.

Steven Universe, also on Cartoon Network, did sell some merch, but ended because the team wanted to move on, rather than anything numbers based, according to all reports at the time.

So things nowadays are more nuanced and complicated than it seems the past stuff was. There’s more black box details involved due to streaming numbers, and there are reasons that are vague at best pulling the strings.

But there’s that fourth era, right? It happened kind of alongside, and between, two of the eras here: The Cartoons as Ads and the very start of the more modern take (which was really in the 90s on things like Nickelodeon).

In this strange side ear you had cartoons as commercials, but not for toys. For existing IP. There weren’t many, if any, bits of merch for the Karate Kid cartoon. But kids could watch it and get into the movies.

The cartoon “Mister T” which was actually about Mr. T and the T-Force (a group of gymnast kids) happened at the same time as the A-Team and certainly served to entice kids to know who Mr. T was, and to follow him to other projects.

Jackie Chan Adventures just existed because Jackie Chan stuff was starting to come to the states and hey lets get kids familiar with it.

Non-Merch IP because an interesting side stream for a bit. Beetlejuice had a cartoon, which was confusing since the movie was a singular unit (unlike Karate Kid that had a series of films) and was also for an older audience.

Which is nothing compared to the Robocop cartoon. Just sit with that a moment. There was a Robocop show. For kids. To get them into Robocop. And there were toys, but still. Baffling.

Anyway yeah, the Non-Toy IP line of cartoons that existed in the late 80s into mid 90s was a fascinating time full of things that are mostly forgotten, or that maybe should be forgotten given how strange and sideways things seemed to get. I’m not quite sure which.