Love for Filmation

If you're a child of the 80's, you are more than familiar with that little musical chime and the colorful letters. Filmation produced a vast share of animation that we grew up with. Most famously, they produced the He-Man and She-Ra cartoons, which currently runs late nights on Qubo Night Owl. It's commonplace to rag on founders and producers Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott, because of the almost laughable limited animation that was in their shows. Re-used animation and stock footage was so damn commonplace in a Filmation show, even people who only occasionally watched the shows noticed it. Now, if you're not familiar with Filmation's library of shows, you might try and defend it saying that stock footage is commonplace even in today's cartoons, especially in a lot of imported anime. But you have to realize, Lou and Norm brought this practice to an art form, having almost 50 percent of the show consist of stock footage. Sometimes more. I'm pretty sure if I put my mind to it, I can find episodes of He-Man that was comprises 100% of recycled stock footage. Very well animated and pretty stock footage, but stock footage all the same. Now bear in mind, I don't recall them EVER doing a “clip show”. That is how talented their creators were. They actually wrote some interesting stories, around these limitations. Sure the shows weren't exactly the benchmark of high quality, and not only was footage recycled, but so was the plots at times... But they hold up, even in today... Which is utterly amazing if you think about the fact these are twenty to thirty year old shows.

For being shows based around silly premises and various toylines, they occasionally attempted some rather mature bits of story telling. And sometimes, It didn't have happy endings. I'm still remembering a Bravestarr episode where a kid died from a drug overdose, or a Fat Albert episode where some kid got gunned down in the streets. There's an episode of He-Man where he had thought he killed an innocent bystander, and he was wracked with guilt over it. It was an interesting change of pace from the usual 'cut and dry' episodes like the Transformers and Thundercats, where at the end of the episode, the bad guys were defeated, the good guys were victorious and everything was all right.

And the thing is, He-Man was actually one of their weaker shows. It just had the better toy line. Sure it sounds shallow, but it's true. If you had smash successful merchandise but a mediocre show... You had a smash successful show. With the Digimon and Pokemon craze from the early 00's, Digimon was the better show, but Pokemon was the show with the better merchandise. Pokemon's still running new episodes, and Digimon has been relegated to reviews by internet critics closing in on their 30s. (Young'uns.) Filmation put out an ungodly amount of shows from the mid-60's all the way to the late 80's, with their best show being their last. I'm gonna go through a few of my favorites here, and feel free to share yours if you got 'em.

SHE-RA – PRINCESS OF POWER: Let's just get She-Ra out of the way. I always preferred it over He-Man. Now, though I'm a child of the 80's, I was never really into He-Man. As many of you know, I'm too much of a die-hard Transformers fan. I thought the He-Man toys were boring and just uninteresting. And to be honest, this probably speaks more about myself than anything, I just was never a big fantasy buff. To me, I preferred science fiction over swords and sorcery. I think I mentioned before that the only reason I ever really watched a lot of fantasy movies, is that they were a lot more willing to show boobies. I never really liked He-Man or Skeletor... Or just about anything about it. I'm just gonna come out and say it: I thought He-Man was kinda gay. And not in that perfectly fine homosexual way that we experimented with at camp, but in that 'Batman and Robin' sort of way that Wanda Sykes belittles us for complaining about. He had a ripped and tanned dude, with a blonde Prince Valiant hair-do, wearing nothing more than a furry loincloth, studded bracelets, and what could charitably be called a bondage bandolier. And he hung around a dude with a pornstache, a mentally handicapped guy who likes to ram things with his head, an annoying floating fuck. So yeah, as a boy, never big into He-Man. His sister though... Totally. She-Ra's cartoon played a lot more sci-fi than fantasy, especially with Hordak and his Horde-bots. It was perfectly common to have laserguns, flying tanks, spaceships, and explosions. It also had that whole theme of the 'Rebels versus the evil empire', which being ANY child born in the Star Wars era, that immediately won it brownie points. And She-Ra was a lot more colorful. When Adam turned into He-Man, all we got was some murky castle backdrop and some lighting effects. But when Adora changed, we got this really neat swirly effect, lots of pretty lights, and generally a lot more visually interesting change. Also, the music was much funkier. It always felt more like I was watching Flash Gordon than anything something He-Man related. And speaking of Flash Gordon...

FLASH GORDON: One of my favorite movies of all time was the 1980's movie Flash Gordon starring Max Von Sydow, and not much else. He was utterly awesome as Ming the Merciless, and the entire movie helped influence me a lot with the concept of color theory. (This and Mortal Kombat. I should really talk about that some day.) Now this cartoon was made in 1982, intended to be a made-for-television movie. But after being completed, NBC saw it and decided to make changes, like turning it into an ongoing series, as opposed to a single stand alone movie. Plot elements like it being a period piece and where Ming gives weapons to Hitler (seriously) was dropped. Eventually the show was canceled, and they reassembled the footage back into the initial movie, called 'Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All.' The show had a significantly higher budget than most Filmation projects and it shows. I'm actually kinda saddened more people haven't heard of this one, because it holds up really nicely over the years. Much like the next one...

STAR TREK: THE ANIMATED SERIES: This one I'm SURE you've heard of. You know the story too. Star Trek was canceled two years earlier than planned, and in the early seventies, they made a couple of seasons worth of an animated show. Now the thing about this show is that it had many of the actors reprising their voice work for the show, and retaining many of the same writers the show had. Essentially, this was Seasons Four and Five of Star Trek. And just like the old shows, it holds up amazingly. Yes, some of the graphics and animation is somewhat bad, but no worse than the old show's special effects were. (The pre-re-mastered versions, I mean.) And interestingly enough, it was also the first time Star Trek ever won an Emmy. One of the common things known about this Star Trek show is that it was de-canonized by Gene Roddenberry. (Or someone high up in the ranks.) So officially, it's not canon in the Trek timeline. But that means dick-all, because many writers of the shows and movies since then (including the recent 2009 reboot that I was not fond of) have referenced that animated series on more than a few occasions. In other words: It doesn't matter that they say. Everyone still considers it Star Trek and that's all that matters. But not every cartoon is as flawless, picking up after a show. Case in point...

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF BATMAN: I know what you're thinking. You're wondering what am I smoking, or if my Batboner is so uncontrollable, that I'm including it on here out of obligation. Well, you're not wrong, but I have a real reason for including it on here. This wasn't just a Batman cartoon show. Prior to 1992's Batman: The Animated Series, this was pretty much the definitive Batman. Look again at that intro. That's a modern day city, with the traditional modernized Batman, stylized after Neal Adams' look. Those are pretty much what the Dynamic Duo looked like in the comics. It was essentially... Batman stories. Sure, you're going to bring up... him... You're gonna bring up Bat-Mite. Yeah, well look. Scrappy-Doo sucked balls too, but I don't blame Scooby-Doo. Outside of Bat-Mite, it was a pretty faithful Batman series. The problem is Bat-Mite was part of that annoying habit that Scheimer and Prescott did with their shows, and always included a cute little imp-like sidekick. Prior to his inclusion in this series, he had pretty much stayed out of Batman for almost twenty years, until this show brought it back out of obscurity. Yes, you heard it right. This show is the Grant Morrison of Batman cartoons, digging up bad concepts from the depths of hell and trying to say it's cool, but failing horribly. But if you can look past Bat-Mite and see the rest of the qualities the show has... And I know it's hard, it's like trying to ignore Tooter in the Snorks... But if you can, you'll find it's a pretty good predecessor to Bruce Timm and Paul Dini's epic show. But it can be nowhere as epic as... 

BRAVESTARR: I fucking loved this show. And to this date, I still do. I would LOVE to have the rights to do a Bravestarr comic book. See, back in the late 90's and 00's, everyone swooned over Vash the Stampede's adventures on the anime Trigun. They were all going off about how awesomely original a sci-fi western cartoon was. “Ooooh, Vash is so cute, and he has this cool gun. And he dressed in a cool trenchcoat. And he had these cool female sidekicks, and his friend Wolfwood, with a cross-machine gun!” Pfft. Fuckin' wannabes.

Marshall fuckin' Bravestarr is where it's at.

Dude had eyes of the hawk, ears of the wolf, strength of the bear and speed of the puma. (As you might remember from the intro you just watched.) Yeah, he dressed a little goofy, but he was awesome. He was very level headed, and your basic good guy. Also, of interest, he was Native American. (Or whatever they're called on planet New Texas.) You have any idea how rare that is? Not just in the 1980's, but even today. They didn't have some ham-fisted racial commentary about it... He was the hero, and that's all we needed to know. He had a very level headed sense of honor. He wasn't perfect, but he tried to do right. Yeah, he had the annoying cute animal sidekick, like in all Filmation shows, but his main sidekick was the most badass sidekick ever conceived. 30/30 was a big ass, talking techno-horse, that can turn from quadruped into a biped. He carries around this giant ass shotgun bazooka BFG that blew shit up awesomely. These were the main characters, and they disagreed a lot. And that brings up another thing about this show, was the maturity on how they handled the topic of guns. Seriously. Even today, I'm still blown away by how maturely they handled it. Sometimes, Bravestarr was right, and there was a peaceful solution where nobody got hurt. And sometimes, 30/30 was right and you just have to blow that son of a bitch up. Then again, this was the same show that had the fore-mentioned drug overdose, and sometimes dealt with topics like murder and slavery... So the fact they handled the topic of firearms in such a mature manner shouldn't surprise me.

The supporting characters were actually kind of interesting, and even unique. The villain Tex Hex, while the rest of the show embraced physical and technological powers, his came from a dark magic source, almost a dark opposite of Bravestarr and his father, the Shaman's powers. The lead female, Judge JB was also unique in Filmation shows for actually being the red-head female lead that wasn't romantically infatuated with the lead character. They shared a friendship that actually made her into a stronger, because she wasn't just an attachment. (Seriously, it was always a red head and they were always smitten with the lead hero. Jessica Wray from the fake Ghostbusters, Teela from He-Man, Bow from She-Ra.) Also some of the aesthetic visuals were pretty cool too, giving a sort of steampunk vibe to the series. Hell, one episode took place on Earth, and it was a total future steampunk London. So in that sense, it was doing steampunk, before it became trendy. Like I said before, if I could, I would do a Bravestarr comic in a heartbeat.

So yeah. Filmation. It wasn't always perfect, and sometimes, it was just outright embarrassing. But no one can say that they didn't try to be creative. They had some limitations placed on them... But they managed to make some really awesome shows. And some really lame ones, but I want to focus on the positives...

...Because I got nothing good to say about the fake Ghostbusters.

Fucking gorilla. *grumbles*