Yesterday I stumbled upon a couple of Youtube videos that compile some of the most memorable cartoons from the 1980s and 90s. Being born at the end of the 70s I grew up on 80s cartoons and continued watching a lot of childrens TV up until my mid-teens so I remember much of both of these compilations.

Looking back, it’s interesting how the childrens cartoons of these two decades reflected wider cultural changes. In this two-part post I’ll look at how massively different 80s and 90s cartoons really were and how that linked into wider cultural changes.

The 80s
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Before I start, I know there are loads of classics missing from the compilation above. The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Dogtanian and Willy Fogg are all absent for a start, but I suppose if it featured every single 80s cartoon it’d be a lot longer than 30 minutes. It’s still a good flavour of what was around at the time.

Back in the 80s, corporate greed ruled. Powersuits, giant mobile phones and upwardly-mobile young entrepreneurs were in vogue and their spirit permeated popular culture. Corporate America was taking over the world and its reach extended into the world of cartoons via the toy tie-in. Newly relaxed broadcasting rules meant weekly 20-minute animated adverts for new toy lines could be screened to a entire generation. Almost all the cartoons included here were toy tie-ins.

In the 80s, the Cold War was still being waged and the threat of a nuclear apocalypse was very real. It’s no surprise, then, that many cartoons here feature all-American hero types that could make insecure Americans feel good about their chances of beating the Red Menace. G.I. Joe, BraveStarr, He-Man and terrible He-Man rip-off Blackstar (the last clip in the compilation) all fit this mould. These heroes are all rather two-dimensional. There’s no motivation behind what they do other than saving the world from a rogue’s gallery of scary looking villains.

The other theme in many cartoons here is that of transformation, a theme that ran right through 20th century pop culture. 80s cartoon makers took the traditional comicbook zero-to-hero tale of Superman, Spiderman etc and updated it for a new generation. From Transformers (robots to Earthly objects) and He-Man (prince of Eternia to musclebound barbarianesque sword wielder) through to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (normal turtles turned to bandana-wearing mutant heroes) the idea of change took many forms but was reused repeatedly.

Of course, not everything fits the themes I’ve listed here. Disney’s anthropomorphic adventures continued as they had for decades before. That said, Scrooge McDuck in Duck Tales could have been any 80s tycoon, so they weren’t totally immune to taking inspiration from current times.

I discussed this post on Twitter in advance of writing it and user geoffsays suggested a link between the drugs of choice in a particular decade and the cartoons of the same period. There certainly were a lot of psychedelic cartoons around in the 60s back when LSD was popular. 80s cartoons were headstrong, bold and, with all that transformation going on, suceptable to mood swings. Cocaine was popular with yuppies back then, so maybe there’s something in that theory!

Now move on to Part 2…