Child Of The 1980’s

Dogtanian may have been a long serialised cartoon but even it couldn’t match the length of Mysterious Cities of Gold! Running to no less than 39 episodes, it was truly an epic cartoon series, following the search for the fabled Cities of Gold of South American legend by Spanish orphan Esteban and his friends Zia, a young Inca girl, and Tao, who is the last of his people after their empire was sunk beneath the waves.

The story starts in the early 16th century when a baby named Esteban is rescued at sea by Mendoza, a navigator on a ship. Esteban wears a medallion of the sun, which is thought to link him to the Cities of Gold. Mendoza looks after Esteban and as the child grows it appears he has some kind of magical control over the sun, being able to make it appear from behind the clouds when needed. When he is old enough, Mendoza and his friends Pedro (a tall skinny man who’s face looks somewhat like a monkey - but he was indeed human) and Sancho (an overweight dimwitted oaf) set sail for South America, hoping to find the fabled Cities of Gold and Esteban’s long lost father.

They are eventually joined on their quest by Zia also wears a pendant of the sun, and is also missing her father after she was kidnapped from Peru and taken to Spain. Tao also adds to the group, along with his pet parrot Kokapetl. Being the last of his people Tao is quite headstrong at times, but he knows a lot about the strange technologies that the group come across during their journeys. The Mysterious Cities of Gold were actually built by Tao’s people, who had a grasp of technology far beyond that of the time in which the series is set.

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Knight Rider did it for cars, Airwolf did it for helicopters, and it was Street Hawk that did it for motorbikes. In the 1980’s we loved our shows about technologically advanced forms of transport, and the short lived Street Hawk was no exception.

It aired in 1985 and whilst it only managed to make it to 13 episodes it still holds a place in my heart. Amazingly, despite such a small episode count there were no less than four different versions of the bike made for the show, but the common specifications were that it could travel very fast (200mph, or 300mph with the computer assisted Hyperthrust mode) and that it featured weaponry such as lasers, missiles and machine guns.

The funniest feature was the anti-theft device though. Obviously KITT and Airwolf both had doors that could be locked, but a motorbike doesn’t have that luxury. Instead it had an ejector seat which was triggered if someone other than the designated driver tried to mount it. Authorisation to ride was provided via what essentially amounts to a bum imprint detection system! The rider had to have a special suit made which was moulded to their body shape - the mould being created by having them stand in a glass cylinder that filled up with foam!

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Jacob’s Club have been around for years and are still going strong today, but the 1980’s was a particularly popular time for them thanks mainly to the advertising campaign for them, of which more in a moment. The bars themselves come in a number of different flavours, the most common being mint, orange, milk chocolate and fruit, although I’m sure there have been others over the years. They consist of a biscuit, normally topped with a layer of flavoured cream, which has then been thickly coated in chocolate, and very tasty they are too.

Anyway, in the 1980’s Jacob’s had a very strong TV advertising campaign for the biscuits which centred around the jingle “if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club“. There were several different adverts made around this theme, but they followed the pattern of having one person start eating a Club biscuit and somebody starting to sing the above line. When they got to the end of the line somebody else would join in and start singing it too.

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If you come from outside of the UK, Ireland or several other European countries then you would be forgiven for thinking that the title of this post was wrong, and should in fact be Ninja Turtles. Well, these days that is definitely the case, but back in the mid 1980’s, when the Turtles cartoon first aired in the UK it was renamed because the word Ninja was seen as being too violent to be associated with a childrens TV programme.

Luckily this didn’t really effect the cartoon too badly. Other than a change to the logo and a few changes to the theme song the adventures of Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo and Michelangelo were relatively untouched by the censors scissors, at least as far as I’m aware. Michelangelo did have some nunchuks, which were banned in films and on TV for many years in the UK, even in adult films (most notably Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon, which suffered a fairly heavy cut) so there may have been a few scenes cut here and there involving those, but given these would have only been fight scenes the storylines and humour of the series would not have been compromised too much.

Originally the Turtles started life as comic book characters, but it wasn’t until the cartoon series appeared in 1987 that Turtle Power really hit the big time and they became a merchandising sensation stretching to action figures, films, videogames and all the other associated things like pencil cases and lunch boxes. More on some of these another time perhaps, but for now we’ll concentrate on the cartoon.

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When it came to the school holidays if there was one thing you could be almost certain of appearing on the BBC morning kids tv schedule it would have been Why Don’t You? The show is another shining example of the BBC’s ability to make long running TV series, with it first appearing on screens in 1973 and disappearing 42 series later in 1995.

The premise of the show was to give you ideas for things to do once you finally switched the goggle box off. Indeed, its official full title was actually Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Do Something Less Boring Instead? but being a bit of a mouthful was thankfully shortened to just Why Don’t You? The format as I remember it best was a group of vair unobnoxious child presenters informing you of things to make or cook and introducing short films following some viewers hobby, rounded off with some jokes and sketches.

During the 1980’s there were a number of Why Don’t You? gangs, as they were called, who all hailed from different parts of the UK. Initially there was just the Bristol gang, but they were soon joined by gangs from Newcastle, Liverpool, Cardiff, and cities in Scotland and Ireland too, though I forget which ones now. This was quite amusing as some of the kids had some pretty thick accents.

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Blind Date first hit the screens in the mid 1980’s and managed to stick around for almost 20 years, and was hosted by the UK’s favourite Liverpudlian, Cilla Black, for the entire duration. It marked the beginning of Saturday nights line-up of shows on ITV, and only came to an end when Cilla herself, realising the shows waning popularity, decided to announce on air that she was going to give up the show at the end of the current series, much to the surprise of the TV company!

The show centred around the idea of Cilla being a kind of match maker, sorting out blind dates for the contestants. Three contestants were sat on stools on one side of a movable wall. A single contestant of the opposite sex was then brought on to choose between the three potential dates, but they were only allowed to ask three questions to each of the contestants. These were normally laced with innuendo, and the reply was similarly full of double entendres. The Carry On team would have been proud! It would normally go something like this:-

Contestant: “I’m a bit of a whizz in the kitchen, but what kind of dish would you say you’re most like?”
Date 1: “I’d say I’m most like a curry, because I’m hot and spicy”
Date 2: “A jam doughnut, because I’m soft and cuddly with a sweet surprise in the middle”
Date 3: “I’m like a cheese burger, thick and meaty and fills the hole in your stomach”

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Gerry Anderson is a bit of a sci-fi legend, and I guarantee you will have watched, or at least heard of, one of his many series from over the years. He is best known for his puppet TV shows, the most famous of which is surely Thunderbirds, but also included Stingray, Fireball XL5, Joe 90 and of course the subject of this post, Terrahawks.

The first series of Terrahawks hit our screens in 1983, and was set in the year 2020. Funny, that doesn’t seem quite so far away now does it! Earth has come under attack for a race of androids who have set up a base on Mars from which they launch their attacks. In response a special force called the Terrahawks was put together to fight off this unwelcome menace.

The Terrahawks were led by Doctor Tiger Ninestein, so called because he was one of nine clones, originally created by a Professor Stein! He is joined by Captain Mary Falconer, who was pilot of the Terrahawks main space craft known as Battlehawk. Lieutenant Hiro is a brilliant scientist who works from space in an orbiting space station, and there are two fighter pilots named Hawkeye and Kate Kestrel. Kate also happens to be a famous pop star, so she has to balance saving the Earth with recording her latest hit, much to the annoyance of her manager (I think that’s what he was anyway) who had the wonderful name of Stu Dapples (Stewed Apples - I have no idea what the relevance of this was!).

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One of the greatest kids shows to come out of the late 1970’s (and then to repeated many a time during the 1980’s) was Jamie and the Magic Torch. This animated show from Cosgrove Hall, creator of Chorlton and the Wheelies and Dangermouse amongst many other classic shows, featured young boy Jamie and his Old English sheepdog Wordsworth and their nightly adventures in Cuckoo Land, which as you will see was particularly aptly named.

Every episode started with Jamie being tucked into his bed by his mother, but as soon as she was out of the room Wordsworth would appear from under the bed with Jamie’s Magic Torch. Quite how Jamie came into possession of this gadget I have no idea, but upon switching it on and pointing the beam at the floor a helter skelter would be created which Jamie and Wordsworth would then slide down to enter Cuckoo Land. This was the title sequence to the show, which was accompanied by one of the most rock based soundtracks you could ever hope to find gracing a kids TV show.

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