All three Telebugs looked somewhat similar, with sleek curved bodies and a television screen for a head. They differed in size and colour. CHIP (Coordinated Hexadecimal Information Processor) was the notional leader, and was the tallest and white in colour. SAMANTHA (Solar Activated Micro Automated Non-inTerference Hearing Apparatus) was yellow and, being a girl had a red ribbon moulded to the top of her head (in so far as a robot can be called female anyway).

The smallest Telebug was called BUG (Binary Unmanned Gamma camera) and he was red in colour, and was, I suppose given his name, the cameraman of the group. He also had a pet named MIC (Mobile Independent Camera) who flew alongside him and helped in filming duties.

The Telebugs travelled around by flying. Instead of legs they had booster rockets, which enabled them to both hover in place and fly off to the rescue of some poor hapless civilian.

Professor Brainstrain was the inventor of the Telebugs, though unfortunately he had a bit of a problem pronouncing the letter R, so he referred to himself as Pwofessor Bwainstwain.

Of course, as with all good superheroes there were a number of baddies who they went up against on a regular basis, and were generally the cause of all the problems that the Telebugs had to put right. The big bad guy was called Baron Bullybyte, who owned a super computer called Angel Brain which he used to cause most of the trouble.

Bullybyte’s sister Magna was also a bit of a trouble maker, as was Zudo Bug. Zudo Bug was also invented by Professor Brainstrain, but unfortunately he ended up turning evil thanks to a bit of mis-programming caused by Brainstrain’s cat Grumble.

The cartoon was made by Telemagination and 86 episodes were made, first airing in 1986 and 1987.

Most of these cartoons had been made in the Sixties, but they were still regularly being shown on kids TV as I was growing up, such was their enduring appeal. What better then than a cartoon that brought many of these great characters together?

The result was Yogi’s Treasure Hunt, which featured Yogi, Boo Boo, Top Cat, Huckleberry Hound, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy, Snagglepuss and more. It also featured my favourite ever cartoon villains Dastardly and Muttley from Wacky Races and Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines (better known, albeit wrongly, as Stop the Pigeon due to the theme song).

A quick aside about Wacky Races. Dastardly and Muttley always tried to prevent the other competitors in the race from winning by planting traps on the course for them. However, given that the courses didn’t appear to be lap based in any way, this meant Dastardly and Muttley always had to get in front of the pack to set their surprises. This being the case, and if they really wanted to win, they must have had the fastest car on the track, so why bother with the traps?

Back to Yogi’s Treasure Hunt. The show revolved around Yogi and the gang sailing around the world looking for treasure (not quite sure why they were on a big old galleon type ship but there you go), after being given orders from Top Cat (who’s voice in this show was totally wrong, presumably explaining his relatively minor appearance). Dastardly and Muttley tried to stop them from reaching the treasure, which of course they never did, but quite what happened to the treasure after they’d found it I don’t know. I guess Top Cat must have pocketed it all.

Viewing it today I think I actually like it more than when I was a kid! I remember watching it, but not being that enamoured with it as a child, finding it a bit boring, but viewing a few episodes on YouTube it’s full of mostly terrible one liner gags. It’s a bit of a case of it being so bad it’s good, if you see what I mean. Here’s an example below (and then you can see what I mean about TC).

As the name suggests, it was about some Raccoons! They lived in a place called the Evergreen Forest, and the show primarily followed the fun loving and mischief making (though never in a bad way) Bert Raccoon. There to keep him out of too much trouble were his good friends Ralph and Melissa (also Raccoons), who were also husband and wife.

Between them the trio ran a newspaper called The Evergreen Standard, with Ralph as editor, Bert as reporter and Melissa the photographer. The newspaper was very important to the inhabitants of the Evergreen Forest as it helped thwart the plans of the nasty Cyril Sneer.

Cyril Sneer was a tycoon who was always trying to find some way to make a profit, and this usually involved the forest being threatened as part of his schemes. Cyril was an aardvark who was pink in colour and had a nose that looked something like a water tap. He was usually seen chomping on a half smoked cigar.

Cyril also had a son named Cedric, who was quite often the voice of reason that persuaded Cyril to back down from his latest destructive scheme. Because of this, whilst Cyril and the Raccoons were, I suppose, technically enemies (though that seems a somewhat strong word to use), Cedric was in fact a good friend of the Raccoons.

The show was made entertaining due to Bert Raccoons antics, and also those of Cyril Sneer for that matter, although most episodes also had a more serious message for the viewer, be that a lesson about life or something more ecological in tone.

Gobots actually started life in Japan (where else) as the Machine Robo series of toys, slightly before the Transformers even came into existence. In 1983 western toy manufacturer Tonka licensed the toys for the US market, and renamed them Gobots in the process.

Sales of the toys were initially very good, as the concept resonated with many a young lad. However, when Hasbro launched Transformers the Gobots suffered. This can be attributed to many things, but ultimately the Transformers toys were just a whole lot cooler. The Transformers looked more robotic an futuristic in many cases that their Gobot cousins, and they had better names too. Where the Transformers had Optimus Prime and Starscream, Gobots had Scooter and Tank (no prizes for guessing what they transformed into).

Another area in which the Transformers excelled was with their design and backstory. The look of the toys, their packaging and eventual cartoon told a coherent story and it was easy to see the strengths and weaknesses of each robot from the statistics printed on the box. The Gobots tended to look a little more chunky and basic looking, although some had very complex transformation seqences that easily rivalled those of certain Transformers toys.

The last new Gobot toys were released in 1987, and they had to concede defeat to their more famous cousins, but the story doesn’t quite end there. In 1991 Hasbro bought out Tonka, which gave them ownership of the Gobots brand, although not the toys themselves as they were only made under license from Bandai in Japan.

Hasbro confusingly went on to use the Gobots name as part of the Transformers line up in no less than three different ways. First, they released a Transformer named Gobots, then there were a sub-range of toys named Go-Bots, then finally a range aimed at younger children (released under Hasbro’s Playskool label) called Transformers: Gobots.

It first aired at around the same time as Gummi Bears, another series aimed at a similar target demographic. The Gummi’s managed to do a little better for themselves that The Wuzzles, but only slightly.

So what on Earth is a Wuzzle then? Well, a Wuzzle is a creature that is a mix of two regular animals. For example there was Bumblelion, who was a mix of a lion and a bumble bee. In appearance he looked pretty much like what you would expect a anthropomorphised cartoon lion to look like, except he also had antennae, wings and a stripy stomach.

Other characters from the Isle of Wuz included Rhinokey (rhino and monkey), Eleroo (elephant and kangaroo), Hoppopotamus (rabbit and hippo) and Butterbear (butterfly and bear). These were all good guys, but of course there has to be bad guys, the main villain being Crock, who was somewhat bizarrely half crocodile and half dinosaur (though which particular dinosaur I don’t know, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was a Tyrannosaurus Rex – it usually is).

Unsurprisingly the cartoon was accompanied by a range of associated other merchandise, with books, duvet sets and all the usual stuff available. The toy line was particularly well catered for with both action figures and soft toys of the various Wuzzles, including some which only appeared as toys and weren’t in the cartoon series.

There obviously wasn’t a National garage close to us though, as I remember we only had a couple of the freebie Smurf toys. My sister had a Smurfette one, and I remember having a Smurf that was black instead of blue. It always puzzled me at the time why he was black, but in this case I have to thank Wikipedia for putting my mind at rest, as the black Smurf was actually a blue Smurf who was bitten by a fly and went a little insane. He was the central plot for one of the Smurf comics.

Before National used Smurfs as a promotional aid though, I had never heard of them, despite the fact they were actually created way back in 1958 by Belgian cartoonist Peyo. Whilst they are known in Belgium as De Smurfen, which is where the English name for them comes from, they were first given a French name, Les Schtroumpfs.

This odd name came from Peyo asking a French friend to pass him the salt at a meal, but he had forgotten what the French word for salt was, so said “pass me the schtroumpf” instead. This led to Peyo and his friend continuing their conversation substituting the word schtroumpf in place of other words, thus inventing the manner in which the Smurfs tend to speak, substituting the word Smurf for other verbs and nouns. Whilst you could normally work out what they were saying from context, “I’m smurfing my smurf to the smurf” could mean anything really.

The Smurfs are of course little blue creatures who run around wearing funny little pointy white hats and white trousers (which appear to encompass the feet as well). Many of the Smurfs add to this ensemble to reflect their character, such as Brainy Smurf wearing trousers, or Smurf elder Papa Smurf having a beard and wearing red instead of blue.

Quite how the race has survived so long is a bit of a mystery given there appear to be no female Smurfs. OK, Smurfette is quite obviously female, but she isn’t actually a true Smurf, as she was actually created by Gargamel the wizard, the Smurf’s main enemy who was always trying to eradicate them, eat them or, bizarrely, turn them into gold…

In 1981 Hanna Barbera created a cartoon version of The Smurfs, and I certainly remember enjoying watching it. As with most TV shows from my youth it had an infectious theme tune (Laaaa-laaaa-le-laa-laa-laaaa, laaaa-le-la-la-laaaaa, come on you remember it, and I bet you’ll be singing it now after reading this).

So popular was The Smurfs cartoon that it ran until 1989 and notched up an impressive 256 episodes, containing over 400 individual stories.

At the time of writing, there is also a live action/CGI mix Smurfs film in the works, due for release in the second half of 2011.

Barbapapa was a series of originally French language books, and later a cartoon series (which is how I mainly remember it), created by Annette Tison and Talus Taylor. The first book was published in 1970, whilst the most recent appeared as recently as 2005!

So who is this Barbapapa then? Well, he’s a big pink blob, who’s natural shape appears to be something like a pear. I say natural shape as he has the ability to squish and mould himself into any shape he chooses (a bit like The New Shmoo, another obscure reference for you there).

Whilst something big, pink and amorphous might seem terrifying, Barbapapa was anything but. He was a friendly sort who liked to help out people with problems however he could, which usually meant he would transform himself into some object or other that would prove particularly useful for the situation at hand.

He may well of started off on his own, but it wasn’t long before he got himself a family. First he met Barbamama, a female blob who was jet black in colour, and with curves that suggested a more feminine form. I guess the writers probably regretted their choice of colour for Barbapapa at this point, as pink might have made more sense for a female of the species, but there you go. However along with her shape, she also wore a ring of flowers around the top of her head, to make her look just a little more girl like.

The pair went on to have a family of Barbababies, each of which tended to have a different area of expertise. The female children had a natural shape most like their mother, whilst the boys generally looked more like their father. Each of the children was also a different colour, and unsurprisingly had a name starting with Barba!

The children were Barbalala (green and musical), Barbabright (blue with an interest in all things scientific), Barbabelle (violet in hue, and the self proclaimed beauty of the bunch), Barbazoo (the yellow ecologist and animal lover), Barbalib (the orange book worm), Barbabeau (black, an artist, and the only hairy one, at least as far as we can tell), and finally Barbabravo (red, strong and sporty, although also fancied himself as a bit of a detective).

I can’t say I’ve seen much in the way of Barbapapa related items in the shops myself, but a quick search on Amazon and eBay seems to suggest there is still a great deal of interest in the lovable pink blob, as there are books, DVDs, clothes and toys readily available (check out the links below for evidence!). The characters have proved very popular in Japan, which might explain why so many interesting items are available, but I also wonder if Barbapapa is still very popular in his native France?

M.A.S.K. was a high action cartoon aimed squarely at young boys, and can best be described as a mix between Transformers and Action Force as it featured cool looking vehicles that could transform into even cooler looking vehicles, and a group of highly trained action men and women.

As the dots in the name suggest, M.A.S.K. was an acronym. It stood for Mobile Armored Strike Kommand (how Kool is that?) which was an organisation intended to fight crimes that were carried out by the also acronymed group named V.E.N.O.M. (Vicious Evil Network Of Mayhem – so no mistaking them as the bad guys then!).

Both M.A.S.K. and V.E.N.O.M. were made up of experts in various different fields, each of which drove their own appropriate vehicle. When the need arose, these special agents could don a special piece of head gear (a mask, see, the acronym works on two levels) and their vehicle would transform itself into something with a bit more oomph, whether that be in speed terms or just extra firepower.

Presumably in order to allow kids to feel that they too could be part of this world, the leader of M.A.S.K. (the very macho sounding Matt Trakker) had a son named Scott who always managed to get himself involved in the action despite his Dad telling him not too. I don’t ever recall seeing Mrs. Trakker though, probably because she would have given her husband hell each week for letting their son get into danger all the time.

Young Scott had a robot companion, which would have been nice enough for most kids I guess, but it too could transform into a funny looking Moped type vehicle so that Scott could get around.

It’s probably not hard then to guess what the accompanying toy line consisted of for M.A.S.K. Yes, it was of course the various vehicles and their drivers, so there were sports cars, planes, helicopters, jeeps and much more, most of which could transform just like in the cartoon. The range of toys influenced the cartoon though, rather than the other way around, and each series of M.A.S.K. changed to accommodate the new toys and characters which were released each year.