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.
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.
SuperTed was one of those cartoons that straddled the strange grey area between cartoons for little kids and cartoons for teenagers. Primary school children would definitely have enjoyed SuperTed’s adventures, but given that the hero of the show was basically a teddy bear by the time you reached around 10 years of age you would probably consider it a bit childish, but would probably watch it anyway if there was nothing better on.
Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds was a phenomenally popular cartoon created in the early 1980’s by Spanish studio BRB Internacional, although it was actually animated in Japan by Nippon Animation. The show finally hit UK TV screens in 1985, being shown on Children’s BBC where it hooked everybody in. Based on the famous novel The Three Musketeers written by French author Alexandre Dumas in the 19th century, the series followed the adventures of Dogtanian (D’Artagnan from the original story) in his quest to become on of the Muskehounds, the finest swordsmen in the whole of France.
If there was ever a decade where companies learnt there was money to be made from kids then the 1980’s is surely it. This surely was the beginning of the merchandising age, where any toy, cartoon series, film, comic could reasonably expect to be refactored from one form of media to all of the others, with a motley array of lunchboxes, quilt covers, clothing and just about anything else you can think of thrown in for good measure.
I certainly remember my sister owning a Strawberry Shortcake doll, but I didn’t realise that, like the
If you were to venture deep within the trees of Doyley Wood, it’s possible you might just bump into Willo the Wisp, or one of his friends. That’s if you’re watching cult 1980’s cartoon Willo the Wisp of course, rather than the real Doyley Wood which is somewhere in Oxfordshire, apparently.
Whilst checking out the new series of the 
