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I am constantly surprised my how many toys and cartoons from the eighties that were aimed primarily at little girls actually started off life as a series of Hallmark greetings cards. The Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake are both good examples, and another is Rainbow Brite.
Rainbow Brite first appeared on a card in 1984, and that same year she also featured in her first animated film entitled Peril in the Pits. In 1985 the theatrical release Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer came out, and then in 1986 the little multicoloured one got a regular cartoon TV series of 13 episodes.
The backstory to Ms. Brite’s adventures was that a little orphan girl named Wisp was whisked away by a magical force to a place called the Colorless World. She befriends a Sprite called Twink, a funny little fluffy fellow, and a horse called Starlite with a rainbow colored tail and mane.
Wisp is tasked with bringing colour back to the world in which she finds herself, and to do this she must free the seven Color Kids, who are Red Butler, Lala Orange, Canary Yellow, Patty O’Green, Buddy Blue, Indigo and Shy Violet. As you can see there was a Color Kid for every colour of the rainbow, and each had their own personal Sprite friend.
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Made in the early 1970’s, Crystal Tipps and Alistair was still being shown whenever the childrens TV schedule had a five minute gap well into the 1980’s. The cartoon was about a girl called Crystal Tipps who wore a tiny yellow and green striped dress and had the biggest shock of curly purple hair you’ve ever seen. Always at her side was her lumbering canine pal Alistair, who always looked a bit dopey and often got teased mercilessly by Ms. Tipps.
In 1981 toy manufacturer Mattel released 
During the 1980’s there was a craze for role playing games, probably the most famous of which has to be TSR’s Dungeons and Dragons. The game was so successful it spawned a cartoon series, which at the time I thought was just a cool TV series and I had no idea of its original roots.
Over the years the good people at animation house Cosgrove Hall have produced some of my favourite childhood TV series. From 
The Shoe People was, as if you couldn’t guess, a cartoon series about a group of shoes. Sounds pretty unlikely I know, but these shoes were ones that had been taken to be repaired by the Shoe Mender (not sure why he wasn’t called a Cobbler?). For one reason or another these shoes were not able to be fixed, and obviously being a sentimental sort the Shoe Mender couldn’t bring himself to throw them away, so they were put in his back room instead.
I was always a little confused by the naming of Disney’s Gummi Bears, since it always brought to mind those little jelly teddy bear penny sweets. Apart from being bears I couldn’t understand why this cartoon was named after the sweets yet the bears didn’t seem to have much in common with their tasty namesakes.
Since I first saw it at the pictures all those years ago 
