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Captain Caveman (or Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels to give it its full title) was another in the long list of Hanna Barbera’s “group of teenagers and their comedy sidekick solve mysteries” style of cartoon, and whilst nothing will ever top good old Scooby Doo in my book, Captain Caveman was certainly not the worst of the bunch, and his great gutteral cry of “Captain Caaaaaavvemaaaaan!” brings back happy memories of pretending to fly around the school playground pretending to be him.
Captain Caveman, or Cavey Wavey as his female teenage companions would call him whenever they wanted him to do something, was a neanderthal super hero, covered in what one presumes was incredibly long brown hair, and equipped with a massive wooden club and wearing a little leopard skin cape (or the prehistoric equivalent of a leopard anyway). He had super strength and the ability to fly, although these powers had a tendancy to pack in at the most inopportune moments, such as when flying across a massive ravine or holding a really big boulder in the air.
His club was not just a great weapon but was also laden with Flintstone style prehistoric gadgets, such as a torch which was a little bird clutching a candle, or a “guard dog” dinosaur. Incidentally, speaking of the Flintstones, it was on one of the many Flintstone comedy show cartoons that Captain Caveman first appeared, then he later appeared with the Teen Angels of Scooby’s All Star Laff-A-Lympics before finally getting his own show. Personally I don’t remember ever seeing him on the Flintstones, and I only have very vague memories of Laff-A-Lympics, but I certainly remember him from his own cartoon.
Mr. Rossi was not your typical type of cartoon. It wasn’t about a group of mechanised warriors taking on an evil foe. It wasn’t about a bunch of cuddly fun loving animals who love everybody unconditionally. It wasn’t even about a bunch of teenage kids and their strangely human like pet investigating mysteries, although it did feature a talking dog. Nope, Mr. Rossi was about an ordinary little man bored of his hum drum life and seeking something exciting to occupy his time.
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.
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.
