The 80s Cartoon Project Thing #6: Disney Cartoons.

 Well, it’s finally time to come back to this after eleven days. Whoa!!! That’s pretty good on my scale! I’ve trying to keep this thing grouped up into themes. Like last time was Ruby Spears and such. There’s still a few more companies I can go through before getting into some other wild stuff. Anyway, I decided to pick a company that gets a lot of discussion and hate (some of it very valid, some of it not), which is Disney. Disney was founded in like 1923 by Walt Disney and he took the FUCKING WORLD BY STORM. For decades this dude was popular as shit. Strange they never tried to do televised animation before the 1980s but Disney was in a bad spot after Walt died in 1966. It actually took a lot of time for them to get back in the top spot. Anyway, they finally started to do Televised animation in 1985.

Their first try was an original creation known as the Wuzzles. It uh, involved a group of wuzzles, which are uh, two animals smushed together for some reason. Stop telling me smushed is not a word auto correct!!! Anyway, this is me cheating a little bit, one because I’m lazy and two because I’m getting over a cold. I didn’t rewatch any Wuzzles for this here, because I’ve seen the show recently enough to remember that I didn’t like it. It felt like they were trying to hard and none of the characters were all that remarkable or memorable. It was just stock plots told in the least memorable or enjoyable way they could be done. This will be going far down the end of the list because I had to literally really think about who the bad guys were and I’m pretty sure it was a crocodile or an aligator. I don’t care enough to look it up and I am tired of talking about The Wuzzles.

This however is a incredible upgrade in quality from The Wuzzles. The second time they tried they really did a great little job. They got people who would work on other cartoons and even create a few for them. Like Tad Stones (still the coolest name in history) and Alan Zaslove. Again they might have worked on the Wuzzles but I don’t want to know if they did because I like to think they always did great work and are cool guys even though I don’t know them as people and never will. Uh, where was I? Oh, this is a show about a magical group of bears that are well called Gummi Bears and they fight off an evil Duke guy who’s a giant jerk. The have a formula that makes you bounce call the Gummi Beary Juice which the Duke wants. I wonder how hard it was for some writers to come up with a use for that stuff in EVERY story. “Damnit I just don’t want them to jump over the guy again!!!” but it probably happened. Despite being a better show than the Wuzzles, this is a cartoon I forget about constantly. Weird, isn’t it? Anyway, this has some pretty great voice acting, animation and I’ll be very glad in the future to one day sit my lazy ass down and watch every episode. It’s good enough for that.

Now we are getting to the cartoon that will dethrone Inspector Gadget! Yes! that’s right! Based on the old Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge/Donald Duck comics gets you (so far) the best cartoon that I’ve talked about. I don’t know if it will stay #1, but I don’t doubt that it really has that possibility. This was a cartoon that pretty much cemented Disney staying and doing many many many other cartoons. This cartoon is about a miserly old Duck named Scrooge McDuck who literally has a fucking money bin that is filled to the brim with coins and gold and all kinds of shit that he swims in like a crazy man. He still wants more money. He and his family (his grand-nephews, Huey, Dewey and Lewey), a goofball pilot, a screwball inventor, a nanny and her niece go ALL over the damn world getting into crazy adventures for all to enjoy. They go up against the Beagle Boys (and their mother) and Flintheart Golmgold, the second richest Duck in the world. Anyway, this is a very fun cartoon and I think that the reason it works better than The Adventures of the Gummi Bears is the setting. The middle ages are a fun setting but they can end up being limiting. You put it in 1987 DuckBerg and have the goofy inventor create a time machine and bam you got your story about knights and kings and witches! Anyway this show ran for 100 episodes and most of them are still a fun watch!

I’m taking a little jump out of historical accuracy to talk about this 1980s Disney cartoon because I don’t really want to talk about the last one, but this cartoon was the last one they made before 1990. It was created by Tad Stones and Alan Zaslove because they created like all of the early Disney animated shows for TV. Either them or a guy named Jymn Magon, or Alans son Mark. Anyway this cartoon also goes back to Disney’s past again and refixes some old characters for the audiences enjoyment. This time it’s Chip N Dale who get the refix treatment. They bring in some really fun new characters. Fat Cat, Dr. Nimnul, Gadget, Zipper and Monterey Jack. I really quite enjoy this cartoon and thats the end of that.

The one cartoon I didn’t really want to talk about is this one. The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. First off, can we find a different title than that. I mean these adventures are NEVER going to continue being new! They will get old! This cartoon is 37 years old this year. Which makes me feel like that gif of Matt Damon from that movie I never saw. Anyway my hot take. A very hot take is that Winnie the Pooh is very, very, very boring. I thought this as a child and I think this now. There are things that have a slow pace (like say Peanuts specials and shows) that I do enjoy but there’s things like Winnie the Pooh which is just BORING AS FUCK. The characters are just uninteresting and uningaging to me. I just never liked Winnie the Pooh and my uh subjective ranking of every 80s cartoon will have him at the bottom. At least the Gary Coleman Show had some WTF factor to it. Winnie the Pooh has nothing, except an excellent voice cast. They were all very good at the voice acting but that’s all I can really say about this one.

The List!

1. DuckTales
2. Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers
3. Inspector Gadget
4. Spider Man and his Amazing Friends
5. The Incredible Hulk
6. The Smurfs
7. Go Bots
8. Adventures of the Gummi Bears
9. Mister T
10. Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos
11. Spider Man (1981)
12. Camp Candy
13. Turbo Teen
14. Goldie Gold and Action Jack
15. Rubix the Amazing Cube
16. Care Bears
17. Pac Man
18. The Gary Coleman Show
19. The Wuzzles
20. The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh