Quite good. Up to Mr. Rogers standards.
Well, on that note (ha), I’d like to cite The New Adventures of Batman, the Filmation series from 1977. In addition to reuniting Adam West and Burt Ward, the musical cues (though repetitive) were pretty effective at maintaining mood.
Of course the show was effectively ruined by Bat-Mate, a proto Scrappy-Doo.
I used to really like the Harlem Globetrotters cartoon, which featured real players like Meadowlark Lemon & Curly Neal.
It was typical Hanna-Barbara 1970s dreck, but I liked it. What did I know? I was just the stupid-kid target market they were shooting at.
Ironically, Maurice LaMarche, who did the voice of Egon, believes that Music was replaced as Venkman by Dave Coulier because of comments made by Murray about Venkman sounding like Garfield. Coulier seems to confirm this by saying the producers wanted an actor playing Venkman who sounded more like Murray.
You mean Bat-Mite. He was an extra-dimensional being who plagued Batman and Robin in much the same manner that Mr. Myxzptlk constantly annoyed Superman. He wasn’t a Filmation creation, but rather was created by Bill Finger and appeared in Detective and World’s Finest Comics from 1959-1964.
Typo aside, oh, I know the character has an long-established comic history, (as do the original Batwoman and Bat-Girl and Ace the Bat-hound and Vicki Vale and any number of characters) but on that animated series he was adapted as a distracting nuisance. Of course, that’s how he was in the comics, too, but at least he wasn’t in every single issue.
As an incidental note, I recommend Bat-Mite’s one shot World’s Funniest, in which he and Mxyzptlk run rampant through the DC multiverse.
Even better: In one episode of the cartoon the Ghostbusters go to Hollywood to have a movie made about them. At the end, they go to the premier, and you see the opening scene of the actual movie and hear Lorenzo Music as Peter complain, “That guy doesn’t look a thing like me!” (All of the characters in the cartoon look completely different from the movie because Filmation didn’t want to pay the actors to use their likenesses.)
Great: Alf. It was about Gordon Shumway on the planet Melmac.
Horrible: Police Academy
Just awful The Three Robonic Sttooges. The Three Stooges as robots. For some six million-dollar reason the producers couldn’t just call them “robotic”; they needed to create a portmanteau word from “robotic” and “bionic.”
Grrrrr.
Little Rosey was much better than it sounds. Well written and funny. If you want to talk about WTF how about the second season of the Harlem Globetrotters where they gave them superpowers?
Strangely all cartoons based on The Three Stooges were really bad.
Bad: *Highlander *
Also Bad: Tales from the Crypt
Even Worse: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
Haven’t Seen But It Couldn’t Be Good: Ramb**o and the Forces of Freedom
I have seen it and it was pretty bad. It had the G.I.Joe quality to it where the team of bad guys come up with some goofy plot and the team of good guys zoom in to stop them. Huge gunfights occur and the bad guys run away shaking their fists and declaring that they’ll get their revenge. The one in particular that I remember had Rambo flying in on his open-cockpitted helicopter, get shot down out of it, and jump up through the blades and parachute out.
Ridiculous: The New Scooby-Doo Movies (where they had celebrity guest stars like Sandy Duncan, The Harlem Globetrotters and Sonny & Cher).
And let us not forget Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos.
On the other hand, please let me forget that one.
Well, heck, are we counting any animated version of a fictional character once depicted in film by a live actor?
There was that Conan cartoon. Admittedly, the character was literary first, but I doubt the cartoon would have been made without the Schwartzenegger films. I remember it as… okay… though sanitized. Conan would hit a lizard-man with his sword (well, he would swing the sword at the lizard-man but the blade would stop before contact) and this was enough to have the lizard-man vanish bloodlessly, banished to another dimension or whatever.
Good: Beetlejuice
It might even have been better than the movie it was based on.
*Yellow Submarine *was great. The short cartoons were awful.
Can’t agree there. Tales from the Cryptkeeper was a fine kid version of the adult show. It was Goosebumps before Goosebumps.
Okay, now that I think back on it, what I’m remembering is that they gave my then 12-to-13 year old daughter nightmares, so I’ve got negative memories of it. YMMV.