It was the first animated-for-TV cartoon, and it shows. Lots of voice over. Outside of stuff like the opening no real animation.
OTOH, Jay Ward was involved and we all know the cool thing he ended up doing.
Another really bad one was Tom Terrific which was part of Captain Kangaroo.
For me, the early '90s had a lot of lame cartoons.
Hammerman
The ABC lineup of cartoons really went downhill in the early 1990s.
Mr. Bogus
This show was pretty bland, and the only thing good about it were claymation segments.
The Lion King animated series that didn’t feature the lion king, but Pumba and Timon instead.
Crusader Rabbit was GREAT! Jay Ward wasn’t just “involved” - he created the show. As with his later series (especially Rocky and Bullwinkle, which used the same “short smart hero/big strong dumb sidekick” dynamic), he didn’t have the money or resources for quality animation, so he made up for it with clever writing.
The Crusader Rabbit cartoons I grew up on, though, were a slightly later vintage, not actually made by Jay Ward, but with a lot more animation (and color). But they kept up the witty writing and wonderfully atrocious puns.
Caillou was on during a period where the overall PBS lineup was pretty strong. Since we were too cheap to get cable, that’s what our kids watched. Arthur, Between the Lions (which included the twisted, and excellent, Chicken Jane), and Cyberchase were all good enough for me to sit through. Caillou, like Barney, was an outlier.
I was picky about my cartoons (I grew up in the seventies). One of the three networks almost always had something I could watch. Probably the worst I would deign to turn on was Laff-o-lympics.
I remember when Disney owned las channel 9 and to promote their dick tracy movie they ran those …… it didn’t last 3 days before the furor started even radio personality tom leykis got involved …
I just want to say that Arthur is the worst artistic rendering of an aardvark ever! Same for his whiny sister!
At the risk of starting an argument, or a thread in the Pit, I have to say that the introduction of Scrappy Doo permanently ruined a fan favorite, to the point of sullying the reputation of the entire series.
Simply saying so made Mr. Celtic Knot dump me after our first date. Thankfully, we were able to talk it out and have enjoyed 23 years together.
I’m now reading Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming, and she mentions that, early in her career with a big Chicago law firm, she was responsible for Barney & Friends’s intellectual property rights.
I felt sorry for her.
There were a bunch of bad spin-offs in the late 70’s / early 80’s I watched avidly but didn’t like much…
I’ll see your Scrappy Doo and raise you a “Godzuki.” Recall, in the spirit of having a “baby” version of the hero, there was a cute, cuddly baby Godzilla that appeared on that show. Ugh.
In the late 80’s they started with He Man, which many kids like but by then, being in High School, I just couldn’t stand to watch it. Babysitting was extra difficult when I had to sit through He Man.
The first Arthur book had him looking like an aardvark. I don’t think the tv show ever acknowledged that any of the characters were animals except Buster Bunny and the Art Garfunkel moose that appeared in one episode. They also had a discussion about a show where animal characters might be in danger of being eaten by their pets in “real life.” The cartoons were way, way better than the books in the opinion of this kids’ librarian.
Agree with Celtic Knot, Scrappy Doo needed to be dropped down a large pit, he made me tune out Scooby Doo, probably forever.
I remember watching Dodo (the Kid from Outer Space), thought it was pretty lame, creepy even, that weird cast and animation, Professor Fingers? Compy the computer bird? Brrrrrr.
King Leonardo etc weren’t the best, but not much worse than similar fare, like Tennessee Tuxedo, Ricochet Rabbit, etcetcetc, watched them all.
And Crusader Rabbit? NOT lame! When I was 5-6 years old, it was the BEST!
Were the USA spared the Japanese manga inspired animated series in the 70s? In Spain we had to endure *Heidi *and Marco, two really soppy but incredibly popular animated series, specially with the pre-pubescent girls. And then there was Mazinger Z, called Tranzor Z in some countries, which was just… hard. An enormous super robot, commanded by a child, aided by another robot, a female one called Aphrodite A (commanded by another child). Aphrodite fought by firing her breasts as missiles against the enemy. Hereyou can see 36 really hard seconds. I remember the episodes as really repetitive, the same sequences shown over and over again. They were so bad, they were almost good again.
Caillou, by contrast, is so bad it’s OH LORD SWITCH THAT OFF BEFORE MY KID HEARS IT AND STARTS COPYING HIM!!!1! KILL THE TV WITH FIRE!!!
My prime cartoon watching childhood years were from the late-70s to the mid-80s, which, as far as I am concerned, was the nadir of American animation. Hanna-Barbera Filmation, and Ruby-Spears were in a race to the bottom to crank out shows the fastest and the cheapest for the Saturday morning cartoon ghetto. Meanwhile, the toy companies realized, that instead of just paying for commercials to promote their toys, they could just pay for the programming to promote their toys.
As a kid I loved Tranzor Z, Battle of the Planets, Starblazers and Voltron.
The problem with naming bad cartoons, is that for every one that sticks in your mind, there are probably three or four knockoff cartoons that were even worse that you’ve forgotten about because they had a brief existence. Think Scooby-Doo was bad? You probably don’t remember dreck like Clue Club, The Buford Files, or Jabberjaw. Think Space Ghost was bad? It’s brilliant adventure compared to, say, Young Samson, Shazzan, or the Mighty Mightor.
didn’t they find out that ruby spears …was a under the table h-b unit that they made so they wouldn’t get in trouble for the monopoly they held on tv cartoons until the mid 80s ?
I liked the Voltron series that wasn’t the lions ……
I remember when most of the most popular weekday cartoons were Hasbro toy based …. transformers gi joe my little pony …
Well when the new MLP show was first on Hasbro bought a network from discovery and called it “the hub” and 90 percent of the programming was based on Hasbro toys and games they even brought back the op transformers and gi joe ……
It didn’t last amd they sold it back to discovery losing a ton of money in the process …
Also, I think you have look at what else was around when a show was broadcast before consigning it to the dustbin of history. I mean, the last time someone started one of these threads, they led off with the assertion the the worst cartoon of all time was…Jonny Quest. Sure, maybe it doesn’t stand up to Avatar: The Last Airbender, but it was outstanding for its time.
Ruby-Spears were Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, two H-B vets who became ABC execs. Fred Silverman, the ABC President, thought the H-B was getting stale and spread too thin, so he asked Ruby and Spears to form their own production company to make cartoons for ABC.