Looking on my husband’s behalf - he lived in central Florida between 1982-1987, and he remembers a cartoon showing on tv - most likely on Saturday because he was in school and practices most of the rest of the time.
The premise was a group of 3 to 5 kids were exploring South America, looking for “the seven golden cities.” One of the kids was actually of Mayan/Incan/Aztec descent who could “read knotted strings.” They were trying to get to each city before a separate set of adults who were looking to loot the cities.
They ended up actually finding a couple of the cities while he watched, and in one city they found a prehistoric airplane that looked like a bird of prey, and was piloted with a joystick that looked like a snake. They flew over people and dropped rocks on them from baskets hung under the plane.
Again, this would be a cartoon, most likely USA origin, shown in central Florida between '82-'87. It could be a cartoon movie, but he thinks it’s more likely to have been a serialized show.
Is your husband sure he saw it on live TV? Given the number of Quebecois in Florida, and the huge popularity of the series in Quebec, I wouldn’t be surprised if he saw it on tape as “Les Mystérieuses Cités d’Or”. Here’s the opening song, which most kids around here could play on recorder
He recognized the characters shown in the opening reel, but he’s less certain whether he saw it in English or French as a child. Upon thinking hard about that portion of his childhood, he did recall some families in his neighborhood speaking French at home, but being Dutch himself, it didn’t make much of an impression on him.
That was pretty amazing. Thank you all! Now off to rent it from Netflix and see if its worth getting to inflict on our hypothetical offspring later in life.
**xnylder **- he wasn’t sure about much of anything, as it was a very faint memory. He couldn’t even remember if it was a serial or a movie, so I think that says a lot for how things fade away. Thank you for that YouTube link - without that opening reel, he was looking at the Wikipedia going “I think that sounds right… but I don’t remember it being anime!”
