shows for girls, the shows boys have to watch in secret!
we talked about this a bit in the kids club viewing of skysurfer strike force et al the other night, and here’s a thread about it.
first, the only girl cartoon i watched as a kid, with the tv on mute and subtitles on, so i could hear anyone coming upstairs and change it quick in case they came in my room. it’s the silver brumby, and from what i remember, it’s about a really fast horse in australia, and it was serialised, which was the big draw. compared to the 2010s, serialised cartoons were relatively rare, because pokemon and dragonball z hadn’t come along and showed anglosphere kids tv people how to build and keep an audience. girl and boy cartoons in general are mostly a thing of the past, too, other than in stuff aimed at very young kids. modern shows like gravity falls, steven universe, and so on are pretty gender neutral
and two shows i’ve never seen, other than seeing the intros in an 80s cartoon intro compilation last week, and they’re two of the most aggressively girly cartoons i’ve ever encountered, but in different ways
tbh, i think the character designs in the original jem are really bad. i love the redesigns sophie campbell did for the 2010s comic, though. also, having it in comic form, you can pretend that all the bands are metal bands!
we would rent maxie’s world for my sister, but i’d watch it, because maxie’s world was the shiiiiiiiiiiiit.
babysitter’s club was also my jam. that fuckin’ theme song. claudia and stacey were my favorite.
not sure if this was really a “girl” show. i remember having chicken pox and watching this.
uhh, does punky brewster count?
and sailor moon, obviously.
i had a younger sister, and also pretty much no friends, so i could indulge in this stuff. i got sailor moon vhs tapes in like, 96 or 97 because of my sister. they were hers, but then they became mine. because i’m older.
I always say this, and it’s still true: The original my little pony cartoon was fucking wild.
There was nothing that said Bronies were fake pony boys like their constant perpetual dismiss is all of it. Sure it bad but all the Hasboro 80s shows are!
But just like GI Joe and Jem, the show is an endlessly weird parade ‘who the hell wrote this’.
The ones that stick out in my memory the most are the multi-episode sagas where an evil Genie used a pony pretty transparently designed to look like a fusion of Michael Jackson and Prince moonwalk his way into the hearts of ponies…only to help steal their Shadows???
The other one is of course there one where a fucking quake castle appears out of nowhere and is ruled by this fucker:
Anyway my memory of this dude is that he’s a tremendously evil wizard highly coded as being motherfucking satan and at one point he locks ponies in chains and forces them into servitude.
I know other fucked up shit happened, but that’s mostly what stuck in my head. I should probably revisit it.
Anyway, I definitely get a little testy about the skow’s bad rep, especially amongst the bronies. As much as Lauren Faust is rightly praised as a creative, her distancing herself from the original show which she said was ‘just about tea parties’ always struck a wrong chord with me.
I’m not saying this show is good, but it definitely has some of that weird He-Man/Gi-Joe/Jem energy that seems to come about in toy commercial TV shows. And if you know me by now, you know ‘weird energy’ is basically what I pursue in my media.
At the end of one of my scooby doo tapes was the Powerpuff Girls episode about nightmare monsters who were all 70s disco and funk-themed, led by “Boogie” Man. It’s the fucking SHIT, just badass as hell funkadelic monster fighting. Great voicework, animation and designs
There’s a bit I only noticed now that I’m an adult where boogie man casually says “Sheeeee-,” like he’s going to say sheeee-it! but barely doesn’t. I didn’t have any opportunities to see other PPG episodes but this is probably one of the best ones anyway.
