Kids are spoiled nowadays. Really. With the Internet and the multitude of cable channels the entertainment possibilities are endless. Me, I could either stare at the wall or stare at the sun. At least I was getting some fresh air if I was staring into the sun.
My few bastions of fun back then were the few chances to watch cartoons on tv. This tv being limited to 4 channels. This became 5 channels when C13 came along, and 6 channels when the fledgling Fox Network began broadcasting quality fare like Werewolf and 21 Jump Street. Ok, ok, so they had one winner with Married With Children. But I already had cable by that time anyway, so the Fox channel didn't matter as much.
So the late 70s and early 80s were the dark ages for my prepubescent mind. I was stuck with a smattering of cartoons in the early morning and after-school hours, and was left with watching shows like Barney Miller with my parents. Even the Barney Miller episodes after Abe Vigoda left. I can feel the sympathy pouring in, thanks.
Of course, Saturday mornings were a gold mine. Not only cartoons, but cartoons on all three networks, intersperced with Kool-Aid and Honeycomb commercials. Looking back, I realize that some of these cartoons were bad. Really bad. Everyone must remember those straight-from-the-arcade cartoons. Pac-Man (voiced by Marty Ingels, ack!), Q-Bert, Dragon's Lair-there was no stopping the lack of originality and the lack of any semblance of plot.
The always reliable Looney Toons (before they were censored) were a mainstay. Thundarr the Barbarian was an interesting ripoff of Star Wars. Dungeons and Dragons was entertaining, perhaps because it had practically nothing to do with the game.
One of my favorites was the Alf cartoon. It came along towards the end of my cartoon watching days (1987), so it had to appeal to an older audience to interest me. I didn't even like the Alf tv show very much and only watched the first season. The cartoon took place on Melmac, which was a good move since all the human characters on the original show were just plain boring.
Even better was a spinoff of this cartoon (that's right, somehow this cartoon was successful enough during it's very brief run to have a spinoff) called AlfTales, which used the cast from the first Alf cartoon as members of a cast that would perform a fractured fairy tale of sorts, only unlike the fractured fairy tales from the Bullwinkle cartoon, these were a half hour long.
Not impressed yet? Well, two of the main writers on AlfTales were David Cohen and Roger Schulman. David Cohen would go on to write for The Simpsons and Futurama. Schulman did even better, as he was one of the four writers credited with the Shrek screenplay. Hmmm, is it just a coincidence that Shrek also featured fairy tale parody? I think not.
It has been way over ten years since I saw any of the Alf cartoons, so maybe they are not as good as I remember. I recorded nearly every episode onto videotape, though the quality is undoubtedly lacking since I tried to squeeze 12 episodes onto each tape. They might not even play after all this time. One thing I hated about Saturday morning cartoons was the mountain of repeats that we would often have to wade through to discover a fresh episode. After I started recording the Alf cartoons, there was one that they just refused to repeat. It was the Legend of Sleepy Hollow episode. Meanwhile, they must have shown the Little Red Riding Hood episode 7 or 8 times. Talk about frustrating. Now it makes me think that maybe there was something controversial about the episode, causing NBC not to rerun it.
But all that does not matter now, as the Alf cartoons are now on DVD!!! Well, some of them, anyway. 9 of the 26 Alf Animated Adventures have been released, and 7 of the 21 AlfTales are available. No doubt if sales are good enough the rest of the episodes will be released. And yes, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow episode is on the AlfTales release, thank God. In a few days I will receive the discs-hopefully they won't be a disappointment after all this time.
