After School in Fall 1985: What the Syndication Block Looked Like

If fall 1984 was when the toy cartoons flooded the weekday afternoon, fall 1985 was when they filled it wall to wall. This is the season a kid could come home and watch two solid hours of brand-new syndicated cartoons without hitting a single rerun. G.I. Joe became a daily show. She-Ra gave the girls their own action hero. ThunderCats, M.A.S.K., and Robotech turned the after-school block into the deepest it would ever be. What the same strip looked like a year later is on the fall 1986 after-school page, when a new show had to displace a proven one rather than fill an empty slot.

After school in fall 1985 was a weekday strip of first-run syndicated cartoons assembled market by market, with no single national schedule. It hit its peak that season: the new daily G.I. Joe, She-Ra, M.A.S.K., and Robotech joined ThunderCats and the returning Transformers, He-Man, and Inspector Gadget. Almost every one was tied to a toy line, and most were built in batches of sixty-five so a station could strip them five days a week.

The strip at full depth

By fall 1985 the weekday afternoon had turned into a reliable two-hour wall of animation on the big independent stations. The mechanics were the same as the year before: shows sold into first-run syndication, stripped Monday through Friday, assembled locally so no two markets matched exactly. What changed was the supply. There were now enough new toy-based cartoons in distribution to build an entire afternoon out of this year's launches, with the older library reruns pushed to the edges of the block or off it entirely. A station that in 1983 might have run one toy cartoon among a wall of Hanna-Barbera repeats could now program the Transformers, He-Man, G.I. Joe, She-Ra, and ThunderCats back to back and still have M.A.S.K., Voltron, and Robotech waiting on the shelf. The bottleneck was no longer whether the shows existed. It was how many half-hour slots a station had between the end of school and the local news.

The new slate of fall 1985

G.I. Joe made the biggest jump: after running as two five-part miniseries events in 1983 and 1984, it was promoted to a full series in 1985 with an order for fifty-five more episodes, specifically to reach the sixty-five a station needed to strip it every weekday. She-Ra split the He-Man formula toward a female audience and became its own hit. M.A.S.K., from DiC and ICC TV Productions, built its show around Kenner action figures: a task force in transforming armored vehicles and superpowered helmets against the criminal outfit V.E.N.O.M. It arrived as the first first-run syndicated series to carry closed captioning, and its first season ran the standard sixty-five episodes before a much shorter second season retooled the premise around auto racing. And Robotech did something stranger than any of them, editing three unrelated Japanese anime, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, into one continuous eighty-five-episode story so it would clear the weekday-syndication bar with room to spare.

She-Ra by the numbers

She-Ra: Princess of Power premiered in first-run syndication on September 9, 1985. It was not simply a Filmation show licensing a toy, the way He-Man had been; She-Ra was a joint creation of Filmation and Mattel, with the initial characters and premise written for Filmation by the uncredited Larry DiTillio and J. Michael Straczynski, later characters designed by Mattel, and Mattel financing the series alongside its Princess of Power doll line. The show ran ninety-three episodes across two seasons through 1987, then went into reruns on the USA Network from 1988 to 1989. For a spinoff conceived to sell dolls to girls, that is a deep, fast-produced run, and it made She-Ra one of the few 80s action cartoons built for a female audience from the start.

The anime pipeline

Two of the season's deepest shows were not made in America at all. Robotech was assembled by Harmony Gold from three Japanese series with no connection to each other, given a single English continuity so the combined run would be long enough to strip. Voltron, still airing in fall 1985, had been built the same way a year earlier from Toei's Beast King GoLion. Even the all-American toy cartoons leaned on Japanese studios: Toei animated the first seasons of the Transformers, and overseas houses did the drawing on ThunderCats and much of the rest of the strip. The weekday afternoon a kid watched in 1985 was, under the hood, a heavily imported product, edited and dubbed and rebranded for the American toy aisle.

ThunderCats and the Rankin and Bass line

ThunderCats had debuted in January 1985 and by that fall was one of the anchors of the action hour. It came from Rankin and Bass, and it was successful enough that Rankin and Bass immediately began work on a space-set companion, SilverHawks, which would join the strip the following year. The Care Bears, a DiC production built from a line of greeting-card characters, premiered September 14, 1985 and pointed at the softer, younger end of the same syndication economy.

A representative big-market afternoon

There was still no one grid, because each station built its own. A representative big independent in a major market would run a stack of half-hour cartoons from roughly three o'clock to the early-evening news, and in fall 1985 that stack could be filled entirely with the season's syndicated action shows: G.I. Joe, She-Ra, ThunderCats, the Transformers, He-Man, with M.A.S.K. or Robotech dropped in depending on what the station had bought. The order and the exact times shifted from city to city. The constant was the density, a back-to-back run of toy cartoons with barely a gap.

What changed from 1984

The block roughly doubled. In 1984 the new shows were mostly the transforming-robot toys and He-Man carrying the load, and several of them, the Transformers included, were still only weekly at that point. In 1985 the categories multiplied and the strip went daily in earnest: a girls' action line in She-Ra, a captioned crime-fighting toy line in M.A.S.K., an anime-derived space epic in Robotech, and a daily promotion for G.I. Joe. Voltron, one of the previous year's biggest hits, wound down its original run that November, but the shelf behind it was deeper than ever. The afternoon was no longer a few toy cartoons among reruns. It was an all-toy-cartoon channel for two hours a day.

The honest bottom line

Fall 1985 was the merchandising strategy perfected. The block was denser, slicker, and more completely commercial than the year before, and the sixty-five-episode math was now driving what got made and how it was written, sometimes to the point of splicing three foreign shows together to hit a number. None of that was for the kids' benefit. And still, this is the afternoon a lot of people remember most fondly, because at its peak the strip was genuinely stuffed with the shows they loved, one after another, waiting every single day. The machine was cynical. The two hours were not.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "She-Ra: Princess of Power", for the September 9, 1985 premiere, the Filmation and Mattel joint creation, the DiTillio and Straczynski premise credit, the Princess of Power toy line, the ninety-three episodes over two seasons through 1987, and the 1988-89 USA Network reruns.
• Wikipedia, "G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (1983 TV series)", for the 1983 and 1984 five-part miniseries, the 1985 promotion to a full series with fifty-five more episodes ordered to reach sixty-five for syndication, and Steve Gerber as first-season story editor.
• Wikipedia, "M.A.S.K. (TV series)", for the September 30, 1985 syndication debut, the sixty-five-episode first season, the ten-episode racing second season ending November 1986, and its status as the first closed-captioned first-run syndicated series.
• Wikipedia, "Robotech", for the eighty-five-episode series built from Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA to make a run long enough for syndication.
• Wikipedia, "Voltron", for the original run ending November 18, 1985.
• Wikipedia article infoboxes for the other syndicated series named on this page (first-run syndication dates, distributor, production company and episode counts), saved verbatim at gate time and checked field by field.
• Method note, stated plainly: after-school television was weekday first-run syndication, not a single national network grid. Independent, UHF and network-affiliate stations each assembled their own weekday afternoon strip from what was in distribution, so order and times varied by market. This page therefore presents a verified roster of the series in distribution that season plus a representative big-market afternoon shape described in prose. No specific station's timed grid is claimed as sourced fact. Reliable per-market listings archives were not accessible when this page was built.

Part of the Saturday morning 80s time-capsule series, which also tracks the weekday syndication strip. Previous year: After School in Fall 1984. See also the network side that same season: Saturday Morning Fall 1985.

Backpack down, shoes off, the afternoon shows are on.

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