The Full Story · How the Kids Shows of the 80s Really Got Made

Almost every show a kid watched in the 1980s was made by adults under commercial pressure, on a deadline, for reasons that had very little to do with the child on the carpet. The interesting part is what happened anyway. These pages are built from what the creators, producers, writers and cast have said about their own work, repeatedly, across decades, with the disagreements left in.

This is the index of every full-story page on this site: 46 making-of accounts of 1980s children's television, grouped by cohort. Each page is built from the makers' own repeated tellings, with verbatim quotes attributed to outlet and year, a timeline of how each story has changed over time, and the discrepancies named rather than smoothed over.

Nickelodeon and the channel that borrowed its personality

The cable network that defined kids TV for a generation spent the 80s running other people's programs.

• You Can't Do That on Television, the Ottawa sketch show that gave Nickelodeon its identity and invented the slime.
• The cast of You Can't Do That on Television, two adults playing every grown-up and more than a hundred kids over ten seasons.
• Danger Mouse, whose villain was named after a farmer the writer disliked and whose dark scenes were a budget measure.
• Out of Control, where Bob Saget handed Dave Coulier a career and "Cut it out" reached television.
• Double Dare, a cookie company's marketing idea built for under $10,000 an episode.
• The Double Dare obstacle course, roughly 40 obstacles engineered out of foam, food service supplies and a playground slide.
• The history of Nickelodeon slime, which was never one recipe and started as a can of paint.

The toy aisle on television

The defining commercial form of the decade: a cartoon that existed to move a product, made by people who mostly treated it as real work anyway.

• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, the toy that came before the show, from a company that had passed on Star Wars.
• She-Ra: Princess of Power, nearly named Hera, forbidden by consultants from swinging her own sword.
• ThunderCats, drawn in Japan by the artists who would become Studio Ghibli, written by a newspaper cartoonist.
• Voltron, assembled by a St. Louis company that asked Japan for the show with the lion and got the wrong one.
• The Transformers, where Marvel named two hundred robots over a weekend and the cartoon killed Optimus Prime to sell new toys.
• G.I. Joe, a war with no stakes, a fax machine for a writers' room, and a hero invented to save fifty percent on paint.
• Jem and the Holograms, a hit show whose doll lost to Barbie, with nearly two hundred music videos in it.
• The Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, whose famous finale was never produced, as both writers have spent decades saying.
• Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling, a licensing deal in which none of the wrestlers voiced themselves.

The gentle worlds

The other half of the merchandising decade: soft, warm, enormously profitable, and in several cases made with more care than the premise deserved.

• The Smurfs, greenlit because a network president bought his daughter a doll in Aspen.
• The Care Bears, a greeting-card sketch turned into an engineered toy line and a movie that saved a studio.
• Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, ordered because an executive's kids liked a candy, and built toward Tolkien anyway.
• Alvin and the Chipmunks, a son reviving his late father's characters against years of closed doors.
• DuckTales, Disney's 1987 syndication gamble, built on 500 uncredited Carl Barks comics.
• Muppet Babies, which Jim Henson greenlit months before the film the legend credits.
• Fraggle Rock, designed by Henson as a children's show meant to end war, and aired in a hundred countries.

The ones that broke the rules

Shows that were not supposed to be interesting and turned out to be, usually because somebody in the building was not following the brief.

• Pee-wee's Playhouse, built by a downtown art crew who did not know the rules of television.
• Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, Ralph Bakshi selling CBS a cartoon it already owned, and surviving a national panic over a flower.
• The Garbage Pail Kids cartoon, a complete unaired season buried by the network that commissioned it.
• The Real Ghostbusters, rebuilt mid-run by a consulting firm, with the makers angry enough to say so on the record at the time.
• Inspector Gadget, born from a toy deal that collapsed, carried by a joke that respected the kid watching.

Live action, sitcoms and the syndication afterlife

The decade's other great mechanism: a show dies on a network and comes back as somebody else's inventory.

• Small Wonder, a syndicated sitcom about a robot girl that became a worldwide hit and a lasting punchline.
• Vicki the robot, and how the writers re-engineered the star around a growing child actress.
• Punky Brewster, assembled to satisfy a federal programming rule and named after a real girl.
• Charles in Charge, cancelled by CBS after one season and given four more by syndication, with a different family.
• Mama's Family, cancelled by NBC in 1984 and revived in 1986 as the top show in first-run syndication.
• ALF, shot from trenches under a raised floor, on the hardest easy job in television.

Games, contests and the things you played along with

• Fun House, a 22-episode audition that a USC sophomore turned into the number one kids game show in America.
• Remote Control, MTV's first game show, set in a fake basement, which launched Adam Sandler and Denis Leary.
• Michael Larson and Press Your Luck, the man who memorised the board and won $110,237 in one taping.
• Star Search, a 1930s radio format rebuilt for stations that did not exist yet, hosted by a man who said no three times.
• TV POWWW, the game you played by yelling into a telephone at a screen that was several seconds behind you.

Music and dance television

• Solid Gold, whose dancers existed because the artists on the countdown would not fly in every week.
• American Bandstand in the 80s, the institution being made obsolete by a channel doing its job with videotape.
• Puttin' on the Hits, the lip-sync contest that invented a format television is still using.
• Club MTV, fifteen half-hour episodes taped in a nightclub across two days.

The shows built to teach

Public television and the prestige projects, made under a completely different set of pressures.

• Reading Rainbow, which ran five episodes a year for most of the decade and could not sell a single toy.
• Zoobilee Zoo, commissioned by a greeting-card company specifically to win an award, which it did, then vanished.
• The Great Space Coaster, whose masters are delaminating in storage and which survives because a puppeteer spent his retirement money on it.

The honest bottom line

Read enough of these and the pattern stops being flattering. The overwhelming majority of 1980s children's television was commissioned to sell something, made fast and cheap, and shaped by people whose actual constraints were a toy company's shipping calendar, a broadcast standards department, or a syndication slot that needed sixty-five episodes by a certain date. Almost nobody set out to make something lasting.

What keeps these pages from being a debunking exercise is that the makers themselves are rarely defensive about it. They say the budgets were nothing and the schedules were absurd and the notes were stupid, and then they say what they managed to smuggle through anyway. The tension between those two admissions, told in the same interview by the same person, is the actual subject of every page here. The affection an audience carries for these shows is not naive. It just belongs to something more complicated than the memory usually allows.

Sources

• This is an index page. It makes no factual claim of its own: every show, date, network and episode figure named here is carried from the individual page it links to, and each of those pages carries its own sourcing. Nothing on this page is asserted that is not already sourced downstream.

Part of 80s kids TV. For when these shows actually aired, see Saturday morning in the 80s.

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