Thursday, April 30, 2009

Name That Toon!

Last month Ailee put together an interesting quiz regarding a number of old sitcoms from the 80's and 90's: Given an excerpt of their opening theme lyrics, you had to name the sitcom... and for added points, you had to give the continuation of that set of lyrics.

I'm proud to say that I managed to peg ten out of her twenty selections, with an added bonus for remembering how the theme songs for Perfect Strangers and The Greatest American Hero went. That said, I also managed to remember almost the entire Baywatch theme, and I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.

The whole exercise did get me thinking, though. While I admit that I do have a soft spot for some of the sitcoms of my youth, I don't look back on these shows on a regular basis. The last time I checked, I'm a testosterone-laden, flea-bitten guy... which means that I'm also an immature young kid at heart. What that means is that, whenever I look back on all the TV that I've ever watched, it's the cartoons that I inevitably remember.

Of course, cartoons were different back when I was ten years old. Most of the animated stuff on TV existed solely for the purpose of selling as much merchandise as possible, and as bad as that may sound, they were effective enough to spawn a fringe collectibles industry. However, some of them also had remarkably adult-oriented plots and fully-realized characters; There are very few contemporary cartoons on the picture tube nowadays that I would have liked to have had when I was a kid.

We've seen minor revivals of some of the most popular of these cartoons recently. He-Man and Ghostbusters both came out with "modernized" treatments some years ago, for example, and we get stuff like Transformers and G.I. Joe in theaters. There are quite a few shows that don't get as much attention but are still remembered fondly by their fans, and you can still find the occasional DVD collection or discussion group out there.

Given all that, I went ahead and tracked down the lyrics to some of the opening themes that I remember. Then, because I don't like making this easy on people, I pared these down to some of the less popular (but hopefully familiar) series, and laid out excerpts of these lyrics below. The first of these came out in the early 80's, the latest came out in the mid-90's, and I now present this challenge to you: Given these pieces of their opening themes, name these shows.


1. ...And you know there's a long long way ahead of you...

2. ...But bad guys are out of luck...

3. ...High in the mountains, or deep in the sea...

4. ...Let's watch the clouds go far below...

5. ...No one knows what lies behind the masquerade...

6. ...Powers of mind, strength, skill and speed...

7. ...Soaring through the highway of the heavens in their flight...

8. ...The music's contagious...

9. ...Two times the fun, wrapped up and rolled into one...

10. ...You're the only one who can scratch our wrists...


I'll have the answers up in a couple of days or so, along with some commentary from my end.

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