Three '80s Cartoons I watched Every Weekday Morning in 1990

 Hey everyone, how's it going? Happy Canada Day to all of my readers who are fellow Canadians! Today I'm going to talk about three '80s cartoons that I watched on weekday mornings in 1990. All three of them were produced here in Canada or have Canadian voice talent in their casts, or both. So let's get right into it.

The first is Inspector Gadget, which aired on Global TV at 7:30 in the morning on weekdays. I did a post over on Josh's Geek Cave a few years ago on this show, but it was one of my absolute favourite cartoons growing up in the '90s, especially in the early part of the decade. It's also one of two on this list that aired on Global TV in reruns all through the '90s, right up until Global stopped airing its Kids TV block in the early 2000s. As I mentioned in that earlier blog post, Maxwell Smart himself, Don Adams, voiced Gadget, which was funny, because I was watching reruns of Get Smart right around this time too.

The next cartoon on this list is The Care Bears Family. This was on pretty early in the morning, either at 7 am or 8 am. I don't really remember when, but it was on in reruns on Global all through the '90s, and into the early 2000s. This and Inspector Gadget were the two '80s cartoons that were on in reruns until Global discontinued Kids TV in the early 2000s. Because this was a Canadian produced cartoon, it had many Canadian voice actors in the cast. Oddly enough, Shreeky was voiced by two different people. In season 2 she was voiced by Terri Hawkes and in season 3 she was voiced by Tracey Moore. Why is that significant? Well, Tracey Moore voiced Sailor Moon in the first thirteen episodes of the original English dub of Sailor Moon and Terri Hawkes voiced her for the remaining 57 episodes of the two season dub produced by DIC Entertainment. So that's pretty neat.

The last show I wanna talk about is The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, based on the toy by Worlds of Wonder. This series was distributed by DIC Entertainment, however it was produced by Atkinson Film-Arts, which was a studio here in Ottawa that went out of business in 1989. I've talked a lot about Teddy Ruxpin on my blogs over the years, but I loved this show growing up. It mixed the charm of the book and tape sets with the action cartoons like The Transformers, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was also the only cartoon that was serialized, as it ran five days a week with an over-arching story arc that lasted for at least four out of the five days, sometimes all five days, there was also usually one standalone episode during that week too. This was unprecedented in the '80s as pretty much every other cartoon was episodic.

Naturally, I have all three of these shows on physical media. As you all know I grew up with The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin on VHS. I still have a bunch of episodes on VHS, on two tapes that my dad recorded off Global TV in 1990, but I don't have any of the official VHS releases from the '80s anymore. I also have the entire show on DVD.

I have "The Invasion", which is season 1, episode 16 of Inspector Gadget on VHS. This was part of a collection of tapes that was given to me by an acquaintance of mine back in late 2020 or early 2021, and I've watched it a few times since then. It's a good episode and I love seeing the opening theme and closing credits as if I was watching it on Global TV in the early '90s.

I have one Care Bears tape. This one contains four episodes from season 3 of The Care Bears Family. These four episodes belong to a batch of episodes late in the season that homages Star Trek. I had a copy of this tape when I was a kid, but the top loader VCR we had at the time, ate the tape and we had to throw the tape in the garbage once my dad was able to get the tape out of the VCR. A few months ago though I spotted a copy of the tape at a local geek sale that I went to with Brad and Jonathan, and I bought it for $5, which was a pretty good deal all things considered. So I'm very glad to have the tape back in my collection after more than thirty years.

I have the 2012 Image Entertainment The Complete Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin DVD release, which contains all 65 episodes across ten discs and nothing else. The transfers used were the original broadcast tapes, with no remastering done. So each episode looks exactly how it did when it originally aired on TV back in 1987. Which actually doesn't surprise me, because I don't think any '80s cartoon or '90s kids show that I own on DVD has been remastered at all, except for Sailor Moon as I own the first two seasons of the 2014 Viz Media English Dub on Blu-ray (season 1) and DVD (Sailor Moon R). There also aren't any special features in this DVD release either. Or any Teddy Ruxpin home video release for that matter.

That's all I wanted to talk about today. I could've talked about so many '80s cartoons but these were the three that were on during the week that I watched every day either before school or when I was in the hospital and needed something to do while I waited for my nurses to finish their rounds or for my doctors to do their morning rounds. I'll definitely do more blog posts about the '80s cartoons and other TV shows that I watched growing up because there were quite a few of them.

I'll be back on Saturday for this week's Rental Recommendations. I took last week off, but I'm back this week. I might have other blog posts in me this week. Maybe one tomorrow or Friday. We'll see. Until then, have a great rest of the week and I will see you back here in 1980 something, 1990 something, or between 2000 and 2005. Take care. Peace out!