![]() The Valorians battled the Rulons, two races from the future that were transported back in time to the age of Dinosaurs. The name of the show is pretty self-explanatory, but the actual fiction of this relatively short show is pretty complex considering. In this case, they recruited Gerry Conway-creator of Marvel's Punisher and writing the death of Gwen Stacy at the hands of the Green Goblin-and then-wife Carla Conway. Once they had some character designs and were getting the toy line together, then they would recruit someone to build fiction to incorporate all of those characters. Dinosaurs, riding things, laser guns-put'em in the pot and mix it all together. Toy makers like Tyco would come up with a toy line based on some market research about what kids like. We were deep in a golden age of toys when Dino Riders hit. The show also dealt with themes of racism, pollution, and all of the other social elements that '80s and '90s cartoons tried to deal with. It toned down many elements, of course, giving our beloved robot cop a laser gun instead of a bullet-thrower, but it followed RoboCop's ongoing fight against OCP as he tried to reclaim his humanity. While the show doesn't feature someone's carotid artery being pierced by a data spike, it did work hard to incorporate the themes of the film into the series. Well, Marvel Productions and Orion Pictures thought that film, in which a guy is melted by toxic waste before being splattered across a car windshield, would be a great starting point for a kids' show and toy line. Remember RoboCop, the subversive 1987 science fiction film about a cybernetic cop in a crime-ridden Detroit under control of a megacorporation? The main character's hands get blown away by a shotgun early in the film. Get ready for R-rated movies turned into kids' shows, acronyms, human-animal hybrids, and some truly bizarre story conceits. Some, though, we're not so sure we need to revisit-and there's a bit of both on this list. Did you know that Transformers is made up of two disparate toy lines and that most of the now-iconic names were brewed up over a single weekend? Because toys.Įven if they were toy commercials, though, we had a blast watching them. Creators did what they could to make the shows resonate and to find fun in them, but at the end of the day, they were still commercial products. The truth is that while these cartoons were fun to watch as kids, they were little more than advertisements meant to sell toys, and YouTube has the worn-out VHS transfers to prove it. Who remembers Inhumanoids? What about Turbo Teen? For most people though, these animated series are lost to time in a way that even much older stuff like the Flintstones never will be. This was, for many kids, the birth of pop culture and nerddom, and memories for those of us who were tuning in at the time can be bright and vivid. The word Forgotten is truly subjective when it comes to something like 1980s cartoons.
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