The summer heat is on. Strange how I have become less tolerant of the heat as I’ve gotten older. It used to not bother me so much; as a youth I was comfortable all the way into the low 90’s. We grow up hearing clichés about how older people get less tolerant of cold as they age but that hasn’t been my experience. I don’t love the freezing cold, but I can tolerate it; it’s the heat that wipes me out.
Fortunately, I have a basement where I keep all my cool stuff, and that’s where I spend my days when I’m home on weekends when the temps soar to nearly 100° as they have all this week. So let it sizzle outside; I’ll be underground watching cartoons!
Ah, Saturday morning cartoons! This is a topic I have expounded upon multiple times on my li’l blog here, as it is one dear to my heart: so many happy memories, so much great entertainment! Playing with my cars while watching cartoons were some of the happiest days of my childhood: I lived for Saturday mornings as a kid, and today, as an aging fossil, I do again! Combing the web today, one can find examples of almost every cartoon show imaginable, even foreign ones. At lot of really popular stuff is still under copyright, but there’s a LOT that you can watch at the touch of a button for free. Hey, in some ways we’ve got it even better now than we did back in the diz-ay!
Plenty of stuff vies for my attention (a surprising amount of it is fun and entertaining) but it shouldn’t surprise any die-cast fan that I was keenly interested in a show I never got to see in my youth, but should have: The Hot Wheels cartoon. And I’m not talking about any of the direct-to-video or online game-linked stuff from the 2000’s; I mean the original Hot Wheels Saturday morning cartoon that ran for 2 seasons from 1969 to 1971, right in the middle of “The Spectraflame era.” You might be surprised to learn that this cartoon has quite a place in history! This innocent looking adventure show about a group of teenagers in a racing club caused a lot of controversy when it first aired, and it actually changed Saturday mornings for millions of American kids for a decade.
The controversy didn’t really have anything to do with the storylines or dialog or characters. No, the controversy stemmed from the concept of the show itself, and it was set off by what seems like a particularly vicious political maneuver by one of Mattel’s market rivals of the day.
There were already rumblings of discontent about this show from some “concerned parents” organization (what we would probably call “Karens” today) who in 1968 formed a group called The Action For Children’s Television, or ACT (having an exciting acronym is so important!) who were crusading for more “educational value” in children’s programming. Yet, while this group did have some influence in collecting data on the potentially damaging nature of excessive advertising in children’s TV in the early 70s, they were only a part of the issue. Principally, it was Topper, the company behind the original Johnny Lightning cars which were developed as a direct competitor to Hot Wheels, that really got the attention of the FCC late in ’69, when they filed an official complaint claiming that the Hot Wheels cartoon was nothing more than a half-hour long TV commercial. Thus, they alleged, ABC, which aired the show, had to count its entire run time against their allotted ad time.
Now, one would like to think that if Topper were so torqued out about Mattel’s programming, they might have thrown their hat in the ring and made an “answer cartoon” of their own. Instead, they chose to go whining to the government to get them to bear down on a marketing rival. Seems like an early example of “cry-bullying.” It worked, unfortunately; the FCC hauled in some mid-level Mattel execs to ‘splain themselves, and the gubmint allegedly decided that, indeed, Hot Wheels, along with its sister series, Sky Hawks, was a 22 minute long commercial.
To their credit, ABC did not buckle, at least not at first! The show must have been popular enough that that stations were willing to eat some of the expense of logging at least half the show as “commercial time” because it stayed on the air for another year and a half before finally winding down in 1971. Importantly, between Topper’s siccing the FCC on Mattel and the angry parents of ACT, word got out that kid’s shows designed primarily around a product were a non-starter. Perhaps we shouldn’t complain too much; the 70’s were a great era for Saturday mornings, made especially so by Hanna-Barbera and Filmation, that gave us all kinds of great and memorable shows, from Scooby Doo to Captain Caveman and the Teen-Angels to Fangface to The Groovy Ghoulies, and it was also the decade that gave us the inimitable Schoolhouse Rock, as well as some live-action “educational shows” that I used to watch like Animals, Animals, Animals! (“and now here’s Lynn with a song about the platypus”). This decade also saw the rise of the Kroft Superstars, and all their crap-tastic uber-low budget live-action flings like H.R. Puf-N-Stuff and Land of the Lost. What you didn’t see in this era-anymore-was shows that were transparently ads for toys.
That was all to change in 1981. What happened then? If, like me, some of your happiest memories of being a kid in the 80’s is of eating sugary breakfast cereal in your “jammies” while watching shows like G.I. Joe, He-Man, and Thundercats, well…you have Ronald Reagan to thank!
The Reagan administration deregulated advertising to children in the 1980s. This allowed companies to market as much as they wanted to kids, leading to an explosion of new toys, junk food, breakfast cereals, and cartoons! And as kids, we loved it! From The Transformers to M.A.S.K. to Dino-Riders to Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, even the “girlie” shows like Care Bears, My Little Pony, and Jem and the Holograms – some of the best and most memorable cartoons of the decade were created entirely to sell toys! What was conspicuously missing from this long lineup of 22 minute toy commercials was…Hot Wheels!
In truth, the Hot Wheels cartoon doesn’t seem to have been all that great. Played very “straight” like a kids version of an action/adventure show, the premise was that the “Hot Wheels” were a race team of rule-following good guys who exemplified fair play and safety as they faced off with a rival team run by a snotty hipster who was always cheating to win. It had an original theme song and there was even a 12” vinyl soundtrack album, but none of the music was very memorable, and the quality of the animation was quite poor. It is notable in being one of the early cartoons featuring the voice of Casey Kasem, who also began voicing Shaggy in Scooby Doo, Where Are You? which debuted the same year as Hot Wheels.
I have only been able to find about 5 episodes of it floating around on the web, and I’ve done quite a bit of digging and can’t find any more, which begs the question: where are the rest of the episodes? It’s been said that 34 were made (some sources say 36), so where are the other 30-31, and why have they never appeared on any home video medium, ever? Perhaps they really have been “lost,” but I bet there’s someone out there hiding some tapes in their basement! It would be pretty cool to see them even if it wasn’t the best cartoon ever, because seeing animated versions of the very cars you were likely playing with on the kitchen table while you were watching it must have been pretty cool to a kid! Hey, you can’t go wrong with Hot Wheels!
Well, it’s certainly more fun than the full scale mowing operations I have going on here this weekend. This was one I hadn’t seen at the time as it was just a bit before my time. There were so many different ones that looking back had an innocent and fun charm.