Yesterdays
post has put me in a reminiscing mood. In writing a little about Turtles and
Transformers, I remember the cartoons that hooked me as a kid.
Not just
the above mentioned but also He-Man (By the power of Grayskull!), Mask
(Crusaders, working all the time!), Defenders of the Earth (Defenders!), Jayce
and the Wheeled Warriors (I still have no idea what it was about), Voltron (a
first love), (Thunder-Thunder-Thunder) ThunderCats, and can I remember it all
without googling; Eyes of the Hawk, Ears of the Wolf, Strength of the Bear,
Speed of the Puma…BraveStarr.
I still
have my Tex Hex action figure, which reminds me of all the toys I had and still
have. Then my mind starts to overflow in a tidal wave of memories like pitting
He-Man against a troop of GI-Joes (GO JOE!) in an oversized Action Man tank
and…….wait. What am I doing? Where am I? This isn’t 1987?
I was
talking about the cartoons, yes, not the toys. I’ll have to come back to them
at a later date, definitely. I’m putting my Boglin down now.
For me
cartoons weren’t just a reason to get up early on Saturday mornings or most
other mornings for that matter. They were also a window into a world of
imagination and creativity. In each of these half hour episodes were contained
a fully realised world, some more fully realised than others admittedly, but
worlds that had been created and maintained as separate, satellites to the real
world. Satellite worlds in which unnumbered stories could be told about heroes
and villains, robots and aliens, people and places. Limited only, I believed at
the time, by the breadth of your imagination. But most of all these worlds were
not made by an alien or super-being; they were made by people, just like me.
Well adults, and even though I could believe at the time that some of these
adults were aliens, I did know that one day, in a galaxy, far, far away, I
would be an adult too. I’ve been striving to create my own world ever since.
