Back when He-Man and She-Ra were made, the animation writers wanted to at least give their shows some sort of moral quality despite all the commercialism, so that was where the little “moral of the story” snippet at the end came from… trying to say, “Hey, this isn’t just a cool commercial, there’s something to learn from all this.” So when you look at a lot of 80’s cartoons-- GI Joe, Fat Albert, Care Bears, Superfriends, etc-- there’s a decent amount of reflection on the lesson learned.
(And a random bit of trivia: the character of Light Hope, from She-Ra, was originally created by the animation writers just so there would be a character that Mattel couldn’t create and sell. Ha!)
My kids watch Sprout sometimes (which is a channel that’s part-PBS, part-NBC, part-Sesame Workshop). Most of the shows leave me pretty cold… but when I look back at some of the things I thought were the bee’s knees back in the day, they were pretty mediocre, too, in terms of plot/writing/continuity/animation quality/etc.
Hello, Rainbow Brite!
There was a Chesterton quote about his prodigious output that’s stuck in my mind that went along the lines of, “If you can talk about God, you can talk about anything; and if you avoid talking about God, there’s very little to say.” And so maybe that’s what some of us pick up on with kids’ shows… it’s okay to say, “Yay! Scientific curiosity!” or “Yay, nutrition and exercise!”, but when you’re stuck in a box where you avoid talking about God or deeper stuff, so that you don’t talk about him in the wrong way to avoid offending people who believe differently or who don’t believe or who are more permissive or less permissive— it’s very confining, and everything feels very generic and shallow.
