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#24: Merch-Driven Cartoons Take Over 80s Animation

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They'll keep blasting you with the Care Bear Stare until you buy the toys.

During the 1980s, we gradually crawled out of the late 70s cartoon nadir, but at what cost? Apparently, the cost that practically every Saturday morning cartoon of the era was made just to sell toys. From Rainbow Brite to Care Bears to He-Man to Strawberry Shortcake to Transformers, a slew of cartoons invaded the airwaves that were explicitly designed to sell toys to children. How could you tell? Endless characters, endless varieties of the same character, a parade of villains, tons of weapons and gadgets at every turn, all seemingly with an action figure set to debut the week after it aired. Hey, the 1980s were the era of "greed is good", after all. Still, the quality of cartoons certainly improved (gotta keep kids' eyeballs on the screen to sell them toys, after all), and some of the most beloved IPs of all time came out of this era, so what was the problem? The problem, of course, was that companies got too greedy. As the decade wore on, the in-show advertisement got more and more blatant, the cartoons got more and more formulaic, and the toys got more and more complex. This attracted government attention, and it's not hard to argue that the 1980s toy-driven cartoon boom led directly to the massive regulations of the early 1990s that eventually killed Saturday mornings for good (but more on those in a later entry). In addition, the huge success of the merch-driven cartoons of the 1980s led to a focus on merchandising, even to the detriment of other aspects of quality cartoons. This created an environment where if cartoons didn't sell enough merch, they were canceled despite ratings or critical acclaim, even when there was barely any merchandise to buy at all. Greed might be good, but too much of a good thing is always bad, and for all the good cartoons we got out of this era, it may not have been worth the damage done to the industry.