Top 5 Horror Cartoons that Need to Make a Comeback!
At the risk of sounding like an old hag, let’s rewind our minds back a few years and remember what being a kid was like on a gorgeous Saturday morning. Unlike my peers, I personally was always up at a decent hour (around 7:30 a.m.). After crawling out of my Ninja Turtle sheets (I wasn’t your typical eight-year-old girly-girl), I would make my way to the dimly lit kitchen and help myself to a bowl of cereal and whatever readily available juice box (preferably Hawaiian Punch or Ecto Cooler) my fridge held that morning.
I would gather my morning sustenance, grab my metal TV tray, and head to the living room, where our mammoth of a television set stood, ready to seize the day with the start of some of the greatest goddamn must-see-TV (to the mind of an eight-year-old in the early Nineties, at least), especially, for a horror geek such as myself, the abundance of horror-themed cartoons.
Thems were the days, eh? Of course, I’m not knocking today’s choice of animated programming. However with the exception of Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and Disney, the Saturday mornings we once knew, which were filled from channel to channel including basic networks with a variety of choices to waste your time on, are pretty much non-existent today. And although I hate to be pessimistic, I’m fairly certain it’s going to stay that way.
I do have a bit of a pipe dream here however. A dream that one day, some of that beautiful nostalgia I love to revisit now and again will once more become a weekend staple for giant nerds such as myself and for a new generation to feast thine eyes upon in all its glory. Hell, I’ll even take it as prime time programming, “cough-cough” Adult Swim. Either way, these five horror-themed cartoons in particular need to make a comeback in the worst of ways to reclaim their mighty thrones as Cartoon Kings.
5. Toxic Crusaders
In 1984, the fine folks over at Troma catapulted Toxie into cult fandom with the release of one of their finest, The Toxic Avenger. Oh yes, the film that gave a hero to janitor geeks everywhere and had the balls to (over)kill a kid, eventually got a Saturday morning slot in 1990. Can you imagine the pitch to make this an animated series geared towards children in a network meeting room? I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that stunning conversation.
Anyway, in lieu of the grotesque humor associated with the Troma film, Toxie was toned down considerably for his animated series. Of course, there was the occasional adult satire that usually flew right over a kid’s head, but what cartoon by today’s standards doesn’t include that? The frail and wimpy health club janitor turned super-mutant by a clumsy mishap with a drum of toxic waste teams up with his trusty pet mop and band of equally ridiculous crusaders in a fight against Dr. Killemoff and Czar Zosta from the polluted planet of Smogula who intend to toxify the planet. As with most retro cartoons, the series encrypted a “very special message” inside the episodes as being eco-conscious. Unfortunately, the series only ran 13 episodes. I suppose Captain Planet and his wimpy Planeteers had the larger following, but we can all agree Toxic Crusaders had the more metal theme song.
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