USA Cartoon Express

I used to watch the USA Network quite a bit as a kid. The thing I watched the most was The Cartoon Express, which was a collection of old cartoons from the seventies and early eighties. This was one of the things that defined my taste in cartoons.

I can't remember if The Cartoon Express was aired everyday or only on the weekends. I do know that on Saturdays it aired at least till 11. Saturday was the biggest day of the week since the day started off with original programming. It also allowed kids to participate by phoning in their opinion on things and it was the first time I saw random people have their birthdays listed on the air. I'm pretty sure that this was a precursor to what Nickelodeon evolved to, although I haven't watched Nick in a long time so don't assume I know what's happen on that network in the last decade.

I remember during 1988 I had my first taste of politics. USA let kids call in to think who should be president. They would make their pick and make a brief empty statement for why they made their pick. Kids got to pick between Bush or Quayle, meaning it was probably the primaries. (Or USA was biased!) Maybe it was Bush vs Dukakis, but I remember it being Bush vs Quayle.

USA Network is where I watched He-Man. I was a big He-Man fan as a kid and one Christmas I got a huge set of He-Man toys. I was such a big fan that I even watched She-Ra after He-Man was over. Side story - Even though I was a huge fan of He-Man, I must have misheard his catchphrase every time. Everybody knows that it's, "I HAVE THE POWER!", but for some reason, I always heard it as, "I AM HE-MAN!" I like my version better because it avoids using the word power twice in two sentences.

Most of the cartoons showed on USA were Hanna Barbara cartoons. The cartoons included more famous stuff like Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear but included a lot of the cheesier cartoons. I'm talking about stuff like, "Help!... It's the Hair Bear Bunch!" and "Turbo Teen." This includes all the Yogi Bear derivatives and Scooby Doo clones. And I love all these cartoons! I think I had a Shirt Tales lunch box at some poin. Today I'm sure I would be embarrassed if I watched most of the cartoons but I always saw these as good, well-drawned cartoons and this led me to reject the later cartoons made by Nickelodeon. My favorite HB cartoons included Laff-O-Lypics, Pebble and Bamm Bamm Show, The Herculoids, and Kwicky Koala.

Sadly, these cartoons quickly disappeared when the Cartoon Network appeared. And now these cartoons have all migrated to Boomerang, which I don't have. I'm sure by the time I get Boomerang, these cartoons will have been replaced by the crappier Adult Swim cartoons.

On Saturdays at seven there was a show called Calliope. It was about some guy and his dog and they hosted cartoons that were different from what was usually offered. It also had a lot of viewer mail. Sadly, I didn't watch this show too often because it was too early to watch. The only cartoon I can remember was something about a bunch of penguins.

The Cartoon Express had several bumpers that teased you about which show they were going to show next. Several times they would show Dragon's Lair and Pac-Man promos but never show the cartoon, which annoyed me a lot. They were automatic must-watch shows because they were based on video games. Dragon's Lair was especially rare because I think they made only a dozen episodes.

There were a couple cartoons that actually disturbed me. The first was a famous episode of The Smurfs where the Smurfs started biting each other tails and becoming purple. The purpleness made them lose their minds and it spread like a disease. There was also an episode of Pac-Man that had a alternate future where the ghosts had won and Pac-Man and his family ended up getting chomped. Even though Pac-Man was just-a-dreaming all this, it made it appeared that the bad guys had won in that episode.

There were some cartoons I didn't like (Johnny Quest for one), but the one that really stands out in my mind as a cartoon that I hated was Gem. I would leave or turn off the tv whenever they showed that. I never cared about a bunch of girls trying to be rock stars and I didn't care about their rivalry with the bad rock girls. Who cares whether or not if she was truly outrageous?

Eventually as I got older it got harder to watch this on weekdays. We only had one tv with cable. I started watching the current Saturday morning line up of the networks. My taste in cartoons shifted towards the Disney cartoons of the early nineties. I watched a couple of Mortal Kombat cartoons towards the end of the decade, but The Cartoon Express I knew died when they got rid of all the HB stuff.

I wish they would put Pac-Man and Laff-O-Lympics on dvd.