“Scooby Doo, Where Are You?” originally was produced for Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1969. Joe Ruby and Ken Spears created the Saturday morning cartoon, which ran from 1969 to 1975 over CBS. Here’s the original opening titles and theme song:
It later aired from 1976 to 1991 on ABC and has run extensively in syndication for decades. “Scooby Doo” has spawned many other films, TV series, comics, video games and other projects. It remains an extremely active franchise owned by Warner Brothers.
“Danger Mouse” was a British cartoon that parodied spy stories. It ran over 161 episodes from 1981 to 1992.
The program went into global syndication. U.S. viewers first saw “Danger Mouse” in 1984, when it aired on Nickelodeon. Fox-owned TV stations also carried the show.
Here’s an episode from the series’ original run:
A rebooted version of “Danger Mouse” began in 2015 on CBBC, the BBC’s children’s channel.
A spin-off, “Count Duckula,” ran from 1988 to 1993.
Crystal Tipps and Alistair was a British cartoon produced for the BBC. The titular characters were a girl and her dog who were joined by their friends Birdie and Butterfly. There were 50 five-minute episodes and a 20-minute Christmas special, all first shown between 1971 and 1974. It was created by Hilary Hayton and Graham McCallum. Michael Grafton-Robinson, a BBC producer went independent setting up Q3 of London to produce the series. The animation was done by Richard Taylor Cartoons.
Back in 1978, I got my first exposure to anime through “Battle of the Planets”. The show was a bowdlerized version of a Japanese cartoon called Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (科学忍者隊ガッチャマン Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman).
The opening narration made comparatively little sense:
“Battle of the Planets! G-Force! Princess! Tiny! Keyop! Mark! Jason! And watching over them from Center Neptune, their computerized coordinator, 7-Zark-7! Watching, warning against surprise attacks by alien galaxies beyond space. G-Force! Fearless young orphans, protecting Earth’s entire galaxy. Always five, acting as one. Dedicated! Inseparable! Invincible!“
Still, even as a kid, I appreciated that this was quite a bit more sophisticated than American cartoons at the time.
The 1970s-80s sitcom “Happy Days” – which was set in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s – had at least two strange and unlikely brushes with science fiction.
Mork (Robin Williams) was an extraterrestrial from the planet Ork who visited the Cunninghams. The sitcom “Mork & Mindy” spun off from this episode.
And the 1980-82 Saturday morning cartoon “The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang” featured several members of the Happy Days principle cast along with an anthropomorphic dog named Mr. Cool joining a young woman from the future named “Cupcake” in her less than reliable time machine.
My Third Parent 