He-Man and the Masters of the Universe

HE-MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE
Made by: Filmation
Shown on: BBC1
Years shown: 1982 onwards

Toy company Mattel came up with the ultimate marketing ploy for their new line of action figures - turn them into TV stars, of course. They invested huge amounts of money in 65 episodes of this, one of the crappiest, most shoddily-made cartoons ever to be a blight on our TV screens. Prince Adam of Eternia, an interesting mix of ludicrous muscles, a girly blond bob, and a pink waistcoat, led a double life. He held his sword aloft, cried out, “By the power of Greyskull!” and turned into He-Man, the self-confessed “most powerful man in the Universe”, who wore red underpants and criss-cross braces across his considerable chest. From this point on, it was all very boring because, obviously, the most powerful man - not to mention the most modest - cannot be beaten with any ease. Prince Adam also owned a cowardly green (?!) tiger, called Cringer (he obviously knew what kind of a series he was starring in), who had the ability to shed all fears and become Battlecat. As a consequence, thousands of eight year old boys around the country kidnap the neighbours’ tabby, try to stick a helmet on it, and throw it over the wall to see if it can leap across gorges. He-Man’s great adversary was Skeletor, some kind of mummy who was obviously very pissed off at having been disturbed from a lifelong slumber; he was actually quite grotesque, with rags hanging off him, but his impact was lessened by his pathetic cronies, such as Buzz-Off (a man in a bee outfit) and Whiplash, who was some kind of dragon with a deadly tail. But all He-Man had on his side, apart from the cat, was some kind of floating ghost in a purple robe, possibly called Orca, and someone with the very odd name of Man-at-Arms - let’s hope he never changed his job, or it really wouldn’t work.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 1/10

(Thanks to www.tellytunes.com for the borrowed pic)

Hart Beat

HART BEAT
Made by: BBC
Shown on: BBC1
Years shown: 1984-93

There aren’t too many real English gentlemen left, but Tony Hart is one of them, complete with his pressed shirts and cravats. None of that bohemian lifestyle for this most polite and decorous of artists. Hart had previously presented Vision On (originally aimed at a deaf audience) and Take Hart, but Hart Beat was his project for the eighties, and this time around he had ‘helpers’, art school graduates, including the frightfully posh Margot (whom he once referred to as Mongo, or so my friend and I believed.) Tony Hart is a genius, no doubt about it; he would set about painting something, which for eighty per cent of the time looked like a bunch of casually and haphazardly drawn lines and swishes. But when he finished, it would be a perfect simulation of a New York skyline at night. Brilliant. The only problem was that however much encouragement he gave, and despite his insistence that anyone could recreate it, children could never hope to produce anything even in the same stratosphere.

One of the staples of Hart Beat was the gallery, pictures which bore the name and age of the child who had sent it in (“Sorry, we can’t return your pictures”) My brother and I, too lazy and unimaginative to send something in ourselves, found it great fun to criticise the achievements before us, along the lines of, “Crap…okay for a six year old…all right…crap…what is that supposed to be?…crap…good, I suppose….that’s made out of old leaves…crap…” Tony, however, was far more exuberant and less derogatory.

But the part that everyone was waiting for was Morph, created by Peter Lord (of Aardman Animation, home also of Nick Park.) Morph was a little man made of brown plasticine, who, as his name suggests, could metamorphose into anything he liked. He was joined, later on, by his ‘cousin’ Chas, made of white plasticine this time; Chas was the gruff, more cynical of the pair, and always tried to put one over on naïve Morph. Poor Tony Hart was also being upstaged by these pieces of modelling material.

One very vivid memory I have of Hart Beat was a show about optical illusions in art and, using the magic of television, Tony threw down a circle of black sugar paper, and then jumped into it, as though it were a hole in the floor. This terrified me, but I wanted to know whether it was really possible, and it took me days to pluck up the courage to put the piece of black paper I found in the cupboard on the floor, and step onto it. I should never again criticise the work of the BBC effects team.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 7/10

Gummi Bears

GUMMI BEARS
Made by: Disney
Shown on: ITV
Years shown: mid '80s
Theme tune: “Gummi Bears! Bouncing here and there and everywhere/ High adventure that’s beyond compare/We are the Gummi Bears!”

The Gummi Bears were brightly-coloured bears, who lived in medieval times,and wore the same clothes as Robin Hood’s Merry Men. Their job was to protect Princess Cala, who ruled over the Kingdom of Dunwyn, and her page, Cavin. To do this, they required special powers, which came from some kind of illegal drug called Gummiberry Juice, mixed in a cauldron by the matronly Grammi Bear, and kept in handy animal-skin hip-flasks. The other bears included Zummi, the wise old father figure; Sunni, the gutsy, blond tomboy; Tummi, the ‘big-boned’ one; Cubbi, present purely for cute-factor; Gruffi, the irritable male lead; and Gutso the artist, with his parrot, Arte Deco. The Gummi Bears was shown on weekend mornings, usually as part of whatever was showing on ITV at the time (eg. Motormouth, Gimme 5), and was nothing to write home about whatsoever. It reached the just-about-watchable level, but I think it probably undid all the hard work achieved by Grange Hill’s ‘Just Say No’.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 3/10