The adage "Everything old is new again" had been the mantra for Madison Avenue. However, over in world of video games, this mantra is not only a simple motto, but it's also the law. In the mid-90s, the 80s resurgence began with a myrad of revamps of popular video game characters for a new generation of video gamers.
Nintendo turned the barrel-tossing girl-snatching Donkey Kong into a banana-loving hero to millions, in one of the last hurrahs for the Super Nintendo system. Konami turned their classic Dracula X, um, Castlevania franchise on its feet with their Symphony of the Night game, with one of the best video game soundtracks ever produced (if not THE best). Activision, a name known to a lot of 80s gamers, began their second life with a revamp of their popular Pitfall franchise. Atari came back to life courtesy of Hasbro Interactive (now a part of Infogrames) concentrating on software as opposed to hardware (kinda like what Sega's doing now) with revamps of Q-Bert, Frogger, and Pong, while Namco not only revamped their Pac-Man franchises, but they also brought the original games to the modern consoles.
With all this gaming going on, memories started to flood in the minds of gamers, and one question was in everybody's minds.
Whatever happened to the shows and toys of the 80's?
The last decade of the 20th century had influences from a lot of decades, and a whole lot of fads from earlier decades were making a return to pop culture. We had swing dancing, afros, bellbottoms, Creepy Crawlers, bomber jackets, and other fads come back, but the 80s had been neglected by every facet in society. Niche stations like Sci-Fi Channel, Game Show Network, TV Land, and Cartoon Network filled their lineups with shows from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and most of the syndicated fare was original talk shows and off-network sitcoms. "Netlets" like Fox Kids and Kids' WB aired original programming on weekdays, turning its back on the older syndicated shows of yesteryear.
Then, some time in 1996, a group of mavericks at Cartoon Network (many of whom were kids and teens in the 80s) got together and started brainstorming an idea. This idea was to create a block of programming dedicated to action cartoons. Looking at the network library, the choices weren't that exciting. So, after remincing about the shows they grew up with back in the 80s, these mavericks convienced Cartoon Network to purchase broadcast rights to Thundercats (a series long dorment in the Warner Bros. vaults), Voltron: Defender of the Universe, and Robotech in 1996, premiering them the following year as part of their new block, dubbed Toonami.
1997 could be seen as the year the 80s came back into existance. World Events used the Toonami experience to bring Voltron back to syndication with the original series airing first, then creating a CGI revamp a year later that strayed away from the original, having only moderate success. A pair of new, independant comic companies purchased comic book rights to create new books based on G.I. Joe and Voltron. Transformers, which never lost its popularity thanks to the Mainframe-produced Beast Wars, got a jumpstart with the TV Tokyo-produced Transformers: Carobots, a return to the classic vehicle version of the popular toyline. 4Kids Entertainment, distributor of Pokemon and YuGiOh!, brought the rights to the series that became M.U.S.C.L.E. in the 80s, and they're bringing the animated series to Fox in the fall. Toylines like Strawberry Shortcake, My Pet Monster, and Popples returned to toy stores, but the boy toys (the toys that inspired the best 80s cartoons) were left in the dust.
Until now!
