Rambo: The Force of Freedom
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The 1980s were a strange time for children’s toys and, by extension, children’s television. Look no further than Rambo: The Force of Freedom, a Saturday morning television program inspired by the very R-rated film series starring Sylvester Stallone.
How does one turn a story about a troubled Vietnam vet dealing with PTSD into a show for children? Have him join a team that is NOT a ripoff of the G.I. Joe, of course! Rambo and the rest of the Force of Freedom battle evil forces across the globe — fighting for peace and helping promote an expansive children’s toy line, each sold separately.
The Toxic Crusaders
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If you’re a network executive in 1990 looking to build out a slate of Saturday morning cartoons, obviously the first phone call you make when looking for material to adapt is to Lloyd Kaufman and the minds at Troma, an independent film production company specializing in gross-out B-movie horror films.
Toxic Crusaders is a take on Troma’s The Toxic Avenger, about a janitor exposed to toxic waste and mutates into the titular anti-hero. The show had something of an environmental message, like Captain Planet, but was far more subversive considering the source material. To this day the cartoon maintains a cult following.
Clerks: The Animated Series
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At first glance, adapting a 1994 black-and-white indie comedy into a primetime cartoon series ala The Simpsons seems like a bad idea.
Maybe, that’s not entirely wrong. The show was canceled almost as soon as it premiered on ABC, with only two episodes airing on television.
The six episodes produced would eventually be released on DVD, and the short-lived series would become a cult classic, with many considering it an ahead-of-its-time cult classic. For years, creator Kevin Smith has said that he wanted to produce a feature-length film or even a revival series, but as of the publishing of this piece neither one has materialized.
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
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The Ace Ventura: Pet Detective cartoon ran for 41 episodes, with 2 seasons airing on CBS and the third and final season landing on Nickelodeon. Though the show is not as good as the source material, it is at the very least far less problematic in 2024, considering some of the poorly aged plot developments from the two Ace Ventura films.
The show even had a two-part crossover episode with another Jim Carrey cartoon adaptation — The Mask: Animated Series. Unfortunately, neither of those shows was able to coordinate a crossover with the third kids program based on Carrey’s work, the Dumb and Dumber cartoon, before all three were ultimately canceled.
Beetlejuice
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It would probably be quite shocking to be a kid who first encountered Beetlejuice in its Saturday morning cartoon form and then caught the original Tim Burton film. You’d go in expecting Lydia Deetz and the Ghost with the Most to be the best of friends who go on adventures together, only to discover Beetlejuice is a crass maniac who tries to double-kill Lydia’s actual ghost friends and force the nihilistic high school goth girl to marry him.
Regardless, the animated series was a huge hit, and at one point was even airing on two broadcast networks concurrently.
Godzilla: The Series
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This Fox Saturday morning cartoon takes most of its inspiration from the 1998 summer blockbuster Roland Emmerich film as opposed to the classic Godzilla films produced by Toho Co., Ltd. The big difference between this and the source material is that now Godzilla (the monster) is one of the good guys, having bonded with the main human character of the series, Dr. Nick Tatopoulos.
The art style of the show is very similar to other film-to-cartoon adaptations like Men in Black: The Series and Extreme Ghostbusters. Jeff Kline and Richard Reynis, the team credited as developing the Godzilla series, also had a hand in the production of those as well.
Police Academy
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Though the franchise is all but completely forgotten now, there were six Police Academy movies produced between 1984 and 1989. Yes, they were critically reviled and became the butt of more than a few jokes, but they still had an appeal to a certain kind of moviegoer.
In 1988, as the movies were becoming less crass and more family-friendly, the decision was made to release an animated version explicitly for kids. Set between the fifth and sixth entries, all your favorite cadets are here — and all available for purchase as part of the tie-in toy line. There were 65 episodes produced over two seasons, and apparently, the show proved to be quite popular in international markets. Perhaps that’s why the final film, produced in 1994, was titled Police Academy: Mission to Moscow.
The Robonic Stooges
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The Robonic Stooges was a Saturday morning cartoon attempting to update the classic Three Stooges comedy team for a new audience. How, you may ask? By recasting the iconic group as a trio of bumbling robotic crime-fighting superheroes whose base of operations was a junkyard.
The craziest part of this entire thing is that The Robonic Stooges was one of the few Hanna-Barbera cartoons to not feature a laugh track. That would have just been too much.
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
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The origin story behind how Attack of the Killer Tomatoes went from a 70s cult classic spoof of 50s b-movies into a Saturday morning cartoon series is a bizarre one, though too complex to entirely explain here (you must read the wiki on this one).
The series is a sequel to both the original movie of the same name and the 1988 sequel Return of the Killer Tomatoes. Here, we follow the exploits of our hero, pizza delivery boy Chad Finletter, and company as he deals with the evil machinations of Dr. Putrid T. Gangreen. The series only aired for two seasons, with the second season seeing a significant drop in animation quality. Still, it is insane that this even exists, and no matter what the theme song is still one of the best in TV history.
Robocop
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Robocop might be the most violent, least kid-appropriate movie to ever be adapted into a children’s animated television show. This would be like someone commissioning a cartoon version of Deathwish or Maniac Cop for kids to watch while they dig into their bowls of Cheerios.
Sure, they made some changes here and there. Bullets, as they so often did in the 80s, became lasers, but that didn’t change the fact that it’s still a story of a cyborg cop dealing with his loss of humanity and fighting criminals and crooked corporations.
In the end, only 12 episodes were produced before it was canceled. It’s a shame the series didn’t last long enough to incorporate elements of Robocop 2. It would have been interesting to see the kid-friendly version of disembodied human brains kept alive in tanks or a precocious preteen drug dealer kingpin.
