Oh crap! I feel so ignorant...
@FurryKittens || Journal Entry
Cheesy Wirt
Question of the Day #10
12 Oct 2023, 03:52 PM
What would be like if Steven Universe aired in the 1980s (specifically 1982)?
Comments (7)
Posted: Friday, 13 October, 2023 @ 06:29 PM
@FurryKittens: No worries; I've dabbled in alternate history so I leaped at the chance to play what-if in earnest. :P If anything, this shows just how much kids' TV has evolved over the decades.
Posted: Friday, 13 October, 2023 @ 03:16 AM
I love 80s cartoons just because of the aesthetic, music, concepts, and given that I'm a care bears fan, I love pretty colors. But, yeah, the sad thing is that 99% of 80s cartoons were like ads and not progressive, sadly. I feel like I can barely handle the harsh truth.😔
Posted: Friday, 13 October, 2023 @ 06:38 PM
@FurryKittens: Kitsch as they are, there's a definite charm to the Eighties cartoons: they might not have had much to say, but at least they tried to have fun doing so. After all, everyone knows Skeletor was the real MC... :^)
What we might ask is, what if we transposed today's SU back in time with a guaranteed sponsor? Some of the themes would need to be compromised for the reasons previously outlined, but a Saturday-morning sci-fi superhero show is a solid front for a bait-and-switch: as I remarked to a friend, OG Steven Universe is ostensibly about a boy coming of age but is "really" about grappling with the long shadows of an interstellar alien empire. ;p Rocky and Bullwinkle proved back in the Sixties a kids' show could fly with sustained plots and subversive satire, and given the stagnation of 70s cartoons, SU would be unlike anything on TV at the time (especially the musical numbers). It might still get squeezed out by the Toy Companies, but it would definitely earn a cult following, and raise the bar for the industry the way The Sopranos threw down the gauntlet to prime-time—essentially, "prestige" children's programming gains traction 10–20 years sooner.
Posted: Friday, 13 October, 2023 @ 08:32 PM
@Thorvald: thanks for the kind words. Being a neurodivergent individual, I sometimes barely articulate.
Posted: Friday, 13 October, 2023 @ 09:35 PM
@FurryKittens: You're welcome. Despite my online persona I'm actually quite introverted IRL; I'm supposedly an erudite writer and yet I often stumble through small talk anyway. :P
Honestly? It would be a completely different show. In 1981 the Reagan administration took a chainsaw to broadcast regulations, with the consequence that kids' cartoons turned into marketing vehicles for toys. Corporate interests dictated planning, which meant story took a back seat to pushing product: shows were sold to fit a schedule block, and the sheer volume meant the writing had to be formulaic just to keep up and the animation was often outsourced to other studios. So it is extremely unlikely an Eighties Steven Universe could have carried such a complex story, and not to the visual style or quality we know—it would certainly never survive with such an irregular broadcast schedule.
There's also the fact that a lot of SU's themes simply wouldn't fly forty years ago: this was the heyday of the Moral Majority and their ilk, and the (projected) American identity was still firmly WASP. Under corporate leadership, the show would conform to certain stereotypes: Steven would be your conventional pretty-boy hero, the Gems themselves would be reduced to sidekicks, and if the Maheswarans weren't removed entirely they'd be reduced to sideline caricatures in favour of the white cast. LGBT+ themes might be smuggled in if they were coy enough, but you'd never be able to say it out loud in a Saturday morning cartoon.
Now, you said '82, which is before deregulation sank its claws into children's TV in earnest, so depending when it was pitched to the network there's a slim chance the show would début with some integrity intact—whether it's absorbed into or cancelled in favour of the Toy Machine is a separate question. Otherwise, my best picture of Eighties Steven would be something similar to Transformers (with Fusions as the fulcrum of the merchandising): a band of superheroes defending the Earth against the constant onslaught of the Diamonds, but without the moral or emotional complexity that makes it iconic today.