Thunderdome
Why Muppet Babies is the Best Cartoon Series Ever
Exciting adventures through the power of imagination
Thunderdome is a FanFare series where our writers good-naturedly debate some matter of pop culture and then leave it to the readers to decide. Read each post and vote at the bottom!The hardest thing about this competition was deciding which cartoon to write about. Like many of my Gen X contemporaries, I had a lot of time on my hands growing up, and I filled it with copious amounts of TV. I wasn’t raised by cartoons, but I wasn’t not raised by them either.
He-Man was the first cartoon that popped in my head. I’m pretty sure it was conceived solely to sell toys, and let me tell you, that shit worked. A friend down the street had Castle Grayskull and I don’t think I’ve ever been more jealous of anything. But my memories of the show are hazy at best, so probably not a good one to pin my Thunderdome hopes on.
Other considerations: G.I. Joe, Transformers, Thundercats (ho!), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Looney Toons (specifically Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote), X-Men, Ghostbusters, Voltron, and Smurfs. I know what you’re thinking: that’s a shitload of cartoons! Yes. Yes it is.
What you won’t find in that list is any of my competitors in this Thunderdome bout. No Scooby Doos or Duck Tales. Avatar is good, but it doesn’t belong because there’s no nostalgia tied to it (yes, I am old). And what the shit is Animaniacs, anyway? Sounds like a knock-off Looney Toons.
I ultimately decided on Muppet Babies because it was the most personally meaningful of all the cartoons I grew up on. Watching giant robots punch each other never really gets old, but that’s also all it ever attains to be. Muppet Babies aspired for something more.
It featured the Muppets as toddlers — babies is a bit of a misnomer as none of the characters wore diapers or crapped themselves, though that probably would’ve been amusing — who were all at the same nursery. They were tended to by a mostly unseen but omnipresent adult who sometimes popped in on them, but in true Gen X fashion, otherwise left them to their own devices.
And let me tell you about these devices.
Each episode saw the group of Muppets transport into another world through the power of their imagination. They might be knights in medieval times, futuristic astronauts, or anything in between. As a product of divorce on somewhat unstable ground, I ate that shit up. Escapism was my entire raison d’être. All TV is about escapism on some level, but here was a show that was literally about escaping the mundane through the use of imagination. Only instead of a solo act, it was a collaborative effort by the entire group; it’s probably the closest we’ve ever come to something like Dungeons & Dragons style group storytelling on television.
Given the series was created by the legendary Jim Hensen, that’s little surprise.
As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood. ~ Jim Hensen
The best episodes were hands-down those that saw the cast take on personas from popular culture, such as Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, and Star Wars. The Star Wars episodes were the highlights. I lived for them, and thrilled in their adventures because I was doing the exact same thing every time I retreated into my imagination.
It may seem cheesily cute now, as these days it’s fairly standard to reference pop culture in movies and TV. But let me tell you: nobody was doing this kind of thing back in the 80s. Everybody loves Robot Chicken's Star Wars spoofs, but Muppet Babies did it over 20 years earlier.
No cartoon of the 80s could be complete without a toy line, and the Muppet Babies had a great little line tied to McDonald’s happy meals. I think I had the complete set. Long gone now, of course. Wish I still had Kermit. I was always a Kermit the Frog guy.
At their base level, cartoons are meant to entertain. But the best ones strive for more than empty calories. They teach us about life and how to be better people.
Certainly I’ve lived my whole life through my imagination. But the world of imagination is there for all of us – a sense of play, of pretending, of wonder. It’s there with us as we live. ~ Jim Hensen
I spent a good portion of my childhood in that nursery, going on adventures with the Muppets, stretching my imagination. I was looking for entertainment but instead found kindred spirits. So what that they were animated toddlers.
If that’s not the best cartoon ever, I don’t know what is.
What say you?
Based only on the arguments presented (you have read all of them, haven’t you?) and not on personal preference: who wins this bout? Voting closes on August 5 at 7:59 AM.The other entries:
Eric writes about pop culture here at Medium and now has the Muppet Babies theme song stuck in his head. If you’d like to see what else he’s working on, check out his newsletter.
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