![]() There is a very authentic, home-grown sensibility to this franchise, in its original form, which again stands in stark contrast with the blatantly manufactured nature of Rainbrow Brite. ![]() ![]() The MISE-EN-SCENE is absolutely exquisite here, with an ambience that evokes the traditional nursery rhyme landscape that children are (or at least used to be) familiar with, while ingeniously incorporating American Greetings' own innovations. I love how it's the supernatural forces of goodness that take on physically "monstrous" forms here to help the heroine and her ensemble, while the villain's monstrousness is essentially internal - children are reminded that looks can be deceiving, which is a lesson that resonates all the more in our current age of fake social media. I was also very surprised at how exceedingly eerie and creepy the Peculiar Pie Man was - a far cry from many of the generic cartoon villains of that era, and also a villain who fits most organically into THE WORLD OF STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE while still instilling a legitimate sense of menace and dread in the hearts of children. There is nothing the least bit forced or strained about the innocence and cuteness and wholesomeness of the title character and her friends - it is all very genuinely and purely presented, which cannot be said for the crassly commercial Rainbow Brite franchise from the 80s (which was an attempt to ride on the coat-tails of Strawberry Shortcake). I watched this TV special for the very first time last night, at the age of 34, and was absolutely blown away by how marvellously it still holds up. Soon, kids television was all toy-based cartoons and it could all be credited (blamed?) on Strawberry Shortcake.First of all, I did not grow up watching or even being familiar with Strawberry Shortcake, so this review is 100% objective. Joe: A Real American Hero debuted literally a week later). The Strawberry Shortcake cartoon coming and going without the world bursting into flames was a sign that these sort of things should be allowed on a regular basis again (you know, an ongoing series as opposed to a TV movie) and on September 5, 1983, Mattel debuted its toy tie-in series, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe in syndication, making it the first ongoing cartoon series based on a toy to appear in syndication ( G.I. He named Mark Fowler as the new head of the Federal Communications Commission and Fowler basically gutted all of the restriction in children's animation, arguing that the marketplace should figure itself out. Reagan pushed to de-regulate a number of industries and children's television programming was one of them. Ronald Reagan was then elected President in the fall of 1980. Now there was this whole new class of kids to sell to (not just in class terms, as the suburban families had more money to spend, but specifically just in pure numbers due to the baby boom) and there was a way to mass advertise these toys to them. That changed with two major events, the Post-World War II suburban explosion (which also included the Post-World War II baby boom) and the aforementioned TV advertising. Toys were, in general, a niche business and were mostly considered luxury items that only well-to-do families actually could afford (there were, of course, plenty of cheap generic toys, but I mean major toy companies with specific branded toys). In another recent article (about the first comic book to be based on a toy), I explained that what we think of today as the toy industry really didn't exist until the 1950s. As I noted in a recent legend about the late 1960s Hot Wheels cartoon, the very nature of toy production was altered dramatically by the advent of TV advertising for toys in the mid-to-late 1950s and especially the 1960s.
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