It’s time for another nostalgic trip down Memory Lane. In this week’s Roundtable, we reminisce about the cartoon series that captured our imaginations when we were younger. Share your favorites with us, won’t you?
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Mike Attebery<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n I’d be afraid to watch an episode now, since I can only imagine how poorly the show was written and animated, but boy did I ever I love ‘G.I. Joe<\/a>‘ as a kid. The first thing I did in the summers was climb out of bed, run into the kitchen to grab a bowl of cereal, and plop down on the floor by 8 AM sharp in order to watch that day’s episodes. The rest of the day was usually spent playing with my G.I. Joe action figures.<\/p>\n Adam Tyner (DVDTalk<\/a>)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n I don’t think any cartoon has defined my life the way ‘Masters of Universe<\/strong>‘ has. I religiously tuned in every afternoon, just about every square inch of my bedroom was blanketed in He-Man action figures and playsets, and my friends and I would have air-sword clashes as we pretended to be characters from the show. I have more childhood memories tied into that cartoon and action figure line than just about anything else. When I first got Internet access all the way back in 1995, ‘Masters of the Universe’ was predictably one of the very first things I searched for. There wasn’t much around in those dark days — no photographs, screencaps, video clips, episode guides, lists of figures, fan-art or anything else — but I collected what little I could find into the first full-featured He-Man site on the web. It gradually evolved into he-man.org<\/a>. Although my involvement with the site is pretty minimal these days, the friendships I’ve made through it have been a huge part of my life for approaching twenty years now. I’m still geeky enough to have complete DVD sets and original cels framed on my wall, which I guess means that I continue to have the power.<\/p>\n Luke Hickman<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Do you remember that ‘G.I. Joe’ knock-off called ‘M.A.S.K.<\/strong>‘ (Mobile Armored Strike Kommand)? I never got into ‘Joe’, but I was all about ‘M.A.S.K.’ The spelling change of the word “Command” to “Kommand” was intentional, so as to make the series’ name ‘M.A.S.K.’ and not ‘M.A.S.C.’, which would just be silly, wouldn’t it? The gimmick of the show was that each of the characters had a distinctive battle helmet with a sci-fi power (laser blasts, levitation, invisibility, etc.) and drove a vehicle that transformed into some other type of vehicle (car-to-jet, motorcycle-to-helicopter). The good guys in the M.A.S.K. agency were always foiling plots from their sinister arch-nemesis rivals, V.E.N.O.M. (Vicious Evil Network of Mayhem). Sure, ‘M.A.S.K.’ was nothing more than a rip-off of another popular series, but it was pure entertainment for my eight-year-old mind. That, and the action figures with their removable masks were pretty sweet.<\/p>\n