Saturday Morning Screams
By T.J. Tranchell
Binge-watching Gravity Falls with my son is awesome. He loves the characters and how, by the end, the show becomes a kid-friendly cosmic horror extravaganza. He doesn’t know that much about cosmic horror and why moments such as a George Romero-looking guy showing up in Phineas and Ferb make me so happy. He doesn’t know — yet — who Harlan Ellison is, or why Jeffrey Coombs voicing a character named H.P. Hatecraft in a newer version of Scooby-Doo cracks me up. It’s okay that he doesn’t know. It’s my job to teach him.
Introducing Saturday morning scares can be touch and go. Just because a child loves the mystery-solving antics of the Scooby gang doesn’t mean the same child is ready for The Real Ghostbusters, even if they’ve already seen the live action movies. The Real Ghostbusters dives deep into a variety of mythologies. The ghost designs on their own are frightening. We even get the spirit of Halloween itself, Samhain, in a season one episode. Personally, I think Samhain, with his jack o’lantern head, should have been a series-long baddie. The show ran seven seasons from 1986–91, the prime years for network and syndicated cartoons. Six years later, Egon Spangler led another team for the spin-off Extreme Ghostbusters.
The best episode, other than Samhain’s appearance, came in season two. “Night Game” put Winston’s soul on the line in an interdimensional, good versus evil, game of baseball. While we cheer for Winston to succeed, we learn that the game was not for his soul but for Peter’s, making Winston’s act one of saving his friend instead of himself.
This is the point where one might expect me to discuss The Ghostbusters, that rival Filmation show that held the copyright to the name for TV purposes even after it was secured for the film. I can’t find it available anywhere. I remember it being more formulaic, with Filmation’s classic reuse of backgrounds and repurposed action shots. Maybe I’m wrong about it not being as good. What I can say for sure is that it only lasted one season, that same 1986 season of its competitor’s debut.
Those mid-80s years proved foundational for many of us. The availability of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror for younger viewers hasn’t been matched since. The best part, though, is that we could find all three genres within the same shows regularly.
While The Transformers and Voltron leaned into the sci-fi realm, and the animated Beetlejuice ran with horror-themed comedy, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and ThunderCats showcased horror, fantasy, and science fiction all working in the same arena. The primary villain of He-Man is a being with a skull for a face! In ThunderCats, the villain is a resurrected mummy! Those are just the most obvious nods to horror. A few He-Man titles should provide more evidence: “City Beneath the Sea,” “Eye of the Beholder,” EvilSeed,” and “Things That Go Bump in the Night” all indicate a link to Poe, Lovecraft, The Twilight Zone, and horror in general.
ThunderCats was no different in this regard. Not only did this show also have an episode titled “Eye of the Beholder,” it also had one called “The Spaceship Beneath the Sand,” and a Freddy Krueger-like Mum-Ra in “Dream Master.” Late in the series, the episode “Swan Song” is a clear reference to author Robert R. McCammon’s apocalyptic novel of the same name.
The two shows live in that realm of cosmic horror and the cartoon landscape with shows such as Dungeons & Dragons, Tales from the Cryptkeeper, an animated version of The Addams Family, and the vastly underrated BraveStarr. These productions opened the gates for other shows such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men (which premiered one Halloween Saturday morning), and perhaps the greatest achievement in American animated TV, Batman: The Animated Series.
BTAS was no Saturday-morning-stay-in-your-pajamas cartoon. It was after-school art. Characters such as the Scarecrow, Clayface, and Mr. Freeze were brought to horrific and often heartbreaking life. We were blessed with potentially the best version of the Joker, voiced by Mark Hamill. None of that happens without He-Man and the Ghostbusters. Notable writers on The Real Ghostbusters included J. Michael Straczynski, Marc Scott Zicree, Michael Reaves, and splatterpunk god John Shirley. Straczynski and Reaves both wrote for He-Man, as did Paul Dini. Dini gained recognition for the Mr. Freeze episode of BTAS called “Heart of Ice” and, along with Bruce Timm, introduced the world to Harley Quinn (Dini and Timm are also responsible for Tiny Toon Adventures which made a key contribution to my wife and I falling for each other, but that is a different story).
It is easy to dismiss these weekday afternoon and Saturday morning cartoons as brain-rotting garbage, just like so many people do with our beloved horror movies. When we look deeper, the connections grow, and we know a little bit more about the world than we did before.
And knowing is half the battle. 🩸
About
T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published the novella Cry Down Dark and the collections Asleep in the Nightmare Room and The Private Lives of Nightmares with Blysster Press and Tell No Man, a novella with Last Days Books. In October 2020, The New York Times called Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from Central Washington University and attended the Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp in 2017. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife and son. Follow him at www.tjtranchell.net or on X @TJ_Tranchell.
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