TV Shows From My Youth That Inspired Me

Everyone gets inspiration from things as a child. Comics, TV, movies; these are all things that inspire, or have inspired, pretty much everyone in the first world. Who doesn’t want to grow up to be Spider-Man, or Superman, or one of the X-Men? And many such comics have/had TV shows and movies to go with them.

Some Intellectual Properties started out as TV shows and moved to comics or movies, or started as movies and moved to the others. Some IPs even became ACTUAL books! Although those books were often lame and even unlicensed (Ninja Gaiden, I’m looking at you, even though you’re a videogame franchise).

All that being said, I’m going to start writing a series of essays about the TV shows that inspired me as a youth, why they inspired me, and how they impacted my life eventually if at all. There are so many good ones and so many places to start (especially since I was a lonely kid with no friends and lots of spare time who didn’t get interested in sports/health/fitness until adulthood).

I’m going to start with Batman: The Animated Series, which eventually became The Adventures of Batman and Robin, and then The New Batman Adventures. I think it was the first real North American cartoon with an actual budget that hired amazing animators and actual formally trained actors to tell stories that pushed the edge of what the censors deemed allowable that didn’t insult the intelligence of children. Sadly as it started gaining popularity and making more money, the higher ups started trimming back the animation budgets and simplifying things and dumbing down the story elements to make it more “cartoonish” and try to draw in more of those younger “toy-buying” demographics. Can’t have TV shows making millions off advertising and NOT millions more from merch!

The second article I have in the pipe for this series is The Real Adventures (or New Adventures depending on the season you’re watching and location in the world) of Jonny Quest. This show was a remake of a classic 60s cartoon but updated for a more modern and progressive social taste. I loved it. World travelling family and friends all globetrotting in order to solve ancient mysteries and battle the supernatural and scam artists. It was like Scooby Do but with science and way less cartoonish. This was another show like Batman with some great animation (some of the earliest use of CGI on television), decent actors, and adult story lines. A few crybaby Karens and money hungry producers half-ruined it for its second season, dumbing it down and de-aging the cast to try and make it more like the original, less “scary and serious”, and more able to sell toys to little kids. The whole thing is still worth a watch though.

Thirdly, is Gargoyles. This show, I cannot say enough good things about it. If you somehow don’t know, Gargoyles tells the tale of 1,000-year-old Scottish creatures that resemble the statues you see on old buildings and turn to stone by day. At night though, they shed their stone skins and wake up to live their lives. This show takes place after they were all put to sleep for a millennium by a wannabe wizard. It’s a story about how they, as creatures out of time and across the world (they were all moved to New York City as statues by a billionaire who broke their curse), have to adapt to modern life while living in a world where magic seems to be reawakening and corporate espionage is a regular thing. Like the other two shows, it has top notch animation, writing, and acting (it was put out by Disney, so that’s not a shock).