Apparently I missed some of these moments.

7) The Smurfs Sing Someone to Death in The Smurfs

On the list of threatening cartoon characters, the Smurfs land just above the Snorks and just below the Shirt Tales, who could probably still tear a grown man apart if they all attacked at once. But there’s another side to the Smurfs and their seemingly innocuous world of mushroom houses and single-trait characters. And it’s not just the "GNAP" virus.

In their first Christmas special, the Smurfs were called upon to save two lost children and their longtime nemesis Gargamel from a sorcerer who, as the show goes on, is clearly painted as an emissary from Hell. The Smurfs fight back the only way they can: by singing an interminable non-Christmas song with the refrain “Goodness makes the badness go away.” And the Satan-worshipping sorcerer screams and screams and screams until he disappears. Don’t f-ck with Smurfs.

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2008/03/...of_80s_car.php

I knew The Inhumanoids would make the list even before I clicked the llink. That cartoon had some seriously freaky/dark shit in it for a kid's cartoon.

What about Robotech? It had massive death and destruction, including pretty much the entire population of Earth. And, as one of the comments at that site reminds us, there's the character 'Lancer', a cross-dresser.

This does not fall into the same category but I always wondered about the priest admonishing the kid about being upset because his mom ordered the wrong hockey jersey.

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I knew naked Thundercats would be on there

Robotech/Macross was cutting edge material in the 80s. Sad that it never had the huge fan base of Transformers/GI Joe in the US. At least Macross had nudity.

What's really sad is that Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato, from around that same time period gets almost universally overlooked... Macross/Robotech most assuredly has a huge fan base compared to Star Blazers.

Speaking of Japanese animation, no mention of Tranzor Z (Mazinger Z) and the female robot, Aphrodite A, which had missiles in very suggestive places (surely the tamest of Go Nagai's stuff, but still rife with innuendo).

That Shipwreck GI Joe episode was one of my favorites as a kid, even though I hated the character.

Yep. Was Star Blazers or Yamato ever aired in the States?

Yup... two seasons, I think, the first season and then the comet empire season (it was called Star Blazers over here). Not sure how widespread it was, as I grew up in Hawaii, and the large Japanese population meant that it was pretty popular.

First thing I thought of from the thread title was Shipwreck's melting family.

I've read that it was only in the northeast. I watched it about 1980. It showed every weekday, and was paired with another program which had giant battling robots. That one had one show on every Monday, a different show every Tuesday, and so forth.

Creepier Transformers: The one where the kid Spike gets severely injured, and they transfer his mind into a spare Transformer body. Every kid viewer's dream of being a Transformer is then turned into a nightmare as being trapped inside the robot body drives Spike insane, and near homicidal.

Creepier G.I. Joe: The one where some of the Joes enter a parallel universe where Cobra has one and most of the Joes are dead. They find this out by finding the skeletons of some of their alternate selves, identifiable by their dog-tags. For a show that never showed death before, showing freaking skeletons was a big jump. Plus nothing's creepier than a character looking at a dog-tag and realizing that the dead body is himself.

I remember that show. And wasn't Baroness in love with Duke or something?

It wasn't just the Northeast. I grew up in Dallas, and ran home everyday after school to watch Star Blazers. This was about 1980 also.

count me as one of the few US fans of Star Blazers (more so than Robotech) - I loved, loved the theme song...

We're off to outer space
We're leaving Mother Earth
To save the human race
Our Star Blazers

Man, its scary I remember that Shipwreck episode...

It's funny I had downloaded that G.I. Joe episode...in an attempt to see if I rememberd the episode correctly. As I am watching I thought, I must have been terrified by this back then.

As it turns out I was. I mentioned it to my mom and she said, "Oh the melting face one? Yeah you couldn't go near Play Dough or slime for weeks". I heard that and I nearly pissed myself.

God bless the 80's.

Most disturbing cartoon moment for me as a kid: in G.I. Joe: The Movie, when Serpentor stabs Duke through the chest with a freaking spear.

Too bad it's not a list of moments from '70s cartoons. This PSA that played all the time on Saturday mornings traumatized me around 35 years ago:


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Ah.. I do remember that Shipwreck episode, tho I didn't think anything about it at the time. I was into comic books which depicted things that were just as bad.

I don't know how this one didn't make the list:

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Funny they included Gem - They used to get away with all sorts of adult shit for such a kid's cartoon - I think it was geared towards teenage girls. They had a lot of stuff about self esteem, relationships, and hardcore drug use. All things teenage girls have to deal with.

The Inhumanoids was fucking insane... that scene could've been in the Heavy Metal movie.

I watched it every day in Long Island, but my wife grew up in Ohio and saw it there as well.

Enjoy those clips while they last because there's probably 10 DMCA C&D letters on the way already.

That was a highpoint in a dreary series. (Disclosure: I was one of the hip kids that read the GIJoe comic and thought the cartoon was for sissies)

I wonder why the Death of Optimus Prime didn't make the list.