If God Had a Lawn, It Would Be Nice Like This

True, I got fired from my job. I prefer to think I moved on to bigger and better things, and just didn't tell them about it, continuing to use my desk and other facilities for a higher purpose than ameliorating cost-volume reports. They may not have seen it that way, but it could be argued that my superiors were too close to the action to truly see the big picture. My 9 to 5 duties there were, to be frank, just a job. But my newfound mission to figure out what was the worst animated show of the 1980's can only accurately be described as a calling. And I don't have call-waiting, guys, so I've got to run with this now. Sorry for the hurt feelings and the slap fight in the hallway.

First, before we start, can you believe that Perfect Strangers ran for eight seasons? That's fucked up. Okay, on to the cartoons.

During the first phase of my quest to find the worst animated show of the 1980's, the period I like to call my "Gettin' Paid For It" phase, I was working from the misconception that there couldn't possibly have been a worse show than Beverly Hills Teens, which debuted in 1987 and sucked a hole in your TV for an entire season, teaching kids the valuable lesson that being rich is fun. But then I remembered The Care Bears and realized I had a lot of work still to do.

The Care Bears were truly awful, as must be any show created by a greeting card company. But The Care Bears wasn't even the worst show made by that company, as Strawberry Shortcake stank her way up the same path in 1980. And any conversation about bad cartoons made from greeting cards began and ended with Rainbow Brite, which Hallmark spooged onto our collective consciousness in 1985.

Easily more terrible than shows made from greeting cards were shows made from toys. For every semi-tolerable animated commercial like Transformers or G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, there was an antichrist like the Pound Puppies or My Little Pony 'n' Friends. To this day, no one can be sure which side of the fence He-Man and the Masters of the Universe falls on, since this tale of a skinny, bespectacled prince fond of Monty Python and math jokes being zapped with an intercosmic ray that turns him into Dolph Lundgren could be viewed as either wish-fulfillment or supreme nightmare depending on one's point of view.

But stranger still were the cartoons made from things you'd never think they could, or would think to attempt to, make into cartoons. There were cartoons made from prime-time sitcoms (Alf), hit movies ( The Ewoks and Star Wars Droids Adventure Hour), and scary folk legends (The Smurfs). There was even an animated show made from the hit video game Pac-Man, which followed the adventures of Packy and his wife and son, which taught kids the valuable lesson that "Packy" is a really rude thing to call somebody from Pakistan.

But strangest of all those was Rubik, the Amazing Cube, which was a remarkably insane attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Rubik's Cube puzzle. For some reason the show was centered around a Hispanic family in Los Angeles, most likely because the white studio execs thought "Rubik" was a common Latino name.

Then there's the Wuzzles. The Wuzzles were strangely interbred animals formed by either unadvisable jungle mating or unscrupulous laboratory experiments carried on my former Nazi scientists, depending on whose version of their origin legend you believe. Living in the Land of Wuz, where everyone remains firmly fixated on the past, the show followed the adventures of Rhinokey, Bumblelion, and Asparagiraffe, an unfortunate accidental combination of a giraffe and asparagus, who was an outcast even among the Wuzzles. Suck ensued.

All of these, however, held something back from their true powers of awfulness for commercial reasons, and so must be relegated to runner-up status. Because nothing, and I mean nothing, ever sucked as much as The Berenstain Bears. You may disagree, but you'd be wrong. Suck this hot has to be handled with asbestos mittens.

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