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Slight corrections: Street Frogs and Karate Kat weren’t science fiction. Both were part of the weekday syndicated anthology The Comic Strip. (CBS Storybreak was CBS’s answer to ABC’s Weekend Special, adapting kids books.) They may have been anthropomorphic characters, but neither was in a sci-fi world ala SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron. Street Frogs was otherwise in a contemporary setting while Karate Kat was something out of classic detective stories, only a detective agency fought the mob instead of the police. (Don’t even remember seeing cops.) Karate Kat and TigerSharks were the only ones I liked. Street Frogs and the unmentioned Camp Mini-Mon didn’t interest me. He should have gone with TigerSharks, the lone action show in the anthology that took cues from the similarly named ThunderCats and Silverhawks. (Rankin Bass was in a bit of a rut, methinks.) Samurai Pizza Cats was a redubbed anime, like Thunderbirds 2086.
Space Ace was also part of an anthology, CBS’s Saturday Supercade. Each episode featured a number of different video games adapted into cartoons as shorts. I thought it lasted two seasons, but I question some of his research. Biker Mice From Mars wasn’t even an 80s cartoon. It started in 1994, with ExoSquad coming a year earlier and Samurai Pizza Cats started 1990, which meant it at least aired in Japan in the 1980s. If he wanted dark, he should have gone with Spiral Zone. Funny he asked about Biker Mice versus Sectaurs, because now they’re in the same universe with Robo Force thanks to Nacelle. Also tossed in Wild West COW Boys of Moo Mesa somehow.
The only one on the list I never saw was Once Upon A Time: Space while you can see Sectaurs, Thunderbirds 2086, and a look at the intro for Starcom here at the Spotlight.
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