Dude, they made a show out of balls?

Cartoons can quite often be accused of being big toy adverts. These days you have stuff like Ben Ten which have loads of spin of material for kids to bug their parents for, but it does actually have a story, and a pretty decently written one too. In the 80s though, you didn't need that artsy crap because there was too much money to be made. Nearly every major toy line you can remember had a cartoon and some where well drawn and had decent stories to pad out the dancing action figure show for 30 minutes. Some series were better than others when you are writing material to sell big muscle dudes with swords and castles and tanks I'd guess it would write itself. But what do you do when you want to make a show to sell some ugly ass rubber balls? Does that sound like a program that needs to be made?

Remember Madballs? Like Garbage Pail Kids you could bounce. Check out the commerical:

Imagine being a TV writer and being shown that by your boss and being told
"We wanna make some of that big balls money. We need you to make a series of 30 minute cartoons about balls. Kids love balls."

Well that's just they did and what they came up with was a planet of balls that had been taken over by and evil gang of balls who stopped all the other balls being able to do fun ball things like bouncing like balls and listening to rock music, which apparently balls like. They give us no reason why a ball would want to outlaw bouncing a music but it is a program about mutant ball people so suspend disbelief. Then a rock band called the Madballs escape the planet after being busted by the bad balls, go to Earth crash into a rock concert, play a gig, go down a storm and get a new manager... AND NO ONE QUESTIONS IT! NO ONE ASKS ANY QUESTIONS AT ALL! The 80s were very tolerant times where it didn't matter if you where a giant ball monster from outer space with one eyeball hanging out of it's socket as long as you could rock the mic right. I guess that was the message for the kids.

They even made comics and video games out of this shit!



They also say balls a lot in the cartoon... but you shouldn't find that funny.




It may be a pile of toss but this cartoon stands as a wonderfully tribute to the money grabbing greed of the 80s: 'The decade that filled your kids head with crap'.
God bless it. Balls.