Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Celebrity Toons: Pro-Stars (1991)

NBC was transitioning its Saturday morning line-up away from cartoons and toward live-action in the early 90's. They let Alvin & the Chipmunks move to Fox, and bade farewell to the Smurfs after a decade. So what stood in their places? For starters, there was Pro-Stars, repositioning star athletes Wayne Gretzky (hockey), Bo Jackson (baseball/football), & Michael Jordan (basketball) as crime fighters. Utch uploaded the opening to YouTube:



While the funky theme song gets the show off to a good start, it gets bogged down with cliched story ideas that we've seen a zillion different times over the years. Predictably, none of the athletes voiced their animated counterparts. It was not a good year for DIC, as this was one of three celebrity-based cartoons the studio produced, and all of them were cancelled after the 1991-92 season. The others? The notoriously bad Hammerman (MC Hammer green-lighted this series about a rapper-turned-superhero thanks to a pair of magic shoes) and Wishkid, a vehicle for then-white-hot movie star Macaulay Culkin ("Home Alone"), who actually did lend his voice to his toon persona of Nick McCrary. By the fall of 1992, NBC had left the toon business and went with an all live-action lineup comprised of teen oriented sitcoms. Too bad they left on such a sour note. Of course, they'd return to toons, thanks first to Discovery Kids, then Qubo.

Rating: B-.

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