Its quite true. I got SMB3 on my VC because nostalgia attacked me and I kind of regret the purchase now. Have barely played it. It is still fun and all but it is not what I remember as a kid.

The Transformers cartoon in the 80s was WAY better than the movie that came out last year. IMO, that movie sucked.

Yea pretty much everything I thought I liked as a kid is horrible.

I'll tell you what does hold up over the sands of time. Mysterious Cities of Gold. Pure awesomeness!!

Yeah i made the mistake of buying the original transformers movie on dvd a while back. Nostalgia is a lie.

I don't watch anything I watched as a kid, it was good, I remember it being good, as long as I don't watch it again it'll always be good

@PSN ID: Kadaj24: That movie did suck balls and not in a good way.

It was sad that not only did it have no character development or interesting characters, that they also went with the lame old kill the black one (Jazz was clearly the black Autobot).

God give me the old movie any day of the week.

Really? My memory does not play tricks on me. Stuff I like a s a kid, Istill liek today, like the TMNTurtles. Spectrum games i liedk as a kid, I still like them now. Same for Gameboy, SNES, etc... maybe my brain just refuses to grow up and let go!?

Transfomers the Movie stands up even today as one of the greatest cartoon movies...heck just plain old movies of not only the 80's but the last 20 years.

YOU GOT THE TOUCH!!!

nothing can dimish my views of Fragglerock and Beast Wars but Transformers and GI Joe god that looks so horrible now

@Zenax: I have to disagree, SMB3 is one of the best games ever made - when I replayed it I realized how much more I can appreciate it now rather than when I was a kid.

I think it's funny people say the movie sucked in comparison to the cartoon - I think the last time a lot of the people saw the cartoon was in the 80's, it was really bad - don't get me wrong, it is/was certainly entertaining - and the translation to film was actually pretty decent considering.

These however are hilarious. NSFW audio.

+ Watch video

+ Watch video

+ Watch video

Did you buy this because of your kid? I remember readin the first article but not clearly :P

This is going to be "I remember loving Mario 64 as a kid, I bought it after 20 years, but it's not the same..." in a while.

Don't flame me for that, I just believe that's how -storytelling,animation,everything(transformers)- games are going to evolve.

Thundercats and Voltron hold up. Stick with those.

@awesomerobot: Didn't say I spoke for everyone. But nowadays I am just not the same kind of gamer I was back then and I quickly stopped playing to play some Shining Darkness I also bought.

did you watch "the girl who loved powerglide"? cause thats the best episode of anything ever.

There's a kids cable channel in the UK which repeats them on a nightly basis. Perfect for when I'm away at a course and it's the only half amusing thing on the hotel TV. It's got good camp value too.

The main thing is that it makes me feel really nostalgic for playing with the toys and for all the ones I didn't get to get as a child. I always really wanted a Jazz...

There are two things that survived the test of time for me, Future Boy Conan and Space Pirate Captain Harlock. And both were aired in Italy on public television in the late 80es, early 90es.
Bash get the full series of Conan and watch it with the kid, both of you will love and one day he will have great memories of some evening on the sofa.

Unrelated side note: Fist of the North Star, Devil Man, Tiger Man, on public television in Italy in the 80es? Simply incredible!

In my opinion they dont make cartoons like the used to. Cartoons now a days suck ass, hard. Saturday morning cartoons used to be the best things on t.v. and now, they just suck. No story, no development, nothing worth while. Sure as far as animation goes and how pretty the cartoons might look, the 80's goldie oldies don't hold up. But, the good old stuff, the stuff that used to make me get up early saturday morning just to watch, pricless.

@Daemonstalker: YOU GOT THE POWEEEERR!!

Personally, I like watching/playing things from my childhood. Yeah they might actually suck, but that makes it better I think. Cause you remember how much you thought that stuff kicked ass and so you can let yourself slip into that mental state again. It's fun!

umm yea how about turbo teen, pole position and m.a.s.k, all were cool when i was 8 now i look at them and say WTF!!!! i must have been a retared child.

@1981suede: I loved that show when I was a kid! I'm going to have to track it down now. I haven't seen that in a good 20 years...

The animation was godawful, and the early episodes were particularly bad.

Stick with Batman, the animated series. Oh, and Smurfs. Go Gargamel!

What holds up really well. The original Fox Comic shows such as X-men, Spider-man. Even the DC shows such as Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series.

All great, I need to pick those shows up on DVD

Wow, Bash. I really, really still like the original series. Maybe what was kick ass back then is just funny to me now. Either way, I'm still a TF fan!

There's actually a few good episodes of the old show... like when they tried to give it a real story.

I've always liked the Transformers comics much more. Once the continuity starts in the comic (around issue 40-something) it gets really good. Since most of the comic's audience was adults, the comic doesn't treat you like an idiot (the first 40 comics do, however) like the show does.

Those shows just aren't as old as G1 Transformers. As for the poster who mentioned that Thundercats still holds up....not for me it doesn't. I couldn't believe how cheesy and gay it was. I couldn't sit through a whole episode. And to think, I used to have the action figures and even the sword as a kid...:(

That's nothing. I bought The Greatest American hero and if you squeezed the box it played the theme song. Man, memories either lie or our tastes have gotten more refined.

Oh, another show I loved when I got a bit older (it's from the 90's) is Animaniacs. Some of the best stuff out there.

he-man was my hero. i watched that show as often as i could as a little guy. i bought the "best" of season 1. it was utter shite. i still love everything about it, just please don't make me watch it ever again.

even back then, i thought gi joe was stupid and transformers was boring as hell. i would like to revisit thundercats because i always liked panthro and, more importantly, mummra, the ever-living source of evil. i always thought he was pretty lame, but i liked his delivery. panthro had a great voice too, and i remember recognizing him when he showed up on the cosby show.

This is my problem with tattoos. If I were allowed to choose a tattoo at age 8, I would be mortally embarrassed now at my decision then. I think now at 34, I'd be embarrassed at my tattoo choice from age 18-21. So, the only time to get a tattoo is at age 94, and even then you should only mark yourself under the wrinkles.

@CaptMonkey: It is out there somewhere, well worth hunting down. I'd almost go as far as to say I enjoyed it more now than I did when I was young.

A-Team and Dukes of Hazzard were like that. I watched them recently and can't for the life of me remember what was good about them when I was a kid.

GI Joe still kicks ass.

The fact is, standards have just gotten higher for TV writing. It's probably a good thing.

@ZenGaijin: I don't believe the Marvel shows really hold up as well. Too much censorship, inconsistent animation, and (especially in Spider-Man) ADD pacing. The writing is pretty strong though. The Bruce Timm produced DC animated series hold up pretty well, though they aren't without their share of stinkers as well (episodes written by Sean Catherine Derek and/or animated by Akom Studios).

After watching some extensive Doraemon with my girlfriend, I feel like I've been cheated in my childhood entertainment. Also, we never got Japan's World Masterpiece Theater.

actually , this trip down memory lane makes me think of something more recent. i had trouble reconciling in my mind the notion that kratos was greek because, even after finishing god of war 1 and 2, my subconscious recognition of the voice of kratos as being that of a black man supplanted my conscious understanding of the character as being greek. hey, maybe you should tell that gears griefer about kratos as a black character. he doesn't seem very stereotypical to me, unless you want to say he is a negative stereotype of the war-obsessed greeks of old. how offensively steretypical! okay, cue the shit hitting the fan as people lambaste me for identifying race by voice. please remember though that i said it was subconscious.

on a related note, when i was a kid, i imagined the guy singing the wonder years theme song to be black. imagine my surprise when i saw that clip of him with john belushi.

i love retro, you just got to have to pull it off to be cool.

i went and bought Looney Toones collection on DVD because that is what i was raised on and its great to watch em again and take a trip down memory lane.

remember these cartoons appealed to kids back then so looking at em in retrospect means we have to still think what the auidence was aimed for.

Im a Retro collecter so i buy anything i played as or watched as a kid so i guess im still living in the 80's

i still have the first issue of Nintendo Power, so what i am saying is don't sell yourself short just let these cartoons do exactly what there suppose to do,

bring back memories of our childhood.

I tried to watch those Transformers cartoons after the movie came out, and was disgusted. The story and the voices made me want to shoot someone (mind you, the story still sucked in the movie, but it was a LITTLE better).

I think some shows hold up pretty well ... some, well, don't. Again, I love Galaxy Rangers ... although, it seems no one ever saw it (DVDs coming out soon!). Smurfs holds up really well, I think.

I also really liked Mighty Orbots. Anyone ever see that?

Please, the original Transformers will run circles around pretty much any reimagining of today. The whole transformer concept went downhill the day they introduced the minicons. Personally I've always had a thing for Beast Wars but the original was great. I still watch the animated movie every once in a while.

@ProfWho: Can you suck balls in a good way?

I never caught the original transformer series when it aired, but I did watch the Beast Wars spin off. I thought it was pretty cool back then... hmm...

Come on! With zillions of Jap Transformers cartoons you expected the original to hold up. Go watch the Headmasters.

There are a few that do hold up. The transformers movie doesn't quite but the original episodes do (prior to the Rodimus Prime era, pre-movie stuff). GI Joe was always bad (never liked it) while Ninja Turtles was good (till they started getting censorship presures).

However the new batch of cartoons going around lately are IMO really good. The new TMNT is one example. That is really good, so is Avatar. Let's not forget to mention any Go Nagai stuff (Voltron, Getter Robo, etc.) holds up really well through the lens of time.

Transformers Live Action when you think about it is a perfect translation of the 80s Cartoon in writing and plotline....especially when you compare it to the 1st week of episodes.

Best written 80s Cartoon.....GALAXY RANGERS....by the way

I think the recent Transformers movie was awesome, minus the minor departures from the story. Jazz was a huge mistake... especially since he was the first and I think only transformer to die haha.

Also I think it's totally unfair to judge something you liked when you were a kid with the same standards you'd judge a new favorite.

I mean... think about it.... really.... the 80s? c'mon... the 90s???? even worse imo.

Bad hair, pants with high waists... robot shoulder pads, puff paint!? Flash Dance? C'mon... seriously.

And there's this:

+ Watch video

It's not the exact details that made these things so cool. It was the little things (and the fact that we were kids... and kids love anything).

Think about the transformer's cartoon.. and think about non-anime cartoons now. Comparatively, Transformers was fucking epic.
Deep twisting plots full of moments of sadness, loss and triumph.

Look at the Transformers cartoon remake they made a few years back... wanna be pokemon/power rangers.

...
Lets put this in terms of video games.
Back when I was 8 I played Final Fantasy 1 for the first time on the NES. I thought DnD was interesting and I wanted to see what it was like but I lived in Jamaica. If anyone even knew what it was, they didn't care. When I played FF1 it was like made of win and awesome. It gave someone like me a chance to enjoy an 'epic' Fantasy adventure.

I couldn't begin to tell you how amazing FF2(4J) on the SNES was to me and then FF3(6J)...epic.

When I fire up my emulator to relive the nostalgia, naturally they don't carry the same 'epic' feeling. Time's have changed, technology has evolved, and even the very idea of what I'd consider 'epic' is different.

@RPGr: The new TMNT (the series, not so much the new movie, and not Fast Forward) is actually really good. Like the first movie, it stays close to the original comic book, and there are no buffoonish villains. The people who don't like are are usually old-school fanboys who remember the old series with rose-tinted reverence (although the pilot miniseries was actually pretty well-done).

I remember HATING Transformers as a kid. I could never understand why a flying robot would need to change into a car, it just baffled me.

Come to think of it, there weren't that many cartoons I liked at that time. I thought almost all of them sucked(Smurfs was good, I think). I watched mostly live action shows like Gilligan's Island and the like. It was only later did I discover the awesomeness that was Anime. Loves me some anime.

So very few things from childhood hold up now. I loved In Living Color as a kid (sure, the first season was in 91 and I was only 8 and didn't get the nuance of every joke, but I got and laughed at most of them). So I went and bought the first 2 or 3 seasons on DVD thinking, "Hey! I'm older now, so I should get every joke in here now and it'll be hilarious!" Yea, that didn't go over too well when I started watching the episodes. It kind of made me sad that I wasn't really laughing after remembering all the good laughs I had almost two decades ago watching the show.

What I'm really afraid of is trying to go back and watch the 80s-90s TMNT. That was my absolute favorite show as a kid, and I don't know if I could take my fond memories of the show be shattered to a million pieces by watching it now...

I was obsessed with the Transformers when I was a kid (84-87 mainly) but it was nothing to do with the cartoon (which I hardly ever saw in the UK it was on TOO early) and everything to do with the UK comic (which had better stories than the US one I since found out). Obviously the toys (Gen 1/mostly metal) rocked too and the comic/toy combo was what kept me going...

I too bought the cartoon movie on dvd a few years ago and its nice nostalgia but it's not going to win any awards for (voice) acting or script.

@BigDanG: Here's one I really hated that will shock people... Macross, the original series be it in it's uncut JP originial or that even worst butchering job of a dub.

I "tried" watching it as a kid. Hated it. Boring as heck and the story just felt cut-up. Tried again a couple years ago... even worst.

I don't know why people like Macross, it's a real zzzz like most rose-tinted shows are (Batman the campy West ver. and Star Trek). Batman TAS is still really good (the series released with the original Tim Burton film).

And yeah, the new TMNT animated series is really good. I don't know why "old-schoolers" give it so much hate. Even apart from the comic, it still stands out on its own as great. Too bad they couldn't have let go of the cheesy "no killing/dying" stuff.

We told you to watch Transformers: Animated instead. Now you've soured Mini-Bash on TF forever! ;)

I find the more artistic live action 'kid shows' the TV beamed to my eyes as a youth hold up pretty well. The Muppet Show, and the Adventures of Pete & Pete for sure. The 90's Batman animated series still holds up fairly well IMO. It's hard for me to think of any animated shows from the 80's that hold up, they sure as hell weren't trying to be the Looney Tunes...

Watch the Transformers movie and tell me it doesn't hold up. Optimus vs Megatron in the opening half hour is the most epic battle ever and I still get misty eyed when Prime bites it (ZOMG SPOILER). The only blemish ont he movie is "dare to be stupid". You know what I'm talking about.

...but it is a good bad though!
Watch Voltron, Thundercats or Macross again, you will be presently surprised.

I will say the one memory that definitely played tricks on me was "Superman: the Movie". I rented it recently for nostalgic reasons and seriously had to imdb.com it, just to make sure I was watching the same movie that I saw as a kid.

The Girlfriend said it with me in unison about 30 minutes in, "This is the worst movie I have ever seen."

Some shows hold up well, others don't. I enjoy the occasional Transformers cartoon, but He-Man (which I LOVED as a kid) is just too painful.

I think the early 90's probably produced the best children's programming. The old Nickelodeon shows, saturday mornings still belonged to kids, Disney had the afternoons. Shows like Gargoyles and Pete and Pete are still great, no matter how old you are.

This rose-tinted nostalgia applies to toys too, many (not all though) of the toys I adored look like cheap crap by today's standards.

I really like the current trend of remakes though (Transformers cartoon/movies excluded). They make the toys and cartoons how we think they were, not how they actually looked. The new 20th anniversary GI-Joe line and the recent He-Man remake.

I still watch alot of 80's toons.. I think i never stopped..
All those Marvel/DC toons still hold up right?
Who doesnt like Spiderman and Friends? The incredible Hulk?
Fantastic Four? I even watch 60's boom pow Batman episodes
Even those lesser known toons still have some nice moments.
Dinoriders, Jace and the wheeled warriors,Ring raiders, man i dont think i could live witout my toons.

You should try watching Mr. Wizard...it used to be badass! now it's just a little creepy.