"Educational" Cartoons

It's no secret that TV standards were relaxed in the 1980's and as long as your cartoon has some (read: not very much at all) educational value, then it could basically be a 30 minute toy commercial. Some, like GI Joe, have become famous for this added bit at the end. Now I learned a lot from GI Joe's "And knowing is half the battle" PSA's, but the one that really intrigued me were the ones at the end of Silverhawks. You see, Silverhawks was a cartoon based in outer space and the stuff at the end was all about our solar system. As a kid who built a modular lego space ship and bullied my parents into sending pictures of it to President Reagan (yeah, I was THAT kid), you might say that this was aimed right at me.

The premise was that each video was a quiz that Blue Grass, the pilot, was teaching The Copper Kid, the youngest member, to navigate in space. Yes, they were pretty basic questions, but I thought they were lightyears ahead of the other stuff out there. Check out a couple of them below.