The 1970s were a fever dream. If you grew up then, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’d wake up on a Saturday morning, pour a bowl of cereal that was basically 90% sugar, and sit three inches away from a wood-paneled television set. What happened next wasn't just entertainment; it was a bizarre mix of low-budget animation, experimental storytelling, and some truly questionable educational attempts. People always talk about the 60s as the era of "trippy" media, but honestly, the cartoons from the 70s list of hits and misses is where things actually got strange.
It wasn't just about the animation. It was about the vibe. Hanna-Barbera was basically a factory at this point, churning out shows using "limited animation" to save a buck. You could see the same background loop four times while Scooby-Doo ran down a hallway. But there was a charm in that clunkiness. We didn't care about frame rates or high-definition textures. We cared about whether the Mystery Machine was going to break down or if Hong Kong Phooey was going to accidentally save the day.
The Hanna-Barbera Monopoly and the Formula That Defined an Era
You can’t talk about this decade without acknowledging that William Hanna and Joseph Barbera basically owned Saturday morning. They had a formula. Usually, it involved a group of teenagers, a talking animal or a weird mascot, and a mystery. Or a band. Sometimes both. Take Jabberjaw, for instance. It was essentially Scooby-Doo but underwater, and the dog was a 15-foot great white shark who played the drums and sounded like Curly from the Three Stooges. It makes no sense when you say it out loud today, yet we all just sat there and accepted it.
This period was the height of "re-skinning" content. Once Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! became a titan in 1969, the early 70s were flooded with clones. Goober and the Ghost Chasers, The Funky Phantom, Speed Buggy—it was the same show in different outfits. Speed Buggy was literally a talking car. Not a Transformer, just a car with eyes on the headlights that hung out with teenagers.
But then you had the outliers. The shows that tried to be "heavy." Wait Till Your Father Gets Home was an attempt at an animated sitcom for primetime, heavily influenced by All in the Family. It dealt with the generation gap, politics, and social change. It wasn't "for kids" in the traditional sense, but because it was a cartoon, we watched it anyway. It’s a weird footnote in television history that proves how much the industry was trying to figure out what animation could actually do beyond selling toys.
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The Most Iconic Entries on the Cartoons From The 70s List
If you're making a list, you have to start with the heavy hitters. These weren't just shows; they were cultural shifts.
The Super Friends (1973)
Before the MCU or the DCEU, we had this. It was the first time many of us saw Justice League legends like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman together. But it wasn't dark or gritty. It was colorful, campy, and featured the Wonder Twins, Zan and Jayna, who could turn into water or an eagle. It’s easy to mock now—especially Gleek the space monkey—but Super Friends stayed on the air in various forms for over a decade. It defined how an entire generation viewed superheroes.
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (1972)
Say what you will about the creator's legacy now, but at the time, this show was a massive deal for representation and educational TV. It was set in North Philadelphia and focused on a group of kids playing in a junkyard. It didn't shy away from "real" issues like peer pressure, divorce, or even death. Each episode ended with a song played on instruments made out of trash. It was gritty for a cartoon, yet incredibly catchy.
Schoolhouse Rock! (1973)
Is it a cartoon? Is it a commercial? It’s both, kinda. These three-minute shorts were a stroke of genius. Advertisers noticed that kids were memorizing commercial jingles but couldn't remember basic math or history. Bob Dorough, a jazz musician, was hired to set the multiplication tables to music. Then came "I'm Just a Bill" and "Conjunction Junction." If you know how a bill becomes a law today, you probably owe it to a singing piece of parchment with a rolled-up scroll for a nose.
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The Weird Experiments That Time Forgot
Then there’s the stuff that makes you wonder if the writers were okay. Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels? A prehistoric superhero who lived in a van with three girls and could pull anything out of his body hair. It was peak 70s absurdity. Or The Robonic Stooges, where Larry, Moe, and Curly were transformed into bionic secret agents.
We also saw the rise of the "Variety Show" format in animation. The Skatebirds featured live-action actors in giant bird costumes on roller skates, sandwiched between cartoons. It was a disaster. It lasted one season. But it represents that frantic energy of the mid-70s where networks were throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck.
Why the 70s Looked "Cheap" (But Actually Wasn't)
People often criticize this era for the "limited animation" style. You’ll see characters whose bodies never move, only their mouths. Or they wear the same outfit every single day (the "animation collar" was a trick to make it easier to swap heads on bodies).
The reality is that the economics of television shifted. In the 40s and 50s, cartoons were made for theaters with massive budgets. By the 70s, they were made for TV on a shoestring. Studios like Filmation and Hanna-Barbera had to innovate to survive. Filmation, specifically, used a lot of rotoscoping—tracing over live-action footage—to make movement look more realistic without hiring hundreds of extra animators. You see this heavily in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (1976). It looked stiff, sure, but it gave the show a sense of anatomical scale that Looney Tunes never had.
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The Saturday Morning Ritual
The context matters. You didn't have Netflix. You didn't have YouTube. You had one shot to catch these shows. If you missed The Pink Panther Show at 9:00 AM, it was gone. This created a collective cultural experience. Every kid in school on Monday morning was talking about the same episode of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (even though those were mostly reruns by then, they were still staples of the 70s diet).
The 70s was also the decade where the "Parental Guidelines" started to tighten their grip. After the "action-heavy" 60s, groups like Action for Children's Television (ACT) started lobbying against violence. This is why you see a shift toward more "mystery-solving" and "socially conscious" plots. Characters couldn't even throw a punch in many mid-70s cartoons. Instead, they had to outsmart the villain or trap them in a giant net. It forced writers to get creative, which is why we ended up with so many elaborate traps and chase sequences.
Essential Watchlist for the 70s Aficionado
If you’re looking to revisit this era, don't just stick to the famous ones. Look for the stuff that feels like a time capsule.
- Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973): Most people think Trek died in '69 and stayed dead until the movies. Nope. This cartoon carried the torch, used the original voice actors, and actually won an Emmy. It’s surprisingly high-brow for a Saturday morning show.
- Battle of the Planets (1978): This was our first real taste of Anime (Gatchaman), heavily edited for Western audiences. They added a robot named 7-Zark-7 to fill time and tone down the violence, but the sleek spaceship designs and capes were unlike anything else on TV.
- The Perils of Penelope Pitstop: A spin-off from Wacky Races. It’s pure melodrama parody. The Ant Hill Mob, a group of seven tiny gangsters, were her protectors. It’s frantic and loud.
- Hong Kong Phooey: Scatman Crothers voiced a dog who was a janitor by day and a "masked" martial artist by night. He was terrible at Kung Fu. His cat, Spot, did all the work. It’s a perfect example of the 70s obsession with martial arts films.
The Actionable Legacy: How to Reconnect with 70s Animation
If you want to dive back into this world, don't just rely on YouTube clips. The quality is usually terrible. Here is how to actually experience the best of the cartoons from the 70s list today:
- Check the "Warner Archive" collection. Many Hanna-Barbera classics have been restored and released on Blu-ray. The difference in color and clarity is shocking compared to the fuzzy broadcasts we remember.
- Look for "The Saturday Morning Cartoons" 1970s Volume 1 & 2. These are curated DVD sets that actually include the original commercials and bumpers. It’s the closest you can get to time travel.
- Follow the animators, not just the shows. Research the work of Iwao Takamoto. He designed Scooby-Doo, Penelope Pitstop, and many others. Understanding the "house style" of these artists makes you appreciate the art more than just the nostalgia.
- Support the Archives. Organizations like the Museum of Northern California Art or the Paley Center for Media often host retrospectives on 70s animation history.
The 1970s wasn't just a bridge between the Golden Age of Disney and the toy-commercial 80s (think He-Man or Transformers). It was a decade of identity crisis. It was weird, it was cheap, and it was experimental. It gave us the superhero boom, the birth of educational music videos, and a giant talking shark in a turtleneck. Honestly, we’re lucky we got to see it.