And how George Lucas is to blame. Great podcast on the subject that talks about Transformers, He-Man, and TMNT. One of the things that they fail to mention in the episode is that the idea of tailoring shows around product launches for things like toys, wasn't exactly new. There's an episode of the Captain Midnight radio drama (aimed at kids in the 40s/50s) that starts out with the announcer saying that there will be "An important message at the end of this episode!" The plot of the episode revolves around a character from Mexico leading the cast of the episode on an arduous journey, all so that he can give the female character an important gift. Imagine, if you will, an episode of Scooby Doo where the person who owns the haunted mansion, is more focused on getting Scooby a super Scooby Snack, instead of finding out that it's old man McVickers pretending to be a ghost so he can chase away the owners in order to buy the property cheap, and you'll have an idea of the episode. Anyway, at the end of the episode, they finally get the thing that the guy wanted to give the girl: Mexican jumping beans. That's right, they hiked all the way through the desert and all kinds of other shit, just so he could impress a girl with some "magic" beans. Oh, and the "important message" after the episode? It was that if your parents went to a particular chain of gas stations and got a fill up, not only would you get your very own Mexican jumping beans, but you'd get a Ringo Jumpo game! Which was played with Mexican jumping beans. Yup, the whole episode was nothing more than a commercial to get kids to bug their parents to go to a gas station and buy something so that they'd get a hunk of cardboard and inedible beans that would only jump for a few weeks. Remember that when you hear the episode talk about parents complaining how shows like the Transformers, etc., were nothing more than long toy commercials. No matter how shitty an episode of 80s cartoons centered around a toy line might have been, none of them were as shitty as that Captain Midnight episode.
Short version: Reagan. Turning kiddie shows into commercials was actually clamped down on, but Reagan undid the restrictions.
