What's blue and three apples tall?

After being shamed by a comment on yesterday's blog referring to my former Friday Top 5 lists, I have decided to resurrect my beloved list format this Friday. While I can not guarantee Top 5's will become the Friday staple they once were since they usually require a week's forethought and I barely have time to eek out nine posts a month (Really? Nine in April? I am ashamed of myself), I hope you enjoy this Friday's list which has been inspired by my discovery of the vintage cartoon network Boomerang on our digital cable, which is in and of itself a miracle as I can barely find NBC we have so many channels now.

The Top 5 Cartoons of My Childhood

5. Scooby Doo - This cartoon is the 1970's children's cartoon equivalent of Law&Order. Formulaic, adolescent crime drama (there was always that red herring) at its best. The curiously ascot-wearing Fred Jones was the hunky, Ken-doll-like leader of this rag-tag bunch of wanna-be detectives which included his never confirmed, but much assumed girlfriend, the red-haired Daphne, his bookish admirer who never showed her jealousy of their relationship, Velma, and the unbeknownst to me at the time, perpetually stoned and munchy-driven Norville Rogers, aka, Shaggy, who was, curiously enough voiced by Casey Kasem. Oh, and let's not forget the odious canine star of this eponymous show. That stupid, goddamn voice was almost enough to drive me away from this intriguing whodunnit series. But watching those "meddling kids" drive around in their psychadelic van (my first exposure to awesome vans), solving mysteries each week kept me glued to the screen. Even though we never got to see Fred and Daphne kiss.

4. The Jetsons - Where is my Rosie? This show set some pretty high expectations of life in the future and I have blogged already about the disappointment of not having a robot housekeeper, a contraption that washes, styles and dresses me and my family or a flying car. While the patriarch of the series, George, was interesting, I found his professional frustrations at Spacely Sprockets to be an annoying distraction from his home life and the fabulousness of his redhead wife Jane with her flippy purple dress and stylish space bangles. Don't even get me started on daughter Judy with her adorable high pony and kicky capris. That episode where she wins a date with a rock star by singing the song "Eep op ork ah ah" was by far my favorite and damn you iTunes for not having it! His boy Elroy? Eh. And yet again, another annoying talking dog with speech impediment. Enough already.

3. The Flintstones - The prehistoric equivalent of The Jetsons with a similarly, somewhat palatable, but more chauvinistic main character who experiences the same 1960's corporate workplace injustices at the hands of a crotchety boss, and equally stylish red-haired wife, drew me in with its interpretation of caveman life. Again, the crap going on with Fred and Barney as they bumbled about at work held very little interest for me. It was the strong, smart-ass Wilma and her adorably giggly BFF Betty who held me rapt as they went about their days washing dishes using a wolly mammoth as a kitchen water source and said pachyderm's offspring as a vacuum cleaner. The show did kind of jump the shark with the addition of the annoyingly sweet-voiced Pebbles and the product-of-overindulgent-adoptive-parents, Bam Bam (seriously, that kid needed a major spanking), but I stayed true until the end.

2. Josie and the Pussycats - "Josie and the Pussycats...Guitars and ears for hats..." Oh how my six year old self rocked out to this theme song and was in love with this show. Similar to the Scooby Do gang (minus annoying sidekicks), this show also involved mystery-solving teenagers, but they were all girls and in a band! And they dressed like cats! And one of them played the tambourine! The lead singer, the red-headed Josie, was my favorite obviously, but as I grow older I can totally appreciate her nemesis Alexandra with her black hair with the premature gray streak down the middle as she was much more badass than the saccharine Josie. The shark was jumpeth when they went into outerspace though, because..do I really need a reason? A cat band in outerspace? Who let them get close enough to a shuttle launch to "accidentally" fall into the cockpit? It insulted my intelligence than and outrages me now.

1. The Smurfs - Yes, it's French, and yes, as an adult I find the show so annoying I'm sorry I ever introduced my kids to it. But what a cultural zeitgeist! The show, the figures I begged my parents for every time we went to the stationery store in town, the totally disgusting, but just had to have it, Smurfberry cereal I begged my parents for and then had to bravely choke down so as not to prove them right in their "this cereal is nothing but a marketing ploy" supermarket rants - it was amazing. The show itself was mildly entertaining and marginally believable (ONE girl? Really? Can we say gang rape?). I apologize to my parents for every dollar they ever spent on this fad, including my "I Heart Washington DC" Smurf tshirt, I am paying with my sanity as my own children beg my to DVR episodes each day to be watched again and again and again.

I hope you enjoyed to today's list. And no, it is not lost on me that four out of five of my favorite childhood cartoons have strong, or semi-strong, red-haired female leads. It's just an accurate representation of the reality. It's our world, people, you just live in it.
Happy Friday to you all.