Weekends as a kid were the best in the '80s. Kids today will never know the thrill of grabbing a bowl of your favorite cereal and gearing up for the cartoon marathon Saturday mornings brought. Were most of the cartoons just long-form advertisements for toys at the time? Sure, but they also had some episodes that would stay with us for years to come.

Quite a few of our favorite '80s cartoons have gotten modern remakes or live-action adaptations. But they will never match the pure nostalgia of the originals. Here are seven of the cartoons that made our Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons magical.

Smurfs (1981-1989 )

Smurfs was based on the Belgian comics, written by Peyo (Pierre Culliford), about little blue creatures who lived in mushrooms. The Smurfs are a peaceful people, but they are constantly under threat from the wizard Gargamel, who wants their magic. He also had a strange obsession with trying to eat them.

Smurfs exploded in popularity and ran for a decade on Saturday mornings. Though it was technically the second animated series about the Smurfs, with the first premiering in the 1960s, it became the most well-known media featuring Peyo's characters. From Smurfs in the '80s, the beloved franchise spawned several films and a rebooted series in 2021.

See the rest of the list here.

Some of these, when viewed later with adult eyes, don't really hold up that well. You can kind of see them for what they were, half hour long commercials for the latest toy line. Especially He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Or they were just hokey.

As the article mentions, Dungeons & Dragons actually had a good story line.

Muppet Babies I think would be a hit if it were made available on Disney+. If I remember correctly, there was some of that subversive Muppets humor that adults could appreciate. Unfortunately the licensing and copyright stuff they'd have to go through to re-release it ( music, movie clips, etc ) makes it so we'll likely never see its re-release.