You can blame an outfit called Leisure Concepts for three of those: Thundercats, Silverhawks and Tiger Sharks were the same basic show sold to three different toy companies and producers, even using the same scripts across all three with minor tweaks.

And sadly, getting it right would have given a perfect tieback to the headline premise. DC put Wendy, Marvin and Wonder Dog into regular continuity sometime back - only to promptly reveal Wonder Dog to be a disguised hellbeast that literally tears Marvin to pieces and near-fatally mauls Wendy, leaving her a paraplegic.

Though in fairness the brief '90s revival did a Dark Knight spoof over two or three months of Sundays.

There was also the non-anthropomorphic (and hard-R) underground spoof Nasty Naughty Nazi Ninja Nudnik Elves.

He was also the singing voice (and later speaking voice) for Beany & Cecil's Go Man van Gogh, replacing Lord Buckley.

Almost every Saturday AM show in that era did the same - the network would commission two dozen or fewer episodes, then run the sprocket holes out of them for years.

Also Sam Simian from ANGEL AND THE APE. (Though the last time someone revisited that series it was Howard Chaykin, and issue #1 became test material for my new paper shredder.)

In full disclosure, Ellison and I have a couple of mutual friends and he's done me a good turn once. We've butted heads a couple of times, and both times he backed down gracefully.

I feel the same way about the Billy Zane THE PHANTOM movie. It's pretty cheap and occasionally crosses the line into camp, but everyone (Even the revered Patrick McGoohan) is obviously having so damn much fun it takes the curse off.

It was a truism for many years that the three most recognized characters worldwide are Sherlock Holmes, Superman and Tarzan.

The source IIRC is one of the extras on my mid-00s DVD. I'd have to watch it again to give you name, rank and SN.

The van Dien version was low-rent in production values certainly - and CvD was probably the shortest Tarzan on record - but it's a fair amount of fun and Jane is never helpless except in extremis.

This. And yeah, it blows. We are watching Pop Eat Itself in realtime. Good Job, Tim!

If there was ever a superhero adaptable to the modern day, it's Spider-Man.

Arctic Circle has them as a regular item.

Wonder if that's the same as the French chain Quick (which Bill Bryson says is short for Quick - A Bucket!)

"Invest in a tuba/An' somethin ' or other' bout Cuba/He sang about a lady / who weighed two hunnert an' eighty…"

It gets weird, since Hungry Jack is a US brand for biscuits and pancake mix. ("Eats 'em all down and the plate comes back, that's Hungry Jack!")

Me too, but it was the plastic Slurpee cup from 7-Eleven.

In the Pacific Northwest: