Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/10-saturday-morning-cartoons-from-the-1980s-that-became-feature-films/
For many kids in the 1980s, the weekend started with a bowl of cereal and a television tuned to whatever the networks had lined up. Most of those shows were meant to be forgotten by Monday. Some of them stuck around for decades.
A few of those characters eventually left the small screen and ended up in cinemas, in forms their original creators probably didn’t picture. The list below follows ten of them. Some began on network Saturday lineups, while others ran in syndication blocks that kids treated the same way.
The Smurfs
The little blue villagers came from a Belgian comic created by Peyo in the 1950s. The animated series from Hanna Barbera premiered on NBC in 1981 and became a fixture of Saturday mornings through the rest of the decade. It turned a European comic into an American toy and merchandise phenomenon.
The first big screen revival arrived in 2011, mixing live action with computer animation. That led to a 2013 sequel and a fully animated film, The Smurfs: The Lost Village, in 2017. Paramount then released a new musical comedy, simply titled Smurfs, in July 2025, with Rihanna voicing Smurfette.
Alvin and the Chipmunks
The singing chipmunks existed long before the 1980s, but the cartoon that introduced them to a new generation debuted on NBC in 1983. It aired on Saturday mornings and gave Alvin, Simon and Theodore a fresh run of pop covers and sibling squabbles. For…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-10-30 07:58:00
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