Hello there. You're probably wondering exactly why exactly I chose to liveblog Strawberry Shortcake of all things. I'll begin this with a story.
It was the 1980's. Cartoons were still rotting in The Dark Age of Animation. The Animation Age Ghetto and Girl-Show Ghetto were at an all time high. Merchandise-Driven cartoons were on the rise. This was one of them.
The title character started off as a series of greeting cards in 1977, and at the start of The '80s became immensely popular with girls, so they came out with a series of 30-minute specials on ABC, which came out yearly from 1980-1985. She fizzled out midway through the decade and only got a short-lived revival in 1991 with the dolls updated for a modern look. Nobody remembers it aside from collectors because it only lasted for a year. Then in 2003, it got revived. It became a Slice of Life/Edutainment Show early on, as well as regular soundtrack releases containing the songs from the show. Then in 2006 they got older, brought back the villains, and continued until 2009 where it got another reboot where she's basically a teen now and reverts back to the Slice of Life/Edutainment Show format with no villains.
So where do I come in, you ask? Well, I knew of Strawberry Shortcake back in the day, but I never cared much for her back then when I was a kid. I took a look at the updated version of Strawberry Shortcake through a picture back in 2003 and I actually liked what I saw. It aired on syndication a few times in my area and I only caught a couple of episodes, but I really liked the art style. That said, I wasn't that big into the show, and the last thing I wanted people to know was me liking a cartoon for girls, and this coming from someone who's a big fan of Powerpuff Girls. But in all fairness, I find PPG more of an action cartoon instead of a girl cartoon, so that might have been the reason.
However, since a certain pony cartoon debuted in 2010 and broke gender barriers, I figured I may as well take a look at the various incarnations of Strawberry Shortcake. However, I'm only familiar with the 2003 version because that's the only one I even bothered to look at and even then, I didn't see that many episodes of it. So as a result, a majority of the episodes are being watched blind with my thoughts on each one. I'll go in order from the 1980's version, to the 2003 version, and the current 2009 version. I'm only looking at the animated series and maybe the movies, but no other material like books or video games.
As for updates, this will probably be one episode per update. I'll try to update this as often as possible, like maybe every couple of days or so.
