Swamp Thing (1991 cartoon & Kenner toys)
Five episodes on Fox, a Kenner toy line with glow-in-the-dark eyes and rubbery slip-on "BioMasks," and a theme song that rewrote "Wild Thing" as "Swamp Thing! You are amazing!" The cartoon barely existed. The song never left.
Swamp Thing, Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's muck-encrusted DC hero, had a more successful live-action series running on the USA Network from 1990 to 1993 while Kenner built a toy line around him and DIC Animation City built a cartoon to sell it. The animated pilot aired on Fox on Halloween 1990, after CBS had apparently passed, and the remaining four episodes ran weekly from April 20 to May 11, 1991. That was the entire series: five half hours. In the goofy horror-hero style of the era, Alec Holland's plant-man protected the bayou from Anton Arcane and his Un-Men, Dr. Deemo, Weedkiller and Skinman, with a Native American ally named Tomahawk and a Vietnam veteran named Bayou Jack, all of it introduced by an opening theme that turned Chip Taylor's "Wild Thing" into "Swamp Thing! ... You are amazing!"
The toys were the point. Kenner's 1990 line had Bio-Glow, Camouflage, Capture, Snap Up and Snare Arm versions of Swamp Thing, and villains whose translucent, rubbery BioMask accessories slipped over their heads to show the transformation into monsters, with eyes that glowed in the dark. There were vehicles and playsets, the Bayou Blaster, the Bog Rover, the Marsh Buggy, the Swamp Trap and the Transducer, Arcane's mutation machine, which came with a praying-mantis figure referencing the episode where Bayou Jack is mutated. A second wave in 1991 added a Climbing Swamp Thing. Wikipedia calls the whole push the only significant marketing platform ever built around the character, and 1991 brought a paint-by-number kit, a Battle for the Bayou board game, slippers, a bop bag and figural sidewalk chalk whose label read "I'm Chalk!", presumably so nobody tried to eat it.
NBC ran the episodes again in the fall of 1991 inside Chip and Pepper's Cartoon Madness, the Sci Fi Channel syndicated them years later, Kenner put the pilot on VHS in 1992 as a toy tie-in, and THQ shipped a poorly received Swamp Thing game for the NES and Game Boy that December. None of that is why anyone remembers it. The memory is the toy aisle and thirty seconds of television: a green figure, glowing eyes, and a chorus a whole cohort of six-year-olds can still finish for a show most of them never saw a full episode of.
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