It's dubious whether partners Jan and Jace did Space Ghost any good. Courtesy of Cartoon Network.

If there is a signifier to cartoon action shows of the 1960s and '70s, it is that of the young “sidekick.” These ubiquitous youngsters appeared in almost every series featuring superheroes, ostensibly giving the viewing audience a figure (or figures) with whom to identify. Their true purpose, in retrospect, appeared to be as preteen plot devices: getting into peril, serving as bait, inadvertently stumbling on to important clues or villain's lairs with equal aplomb, and laughing heartily at the conclusion of an episode seemed requisite for the job. The reward was adventure, in some cases a cool costume, and the inestimable prestige of teaming up with superheroes...even if the runts in question did endanger said heroes' lives in most episodes. Most classic animation fans today admit to hating these sidekicks, who were often saddled with a tertiary animal sidekick as well; one is reminded of scientists turning microscopes on parasites only to find smaller parasites feeding on them.

The Despised
Some of the most remembered (and despised) sidekicks of the bunch were Jan and Jace, who spent their adolescence doing Space Ghost little good. Marvin and Wendy were two spunky tykes known for befouling the Super Friends adventures long before Wonder Twins Zan and Jayna were turning themselves into puddles and critters respectively for the same luckless team. (If the darker, more recent incarnations of Batman were present for these cartoons, all these sidekicks might have perished in their first episodes.) No one knows from what egg Birdboy hatched, but fans of the old Birdman and the Galaxy Trio show likely would have cooked up a fluffy quiche rather than let that particular sidekick take wing. Before Saddam Hussein besmirched the Middle East, the hapless twins Chuck and Nancy were giving the unfortunate Shazzan! many sleepless Arabian nights. If prehistoric puerility was your cup of lava, you may have wondered why Dino Boy didn’t cause Ugh to hurl himself off the evolutionary tree. My personal bugbears were Tom and Tubb from the Moby Dick half of the team-up with Mighty Mightor, but any kid that showed up in pretty much any action-adventure series could typically be found going over a waterfall, falling off a precipice, facing an avalanche of rocks and needing some sort of last-second rescue.

Did Super Friends really need any sidekicks? Courtesy of Cartoon Network.

I am convinced that audiences deplored these sidekicks just as much as I did. Reviews of these cartoons both in print and on the Web describe them as “lame,” “worthless,” and generally a waste of even limited animation. It may be no coincidence that three contemporary shows featuring kids as the heroes are among today’s most nostalgic treasures: Speed Racer, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and Jonny Quest. These cartoons were the exception to the rule, but they made no lasting difference. After the superheroes and action-adventure shows began to disappear courtesy of regulations prohibiting violence and peril, kids were most often seen as comic sidekicks rather than adventurous ones. Until recently. There has been a significant change in the number of young heroes and heroines in the animated universe. There are several reasons for this phenomenon, all of them linked to changes in American entertainment and society.