The Tarzan/Lone Ranger/Zorro Adventure Hour

For a kid growing up in the early 1980s, this was about as good as it could get: Tarzan, the Lone Ranger AND Zorro, all in one place!

I recently acquired a videotape of some animated Lone Ranger episodes, so my commentary will focus on that portion of the show. The series seems to hold up well. The stories are fun and exciting, plenty of action (they sneak in an educational message, but I won't hold that against them). William Conrad does a fine Lone Ranger, and Ivan Naranjo's Tonto is pretty good, too.

The animation... well, it's pretty typical Filmation. The characters look good, and the backgrounds are fantastic (almost 3-D in places), but you get a little tired of watching the same stock footage all the time (like that same shot of the Lone Ranger and Tonto riding towards, then away from the camera -- how many times can you show that in one episode?)

But little things like that don't really matter. Unlike some favorite childhood series, I can watch these old Lone Ranger cartoons and not wonder what I was thinking. It reminds me of the days when cartoons existed just to entertain (and educate!), rather than sell toys.