Cartoons like GI Joe Added PSAs to Appease Critics and Appear Educational

The adage "knowledge is half the battle" is probably well known to everyone who grew up in the 1980s. This was the way every 30-second PSA that was slapped into an episode ended, made popular by GI Joe. Why would a PSA take up 30 seconds of valuable cartoon airtime? Strategy. Like He-Man and Transformers, GI Joe was essentially a 30-minute action figure advertisement.

It was made to sell toys, and in order to do so, it capitalized on the joy of destroying your adversaries. The creators of the show made it “educational” to head off critics, since they were aware that may be a problem in ways we addressed with the ThunderCats. A small PSA was added to add value to the program. This went above and beyond simply having a doctor on staff. Now that the show's significance was clear,

The PSAs were reviewed by the National Child Safety Council and were overseen by a physician from Harvard's School of Education and Human Development. The Children's Television Act of the 1990s, which obliged TV stations to guarantee that a certain percentage of children's programming was, in fact, educational, could be made to link this to the overall attitude of TV critics at the time. Shortly after, channels requesting for broadcast license renewals identified GI Joe as instructional programming, possibly taking advantage of this exact regulation.