Last week, I received an email from artist extraordinaire Conscious, with a link to his blog post entitled Five Truly Talented Artists You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.

A few clicks later, I realized that his Top Five post was part of The ProBlogger Group Writing Project. The project inspired me to create my own, so this week’s post – The Top Five TV Shows of My Youth.

5. ThunderCats
This was tough. There was almost a tie between the ThunderCats and He-Man, but the presence of Cheetara gave ThunderCats the edge. Cheetara was the only female of the crew, the fastest and she was psychic. It doesn’t get better than that. Though Lion-O was the star, Cheetara and her magic battlestaff kept me tuned in on a daily basis. Not to mention, my fourth-grade crush would shout “ThunderCats, Hooooo!” everyday when we left school. So, well…you know…the boy I liked really liked the show. But, I was in it for the female empowerment. Snarf, snarf.

4. The Great Space Coaster
The Great Space Coaster is one of those shows that rarely gets any credit for being as awesome as it was. Every week there were original songs, animated skits and life lessons learned. It wasn’t until I read the wikipedia entry that I realized the show had a plot – something about three singers, a habitable asteroid and a puppet clown — all of which was secondary to why I watched it. My favorite characters were Gary Gnu, anchor “Gnus of the Week” show, who pronounced any word beginning with an “n” as if it were a “gn.” (Try it. Guaranteed fun for days) and Speed Reader who would pick up a book, flip through the pages in under ten seconds and then tell the kids at home what it was about. A comet ride of fantasy, indeed.

3. JEM
Philanthropist by day, rockstar by night — Jerrica Benton ran a home for wayward girls, a record label and rocked the masses as her alterego, JEM. My day had not officially begun, unless I watched back-to-back episodes of JEM before going to school. As much I tried talking to my own earrings I never got in touch with Synergy, but the possibility of creating a hologram of anything I wanted, at will, was too much to resist. Never really addressed, but inherently problematic, the fact that Rio – the show’s dreamy, purple-haired, boy wonder – was simultaneously dating JEM and Jerrica (yet never realized it was the same woman). Truly, truly outrageous!

2. Degrassi Junior High
If the characters on Degrassi Junior High didn’t use words like “eh?” and “pop” it never would have occurred to me that they were Canadian. Unlike the picture-perfect, matinee idol faces of the 90210 set, the kids at Degrassi looked like real students – awkward and average, odd-shaped with bad hair. And they had real problems – Spike got pregnant and decided to keep the baby, Snake dropped acid and jumped off of a bridge, and poor Caitlin – would she and Joey Jeremiah ever make it work? No teen drama, before or since, has even come close to Degrassi’s authentic portrayal of the middle school experience.

1. A Different World
Originally a star vehicle for Lisa Bonet, this Cosby Show spin-off single-handedly defined what I thought college life would be like. Needless to say, Columbia was nothing like Hillman, but the exploits of Freddie, Kim, Dwayne Wayne and Ron will forever be fondly etched in my memory. From date-rape to the Gulf War, A Different World addressed real-world issues in every half-hour episodes without ever becoming didactic. Plus, how rare to see black people of varying social classes interacting in an academic environment. In fact, the show is credited with the rise of enrollment in Historically Black Colleges and Universities from the late 1980s to early 1990s. Any show that manages to work a Nikki Giovanni poem into the storyline is alright with me.

Honorable Mentions: He-Man, The Electric Company, G.I. Joe, The Smurfs.

Got your own top five? Let’s hear it.