Part one · the top 8

Top 8 parasocial moments in Saturday morning cartoons of the 1990s

Every one of these is a one-sided relationship with a person who does not exist, aimed at a child, on a Saturday, before anybody had a word for it. Ranked by how well it worked.

This is the section nobody argues about, because it started before anyone had an argument. A child watching a cartoon is doing the same thing a forty-year-old watching a stream is doing, and the only difference is that nobody had decided yet whether it counted.

1
A roller coaster with green tubular supports and a yellow track, a train of riders cresting a hill above a sign reading DRIVE IN, NOW SHOWING RUNAWAY. · Chris Hagerman · CC BY-SA 3.0

The letter from the NEST

Rugrats, 1991

Tommy writes to a magazine telling them the NEST was real. The NEST never appears. The letter is never answered. Chuckie and Tommy argue about it and then forget about it and then the episode ends.
2

The client in the basement

Batman: The Animated Series, 1992

Sherman Grant is twelve and has a junior detective kit. When Batman is hit with nerve gas and collapses into the Batmobile, Sherman and Roberta drive him home, lay him on a couch in the basement, and set up a crime lab around him. Roberta wants to call the police. Sherman refuses: a detective has to protect the identity of his client, especially when it is this client. The Penguin comes to the house. The kids hold him off with the contents of Batman's utility belt until Batman wakes up.
3

Will you help me?

Blue's Clues, 1996

The host asks the child at home a question, straight into the camera, and then waits through a silence written into the script before behaving as though an answer arrived. The pause is not dead air. The show was built out of it.
4
Rugrat Baby Shower Decor · Sherlene · CC BY 2.0

Tommy finds the gun and it works

Rugrats, 1995

The premise of the entire show, which is four toddlers exploring a house while believing they are the size of insects. And they are. The house is as big as a city to them.
5

The player at the keyboard

Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?, 1994

The show opened and closed on a live-action kid at a computer, seen from behind, playing a Carmen Sandiego game. The cartoon was the game. Carmen talked to the player - not to Zack and Ivy, but to the person at the keyboard - and the player sent the detectives to the next location. The show never showed the player's face, because the face was yours.
6

The moral delivered by the character

Sailor Moon, 1995

At the end of every dubbed episode the Scouts stepped out of the story and spoke to the viewer directly - thirty seconds about friendship, homework or courage, tied to whatever the episode had just done, in new lines recorded over the existing footage. The person who had just saved the world stayed behind to talk to you.
7
A cosplayer as Oscar the Grouch, Hallowbaloo 2012. · Kyle Nishioka · CC BY 2.0

The grouch on the telethon

The grouch, Sesame Street, 1990s

Oscar the Grouch refused to perform in a fundraiser telethon and was written out of the special for a season. He came back. Millions of children wrote in about it.
8

The User outside the Net

ReBoot, 1994

ReBoot was set inside a computer. The city of Mainframe was full of sprites and binomes who knew that their world was run by a being called the User, who lived outside the Net and dropped games on them for pleasure. The User never appeared. The User was the person at the computer, which is to say the viewer. The opening narration said no one knew for sure what the User wanted, but Bob intended to find out.
9

The answer waited until after the break

Pokémon, 1998

Before the commercial break the show put one of its creatures on screen as a silhouette and asked the audience to name it. The answer came after the adverts. Children shouted at the television anyway, because the question was addressed to them and the pause was real.
10
Two cosplayers as Gerald and Phoebe from Hey Arnold!, in a convention hall at Katsucon 2015. · peyj_turner · CC BY-SA 2.0

Hey Arnold, said to a room where nobody is Arnold

Hey Arnold!, 1996

A greet-the-world catchphrase, delivered out loud, several times an episode, to rooms full of people who are not the person it is addressed to. It is a hello with no possibility of an answer, and it is the premise of the show rather than a joke inside it.
11

The producer takes your call

The Magic School Bus, 1994

The show ended most episodes with a segment called Producer Says. The producer, voiced by Malcolm-Jamal Warner, answered a ringing phone and took a call from a viewer who had just watched the episode. The viewer pointed out what the cartoon got wrong: the volcano took thousands of years, the class could not have survived that, the bus could not do that. The producer agreed, blamed the half-hour slot, and thanked them for watching closely. Then the next episode did it again.
12

The hedgehog told you how to cross the street

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, 1993

A short segment closed every episode: Sonic and Tails turn out of the fiction and give the child watching a piece of advice - seatbelts, smoking, sexual harassment - in character, straight at the viewer. The rescue ends and the character instructs.
13

The dragon that waited

Dragon Tales, 1999

Emperor Kukulkan is a fictional dragon who can only be summoned by a child who believes in him. Every child who believed in him could summon him.
14

The hosts in the comic book

KaBlam!, 1996

KaBlam! was an anthology of short cartoons, and between the shorts it was a comic book. Henry and June lived in its pages, turned them to introduce the next cartoon, and treated the whole show as a publication you were holding. The announcer called it a place where cartoons and comics collide and introduced the two of them as your hosts. They were not characters in the shorts. They were the frame, and the frame had a personality.
15

The power is yours

Captain Planet, 1990

A hero who exists only when five children combine their rings and summon him - and at the end of the episode he turns to the audience, hands the power over and leaves. 'The power is yours!' is his farewell line.
16
The Power Rangers cast on a Camp Conival panel at Comic-Con, beneath banners for Alpha and Omega · iDominick · CC BY-SA 2.0

Mighty Morphin, you are the ranger

Power Rangers, 1993

Five teenagers in spandex, and the entire premise is that a group of people with no special qualities are chosen by a machine to fight monsters. Then the actors leave and new teenagers take the costumes and the audience carries over completely.
17

The popsicle stick who read your mail

Nick in the Afternoon, 1995

Between cartoons on summer afternoons, Nickelodeon ran a block hosted by a popsicle stick. Stick Stickly had googly eyes, a jelly bean nose, and a PO box. He read viewer mail on the air, interviewed children, and sang his address so you could write to him: PO Box 963, New York City, New York State, 10108. In U-Dip, viewers voted on which substance to dip him in. In U-Pick, viewers voted on which cartoon to show.
18

The turtles left the screen and played the concert

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 1990

In the fall of 1990 the four cartoon turtles went on a live arena tour, 'Coming Out of Their Shells' - a run of about forty cities that opened at Radio City Music Hall. Pizza Hut sponsored it, the opening night went out on pay-per-view, and the show's own spokesperson told a reporter: 'They are not actors dressed in costumes. They are the Ninja Turtles, and they've learned to play rock & roll.'
19

Doug's dad watching the TV in the dark

Doug, 1991

Phil Funutmarsh sits in a dark room in front of the television and is, for a few seconds per episode, allowed to be a person who is merely a father.
20

The fan letter with a trap in it

Tiny Toon Adventures, 1991

Buster and Babs open the viewer mail on screen. One letter is from a little girl in the hospital who says she is very sick and asks if Fifi La Fume can visit. Fifi cries and agrees to go. The girl is Elmyra Duff, whose running joke is wanting to keep Fifi as a pet; the letter was bait. The show stages the fan letter as a con and lets the character's sympathy be real.
21

Three new faces in the same suits

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, 1994

In the fall of 1994, mid-series and five days a week, three of the five original rangers left the show and three new teenagers took the powers on screen in a ceremony. The audience watched everything attached to the old faces move to faces it had never seen, and kept watching.
22
The Animaniacs at WonderCon, 2012 · The Conmunity - Pop Culture Geek from Los Angeles, CA, USA · CC BY 2.0

The rabbit in the hat

Animaniacs, 1993

A whole generation of children said a specific sentence in a specific order with a specific pause in it, for a cartoon rabbit, on Saturday morning.
23

The fan who had no life

Freakazoid!, 1995

Fanboy is a teenager in a comic book store who decides that his life's purpose is to become Freakazoid's sidekick. Freakazoid, still mourning his last sidekick, does not want him. Fanboy follows him through an initiation, a fight, and a comic book convention. Freakazoid finally gets rid of him by introducing him to Mark Hamill, who is at the convention as himself. Fanboy is delighted. When Freakazoid asks if he really has no life, Fanboy says no, sir, proudly.
24

The toy that laughed back

Sesame Street, 1996

A plush Elmo that giggled and shook when squeezed, sold for about twenty-five dollars in the Christmas season of 1996. Then it ran out: stores sold out as the trucks unloaded, resellers got hundreds for one doll, a Denver charity auction sold an Elmo for $10,000, and parents lined up by the hundreds for a shelf that was already empty.