The weekend starts here for most of you, so the Weekend Discussion begins today!

Nostalgia: the mind killer. I hate it when people go on and on about something they loved as a kid as if it’s actually quality. The reality is that you were ten, and easily impressed.

But there are some things that hold up just as poorly as you remember. For a number of years there was a spate of cartoons based on live action properties. While I ate up all kinds of crummy cartoons and loved them – I really liked the Q-Bert cartoon for some reason – even at nine and ten I understood just how monumentally ridiculous and bad these shows were. And in some cases these cartoons had the voice talent of the actors from the real TV shows. As a kid who adored Star Trek: The Animated Series, I was drawn to anything that used the real voices. And so I watched the time traveling adventures of the Fonz and his friends, and watched as Laverne and Shirley tried to make it in the Army. And I sat in slackjawed disbelief as Gilligan and the other castaways got their asses marooned on an alien planet. So I’m nostalgic for a time when children’s television programming included such poorly thought out spin-offs of popular prime-time shows.

For your Christmas Eve enjoyment, here are the opening sequences to these terrible, terrible cartoons:

And here’s a bonus. It didn’t use the original voices (although there was a 60s cartoon, still playing in reruns when I was a kid, that used the real Stooges in live action interludes and intros), but I was still endlessly thunderstruck by the idea of The Robonic Stooges – the Three Stooges had been turned into cyborgs and lived in a junk yard. Fucking stunningly bad.

Your mission: Which modern live action shows would have the best cartoon spin-off? Remember: the spin-off MUST include an adorable animal in some capacity, and the animal must not have been in the original show. It helps to expand the initial concept into sci fi or to take the characters somewhere bizarre and totally away from the concept of the original live action series. Sound off below!

Make your pitches good – if we get enough quality ones I’ll be running the best responses (from below and the message board)_in an article next week.