Anyone who says that TV in the 80s and 90s didn't have 'woke' or 'politically correct' elements in it hasn't been (re)watching a lot of TV from the era. Many major shows I grew up watching in the 90s were chock full of it. Quantum Leap, MacGyver, Sliders, The entire premise of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and basically every fucking Saturday morning cartoon...

Speaking of Saturday morning cartoons. I wonder what those people would think of characters like Charlie from Biker Mice from Mars? She was a tough, no-nonsense girl working a blue collar job (motorcycle mechanic), and there were times when they wanted to 'Damsel' her but it turned out they didn't. The funniest one for me was when an episode that starts out with a bank robbery, and the robbers claim they have a hostage, the Mice all go 'Charlie?' and then she shows up behind them and says 'why do you always think I'm the hostage?' You know who the hostage was? Greasepit... the villain's main henchman and a certified dumbass.

Every fucking time I go back to rewatch those cartoons I ALWAYS find elements that would make reactionaries go nuts. The pilot episode to M.A.S.K had the bad guys think that one of the protagonists trying to thwart their plans was a man... only for them to figure out quickly that it was a woman. Even shows that I would now consider to be really, really stupid, like Dinosaucers, had gender flipped characters. In Dinosaucers they were making a tribute episode to old-school Film noir detectives, and they had to meet 'Sam Spade' (Sam Spade was the protagonist of the Maltese Falcon), only for them to find out it was not Samuel Spade, but Samantha Spade.

I could go on forever. But one thing that I DID want to say that I honestly did find problematic even as a child from cartoons of the era was what I would call 'the love potion episode'. What I mean is that sometimes in some cartoons they would have an episode where a love potion or something or the other that causes a character to fall in love with another and cannot control it. So what's the contradiction I found as a kid and more so as an adult?

Well... if the person afflicted by the potion is female, the entire episode will center around it. Two examples is one from Dinosaucers were a female dinosaucer gets influenced by it and now is OK with wanting to marry the leader of the antagonists. One other example that was played more for laughs is in Gummi Bears when Duke Igthorn wanted to get Lady Bane to fall in love with him in order for him to gain access to her powers or something or the other to finally capture the Gummis... only problem? The person she falls in love with is Toady, Igthorn's bumbling chief henchman, and the whole episode centers around getting Lady Bane to snap out of it.

So that being said, one thing I DID notice is that sometimes the person being affected by a love potion or spell is a guy... and when that happens, the plot or the show doesn't take it seriously at all and is usually a quick gag. The main example that comes to mind is from Conan the Adventurer where they have a quick scene where a very large, ogre-like woman is dragging a scrawny little man who is actively resisting her and she says 'give him a love potion, I want to marry him!' and the man protests, but the love potion is forced on him and he then he falls in love with the woman he detested and... well, that's it. The episode continues and those two are never mentioned again. There are probably other examples, but that is all that comes to mind.

Trust me when I say it, if these people ended up waking up 30 or 40 years ago and thinking 'ah ha! finally! no more woke!' they would be in for a rude awakening. Don't get me wrong, there was a fuckload of problems with representation in the media at the time. Things like brownface/yellowface hadn't fallen entirely out of style yet, and there were issues with female representation and racial stereotyping. MacGyver had those issues to an irritating degree, especially in the earlier seasons. Neurodivergent people weren't well represented and in many cases not present at all. And don't get me started on transgenderism. It is almost like at the time being transgender was a gag more than anything at best or a highly sinister trait at worst.