Cheerios and Dystopia

I've been thinking a lot lately about post-apocalyptic pop culture, and I remembered that Thundarr The Barbarian, one of my favorite Saturday-morning cartoons when I was a kid in the '80s, was bluntly, brutally post-apocalyptic. Between Thundarr, The Day After, and NBC version of Damnation Alley, it's no wonder I grew up obsessed with the end of the world. I also never realized that Thundarr is a weird, soupy mix of M. John Harrison's Viriconium cycle, Fred Saberhagen's Ardneh books, and (duh) Star Wars.