Salty's Lighthouse is a pre-school cartoon from Sunbow Entertainment that originally aired on TLC in 1997 and also aired on PBS stations. What makes this cartoon something that a fanbase disowns as being an insult to a famous cult show? Let's find out.
The series centers on Salty, a young boy who enjoys daydreaming and going on adventures. His friends consist of Ocho, an Octopus; Claude, a Hermit Crab; Sophie and Saddie, twin birds; Aurora, the shining light inside the lighthouse; and Aunt Chovie, the owner. With this, the characters learn life lessons and other things you'd expect in pre-school shows. In addition to its animated segments, the show also features live-action wrap-arounds featuring models of tugboats on their adventures. This isn't anything new, but rather stock footage taken from the 1989 British children's series entitled Tugs. Sunbow bought a stake in the show from Robert D. Cardona and passed it off as what you see. In some way, it's sorta like Shining Time Station, as that show used Thomas as its framing segments quite like how this show uses Tugs as its framing segments.
So, now onto the show's quality. It's pretty obvious that this was produced on a low-budget and the animation reflects that. The character designs look generic and Salty himself looks like Tommy Pickles from Rugrats for some reason. The Canadian voice-acting cast is quite small, with only eight altogether split between the Salty and Tugs segments. Quite a lot of the same actors portray different characters in the latter. The Tugs segments commonly reuse footage from one episode to another because the show only had thirteen episodes produced while this show had forty segments, and as this was a pre-school show, the violent and dark scenes were all removed. The characters are generic, wooden, and don't feel relatable. I can't tell anybody apart. The episodes are repetitive because of their formulaic nature - A problem occurs, then they look at the Tugs, then other things go on, and the episode is over. I can understand that this is aimed at pre-schoolers, but it could do better than that.
If I had to say something good, it's that the opening theme is catchy.
Overall, this show isn't fun to watch and as I stated, there's a good reason why fans of Thomas and Tugs disown this show as being shameful.
