In 1980, everything changed for animation in America. President Jimmy Carter signed the FTC Improvements Act of 1980, limiting the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to regulate children’s programming, among many other things. Ronald Reagan was elected the same year: As president, he championed an immense wave of pro-corporation deregulation that loosened the 1970s rules that limited ads during kids’ shows. Suddenly, toy-company-backed cartoons like Mattel’s Hot Wheels show were no longer classified as advertising. The immediate result was a wave of animated shows backed by Hasbro, Mattel, and other toy companies — well-funded shows supported with copious advertising and merchandise. And weird little one-off, non-toy-based shows like 1980’s Drak Pack all but disappeared from Saturday-morning TV.

Nostalgia for the heavy hitters of ’80s cartoons — He-Man, Transformers, My Little Pony, Thundercats, G.I. Joe, and so forth — remains a cottage industry, with endless retro merch and endless reboots and reimaginings. But I was apparently put on Earth to champion the one-season animated oddities of the ’80s, and Polygon’s Fangsgiving celebration is the perfect time to argue for a modern reboot of 1980's little-remembered one-season series Drak Pack.

The Saturday-morning show has deep roots in the off-brand Universal Monsters tradition. It centers on three teenage sorta-superheros — a vampire, werewolf, and Frankenstein’s-monster trio — “dedicated to reversing the evil image of their forefathers” by prominently positioning themselves as do-gooders. That pretty exclusively means battling a group known as OGRE (“Organization of Generally Rotten........

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