Sport Billy

Sport Billy was a 1979 TV cartoon made by Filmation Associates.

In 1982, the show was carried over to the US for syndication after being highly successful in Germany.

Sport Billy was originally a European character who was already reasonably well known in various parts of Europe and even in some parts of latin America.

Sport Billy's main sport was football (soccer), and this was reflected in the opening sequence of the show.

He was even adopted by FIFA as a Fair Play Mascot for football World Cups - not bad going for a cartoon character!

To build on being the Fair Play Mascot he was also used as a mascot in many sporting youth programs internationally, promoting fair play and sportsmanship.

26 episodes were created in total and were eventually shown world wide.

The story of Sport Billy revolves around our hero who is from the planet Olympus, which was an earth like planet in orbit on the opposite side of the sun.

This planet Olympus is populated by athletic god-like beings, so the show took a lot of inspiration from Greek mythology.

Billy has a few gadgets at his disposal to help in his sporting quests.

His main piece of kit was a magic size-changing gym bag called the 'Omni-Sack' - which magically produces various tools and items which was usually used to overcome some problem that would arise during the show.

Always convenient these things eh?...

Billy flies to Earth on a mission to promote good sportsmanship, teamwork and fair play (which is no doubt how he became a fair-play mascot).

Like any good cartoon there was an 'evil' wrong-doer who was always out to thwart Billy and his fair-play plans.

Queen Vanda was out to stop sports throughout the galaxy and was always making things difficult for our hero.

Luckily though Billy was assisted by two faithful companions, a girl named Lilly and a talking dog named Willy.

A lot of cartoons from this era seemed to feature talking dogs and helpful sidekick animals!

The three companions travelled around in a space ship / time machine, saving different parts of Earth, which was being targeted by the dastardly Queen Vanda.

This made for mega-excitement as Billy and his friends triumphed in different locations of our planet each week!

I remember watching this on Saturday mornings during the 1982 world cup which was held in Spain.

Since I was only 10 at the time, this was almost more exciting than the international football!

A game of Downfall followed by Sport Billy, then a kickaround witth my pals in the park.... ahh good times.

Things like this get me all nostalgic, so I think I'll have an afternoon of ZX Spectrum Games ramp up the evening with some Amiga Games and close out the night with a stint with some Vintage Classic Toys.

I'm surprised that our hero was not given a computer game of sorts as many cartoon's were made into a game for lots of home computers that were around at that time.