The Masters of the Universe and Princess of Power cartoons got insane TV ratings

[Werewolf]

At their peak 10 million viewers per episode in the US alone. Wowzers!! That's amazing.

He-Man and She-Ra TRIVIA: ASTONISHING ratings! - YouTube

[sprytel]

Those numbers can't be right.

[Werewolf]

Those are the correct numbers. MOTU and POP were an absolute phenomenon in the mid 80s.

[sprytel]

I ended up going down the rabbit hole looking into this one, and it was interesting (at least to me). I thought I would share what I discovered... even though it is too long and too full of statistics.

This is not meant be a challenge to Werewolf, the assertion that MOTU/POP got insane ratings, or even the original video.


Nielsen has two kinds of ratings. The main rating is basically, out of all households that have a television, how many are tuned into this show. Then they have demographic ratings, which instead is: out of all the people in that demographic that have a television, how many are tuned into this show. In 1984, the number Nielsen used for total households was 84.9 million.[1]

So what were He-Man's ratings?

This article, which apparently takes its data from a June 26, 1985 issue of Variety magazine shows He-Man with a household rating of 3.[2] 3 of 849M total houses means a viewership of 2.5 million households.

But that could be summer ratings and artificially low. I did find this helpful quote from Broadcasting magazine in July of 1985, "The number-one program among children continued to be Group W's He-Man and Masters of the Universe (10.9 rating/152 stations), followed by Claster's Transformers (10.7 rating, 99 stations)."

If that was household ratings, 10.9 of 84.9M total houses, you would get about 9.25 million households. That's close to 10 million. Not quite. But that 10.9 is not the household ratings. Those are demographic ratings.

So we need to use a different number than 84.9M. We need the total number of people in that children demographic. School age children (age 5-17) gives us a good approximation. That is 59.7 million[3]. That will cover a bigger slice than what Nielsen considers the "children" demographic (and it doesn't factor in the percentage of those children that do not have a television). But that is probably a wash with the fact that He-Man was popular with some non-children too. So 10.9 of 59.7M people, you would get something closer to 6.5M people.

(Note that in this demographic sense we mean "discrete individuals". The standard that Nielsen and others typically follow for viewership is households. So, that viewership total is going to be lower than that number derived from its demographic ratings, since some of those discrete individuals will be in the same household.)

These numbers make more sense. As a point of reference, Star Trek: TNG (1987-1993) was considered an unprecedented success for syndicated television, and it averaged about 10 million households' viewership.[4] So it makes sense that He-Man viewership was a little lower than that. Plus, the quote about He-Man and Transformers comes from a whole article on syndicated ratings. While He-Man gets a special mention for its dominance in its demographic, it is not on the top 25 on the list. Perhaps they arbitrarily excluded cartoons, but the list has Donahue and daytime game shows, so it otherwise seems pretty eclectic. It certainly reads like He-Man didn't quite make the cut, but they wanted to recognize it for being effective at reaching its target audience.

So bottom line... hugely successful cartoon... the numbers are impressive in their own right... but the 10 million is too high.


References

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/30/a...ng-habits.html

[2] http://pleasesavemerobots.blogspot.c...toon%20ratings

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210308...1985-07-15.pdf

[4]https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1987/demographics/p23-150.pdf

[5] https://www.trektoday.com/articles/ratings_history.shtm

[Werewolf]

This is not meant be a challenge to Werewolf, the assertion that MOTU/POP got insane ratings, or even the original video.

It's all good.

The fellow who did the video, James Eatock, is considered an authority and historian on Filmation and the MOTU and Pop cartoons. I just thought it was fun video to pass along.