Rubik, the Amazing Cube

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Rubik, the Amazing Cube was a Saturday morning cartoon that aired from September 10, 1983-September 1, 1984 in the United States, produced by Ruby-Spears Productions. The program, broadcast as part of The Pac-Man/Rubik, the Amazing Cube Hour block on ABC, featured a magic Rubik’s Cube named Rubik who could fly through the air and had other special powers. Rubik could only come alive when the colored squares on his sides had been matched up.

Rubik had fallen out of an evil magician’s stagecoach, and this magician was the main villain throughout the show. Rubik helped three siblings--Carlos, Lisa, and Reynaldo Rodriguez--in foiling the magician’s attempts to recover Rubik. One time Rubik was recovered by a detective who was a relative of the magician, but then decides the children should keep Rubik as the magician would use him for evil and selfish purposes. Outside of the evil magician, episodes usually dealt with more normal adversaries, such as when the eldest son had run afoul of a bully who had thwarted his efforts to gain a potential girlfriend, while at the same time the bully was making himself appear decent to the girl. Rubik had worked in secret to expose the bully's true brutal personality in front of the girl.

The Rodriguez children were quite adept at solving Rubik’s Cubes, often doing so with only a few movements, even for configurations that were impossible to solve that quickly, although in stressful circumstances it took them longer. Sometimes even animals would solve the cube, just as quickly as the kids could. This was beneficial since Rubik regularly got thoroughly scrambled by simply being dropped, grabbed by the family dog, etc. Rubik was also the first Saturday morning cartoon show to feature Hispanic children as the main characters.

In keeping with the Hispanic flavor of the show, the theme song was done by Puerto Rican boy band Menudo.