Subscribe!Richie Rich (1980)
Originally posted on 25 April 2026First episode title: The Robotnappers
How familiar with the show am I?: I was vaguely aware of the existence of the character, and that's all.
Is this the first episode?: I've found inconsistent statements about how the segments of this show were aired, but this one looks most likely to have genuinely come first.
Richie Rich is the boy who is so rich that his name tells you it twice. He has a mansion full of gadgets including a robot maid, and people are always trying to steal from him.
Major characters seen this episode alongside Richie himself include his friends Gloria Glad and Freckles Friendly, his robot maid Irona, his butler Cadbury, his dog Dollar, and the inventor Professor Keenbean.
In this episode, Gloria and Freckles arrive at Richie's mansion to find him trying to wake Dollar up. Announcing breakfast does the trick, but Dollar presses too many buttons on a control panel to order the food, and it ends up giving him a bath, brushing his teeth, and then dumping the breakfast all over him. Then they rush outside for a demonstration they're doing for TV of the new security system that Keenbean has created for Richie's house. Meanwhile, a pair of phony "gardeners" on the grounds of the mansion are looking into Richie's vault, not to steal the money, but to steal Irona, as their boss as told them that a robot like that could help them plunder many more vaults. The robbers get to the alarm system and spray it with water to try and mess with it. Meanwhile Richie is talking to a reporter outside, and they decide to have Dollar pretend to be a kidnapper and grab Richie to set off the system. A mechanical hand grabs the dog, but the sabotage makes it fall to pieces. Richie demonstrates that they have a backup plan by summoning Irona, who transforms into a vacuum cleaner and sucks up Dollar, but then the robbers use a robot cat as a distraction to lure her away. They spray her with water to make her stiff with rust, and then carry her away!
Richie and his friends see what's happening, but then the robbers flee into a hedge maze and they can't find them. The robbers find that they've locked their keys in their van so they steal one of the Rich family's cars instead to make their getaway. The heroes go and see Keenbean, who is punishing himself with a kicking machine for how much of a failure the security system was. Cadbury arrives to tell Richie about the stolen car, but one of Keenbean's inventions is a stolen car locator, so Richie knows where the villains are and can get there in his own car. At the bad guys' hideout, their boss is using Irona as a blueprint to make an army of robot maids, so by the time Richie and friends arrive, there is a crowd of fake Ironas looking down on them from the roof of the hideout.
Richie goes to a bulldozer shop and casually buys half a million dollars' worth of them, then uses them to tear the walls and roof off the hideout, to rescue Irona. But he and his friends are still menaced by the bad guys and the fake Ironas, until Cadbury arrives by helicopter to give Richie his lunch. Richie takes a bottle of oil from the lunch platter and pours it on Irona to cure her rust, and, enraged, she attacks the fake Ironas, destroying them easily. The villains try to escape in the stolen car but Richie has a remote control for it and ejects them. Then they try to hide at a fruit stand but Richie uses some kung fu moves on the fruit and buries them in fruit, so that they surrender. The fruit stand owner is angry but Richie gives him his own allowance for this week, making him rich.
Finally, a new security system is installed and they test it out - this time it successfully throws Dollar in jail, and Richie promises to hire him a good lawyer!
This show was originally broadcast alongside Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo, and there's a noticeable holdover from that in the theme song - it plays a riff from the Scooby-Doo theme right before transitioning into the actual Richie Rich lyrics. The first time I heard it, I thought they were just randomly ripping off Scooby-Doo until I learned that context! Funnily enough, there's also a joke early in this episode where Dollar gets compared to Scooby - it's like Hanna-Barbera were lampshading that they had two cowardly, food-loving dog characters on the go at once.
Richie himself is, of course, the mythical concept of a nice rich guy. His family seems to own almost everything we see, including the science centre where Keenbean works, and even the jail! The scene with the fruit stand owner confirms that his weekly allowance is $100,000. That was in 1980, so in today's money, that's almost $400,000.
There isn't much to say about his friends, though. You can tell from Freckles' clothing that he's meant to be much poorer than Richie but it never comes up here, and I've seen online that Gloria is Richie's girlfriend but that doesn't come across at all in this episode!
So, one of the ways Richie's wealth is illustrated is the number of gadgets and stuff he has around, a lot of which seems to have been invented by Keenbean. I haven't even mentioned all the ones we see illustrated here as they're not all relevant to the plot. The aforementioned kicking machine is especially ridiculous:
But I'll also shout out this expanding television that Keenbean accidentally activates while looking for the stolen car locator. When I'm watching a video on my phone I do sometimes wish I could just make it bigger at will!
Another thing this show does to demonstrate Richie's wealth is to plaster dollar signs over everything. The hedge maze, for instance, has all of the hedges cut into dollar signs! And Dollar the dog has dollar signs on his fur - I wonder if the family had him bred that way?
Irona - pronounced eye-ROH-na, although it's obviously meant to be "iron" as a woman's name - speaks in a faux-robotic monotone voice, and yet shows stronger emotions than any of the other characters, especially at the end when she takes out her anger on the duplicates!
Overall, this is a pretty average cartoon. It didn't blow me away but I wouldn't say no to seeing more of it.
Want to talk about cartoons? Or perhaps you have some feedback about the site? Whichever it is, please get in touch!