I think most cartoons of the eighties looked more or less the same because they were made for kids to sell cereal and toys. I think part of the reason it wasn't more popular was twofold. 1) It was on at a lousy time. I lived in the midwestern United States at the time and it aired at 7:00am there. 2) Things like action figures and toy cartoons were in decline by 1988. TMNT being the exception at that time. There was also the oversaturation issue. It's hard to explain to someone who didn't live through it at the time, especially if you weren't a kid, how many cartoons and toy lines there were at the time. Yet another Superman show by that point was probably just another cartoon to most kids. Only two years after SF went off the air. And only one year after Superman 4 bombed. There also wasn't really any tie in toy lines with it necessarily. The Super Powers line had been discontinued two years earlier and the Batman movie was a year out that re-released a Superman figure with it. This is as close as we got. I think people were just sort of burned out on Superman by then.