Remember Saturday morning cartoons?

Cafe Society
1

I don’t know if it’s still done, but when I was a child, Saturday mornings from 7 am to about 9 or 10 were prime cartoon time. You’d get up early on Saturday, snuggle up on the couch in your pjs with a bowl of cereal and spend a few hours watching cartoons. The Big 3-ABC, CBS, and NBC competed for your viewing, with the traditional offerings like Looney Toons, Tom and Jerry, Mickey Mouse and co, maybe some variety of Scooby Do with that asshat, Scrappy, along with tons of various original cartoons (which always seemed to be cancelled after 1 season). And of course, the commercials, with Schoolhouse Rock, toy ads, and the little PSAs from The Will Rogers Institute (“White Plains, New York!”).

Some of the cartoons of my youth:
The Get-Along Gang (I still have my stuffed Woolma Lamb!)
The Smurfs
The Snorks
Gummi Bears ("Bouncing here and there and everywhere!)
The Littles
Richie Rich
Alvin and the Chipmunks
Muppet Babies
Punky Brewster
Berenstein Bears
Kissy-Fur
Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
Scooby Do and Scrappy Do (God, I hated Scrappy. I especially hated how they cut the gang in half and you only got Scooby and Shaggy. MAYBE Daphne would come along but that would be it)

And one of the PSAs I remember was a serious called “One To Grow On”, where they’d have various actors and actresses from popular prime time series (Michael J. Fox, Jason Bateman) presenting a little moral dilemma (Don’t get in cars with strangers! Don’t do drugs! Don’t lift candy bars!) and then they’d offer you the correct response. “And THAT’S one to grow on!”

Do they still do this for the kiddies, or does everyone just watch Nick Jr and Disney?

2

Ah I remember the days when Hannah Barberra ruled Saturday mornings with an iron fist.

I think Saturday morning cartoons ended sometime in the mid-late 90s. Last ones I remember were shows like X-Men, The Tick, Men in Black and Eek! the Cat.

3

And in Memphis, after cartoons came wrestling with Jerry Lawler and the channel 5 weatherman as announcer. Also sprach Zarathustra was the theme. It was kinda surreal.

4

Fox and UPN/WB/whatever the heck it’s called do this. Though it’s more like 9-2 (8-1 for your Eastern kiddies). And if you have satellite, you get both channels twice extending it until something like 4pm.

5

Beany & Cecil: My Favorite cartoon villan, Dishonest John! Nyah ah ahhhh

Popeye:  Alice the Goon & Eugene the Jeep, a 4-demensional dude living in a 3-demensional world.
6

Johnny Quest

The Hudsen Brothers

All sorts of superheroes, from the Justice League to Captain America to Chicken Man…

Some cheaply done live action shows: Planet of the Apes, Time Tunnel, Land of the Lost…

Popeye, Bugs, Woody, Tom & Jerry…

Star Trek, the Animated Adventures

Man, we had loads.

Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?

I’m just a bill, on Capitol Hill…

INTER - JECTION!

::sigh::

7

I still remember snippets of jingles.

Looking for a Saturday morning place to be
Come and join the wonderful world of ABC!
Boom-boom, yeah! Boom-boom, yeah!
The Jackson 5 are coming to town…

I liked to watch Hot Wheels and Skyhawks. Hot Wheels featured Hot Wheels care you could get your parents to buy, as the protagonists drove them on different adventures. Thing remembered: Someone raced a blue car and won. A Hot Wheels Girl said, ‘Ooh, that makes me see red!’ Someone else said, ‘Wait a minute, you really do see red!’ The car had been red and was repainted blue, and some of the paint had chipped off. This led to the capture of the Bad Guy.

Skyhawks came on right after How Wheels. It was about a family of fliers. I used to roll out some teletype paper (dad worked for the FAA) as runways, and play with my Matchbox airplanes as I followed the adventures.

I also used to watch the animated Lassie series. It was kind of lame, but I watched it for some reason. Thing remembered: Someone wants to ride a minibike up a trail. The Young Indian said he couldn’t. ‘The sign says no motor vehicles [or horses only], and that putt-putt don’t eat hay!’

I watched the adventures of The Osmond Brothers and The Jackson 5. One followed the other, but I don’t remember which.

Star Trek. That was cool. A Star Trek cartoon.

And I liked the reruns. Jonny Quest was fun. Thing remembered: A Nazi war criminal is hiding out on an island with a bunch of cavement that he’d ‘domesticated’ and used as his henchmen. I remember a caveman saying ‘Kommen Sie!’, and the Nazi Doktor crashing a plane into a volcano (or something). I liked the 1990s version too. But the best reruns were The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. (OVerture! Cut the lights! This is it, the night of nights!..) I also liked the old Underdog and Rocky & Bullwinkle shows.

Schoolhouse Rock. Man, I loved those! Catchy tunes, and you actually learned something. I have the DVD.

Then there were the live action shows. The Banana Splits featured funky characters and serials. (‘Uh-oh! Chongo!’ – That came from a serial featuring Michael Vincent. Apparently he didn’t use ‘Jan’ back then.) I liked the Arabian Knights cartoons they showed, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (That Mississippi, she is a mystery…’). And I watched H.R. Pufnstuff, Lidsville and Sigmond and the Seamonsters.

I hated Sundays, when the only kids’ fare on was Davy and Goliath and Gumby. I watched them anyway, since they were the only things on.

8

Well Fox does show Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’m still trying to figure out why The WINX club is classified is Educational / Instructional. (and now ABC has a rip-off show called W.I.T.C.H.)

ABC does have some other cartoons (Fillmore is OK), CBS has some Nick Jr stuff.
NBC shows some Discovery Kids stuff (I wish they would show Operation Junkyard again).

There was time when the FOX lineup ruled. The Tick, X-men and Spider-Man (I think)

Brian

9

NoClueBoy: I’d forgotten about The Hudson Brothers. (*We’re gonna razzle-dazzle you…!)

I also forgot about Super Chicken and The Justice League of America.

Mr. Roboto: I watched Popeye when I was really young, when we lived in Japan. Whenever I hear the name Alice, I always subconsciously append ‘The Goon’.

At the same time, I watched a show called Tetsujin. (Good thing I’d learned Japanese. Too bad I’ve forgotten it.) I had an inflatable Tetsujin toy that I played with all the time. Shortly after returning to the States, Tetsujin was released here as Gigantor.

Others I forgot in my first post:

Speed Racer
Groovy Ghoulies
The Archie Show
The Wacky Races
Tom Slick

There was another one that was cheaply animated – Rocky & Bullwinkle cheap – about young jet pilots whose airplanes were rather pointy and had long landing gear struts.

And Winky Dink, and The Beany and Cecil Show. (I was way young then, so they didn’t immediately come to mind.) And I remember a little bit of Hobo Kelly, which was a show that (I think) was local to SoCal.

10

I was all about NBC on Saturday mornings.

My sister and I would wake up real real REAL early in the morning to catch this creepy show called “Space Hawks”. We’d never see the whole entire thing–just the last fifteen minutes or so. It wasn’t a cartoon but a live-action show with crazy-ass puppets and people dressed up in funky costumes. Futuristic and surreal. At the ending credits, they’d play this song sung by one of the characters (she had pink hair, I remember) that had a chorus that went: “Living, living, LIVING IN THE 21st CENTURY!” K.I.D.S Incorporated replaced this show, but we would still only manage catch the theme song at the end.

After that came The Snorks, which were just wanna be Smurfs.

And then came the Gummi Bears, followed by the Smurfs (a whole hour!!)

I think it would be around ten o’clock when the Smurfs would go off.

What would follow was always subject to change. Sometimes it would be Foofur. Sometimes it would be Punky Brewster (remember Glomer?) Sometimes it would be Camp Candy, A-Team, MC Hammer (hehehe), Pink Panther and Sons, and Kissyfur (which would actually replace the Gummi Bears, IIRC). These were the “B-list cartoons”, the ones that everyone knew wouldn’t last. My attention would never be 100% devoted to these shows while they were on, and I would usually be doing something else while I’d be watching, like eating breakfast or watching another cartoon, like Muppet Babies.

Alvin and the Chipmunks always came on last. They were ok, but I always preferred the rarer Chipette storylines to the Chipmunks’. (I had a hard time with the whole “chipmunk” thing, so I would pretend they were just adopted black kids ala Webster and Different Strokes.) After they went off, it was time to do house chores, go to Girl Scouts, or watch something like Soul Train. Sooooooul Train!

I remember “One To Grow On” and also all the milk commercials. “It Does a Body Good”.

It seems like when “Bay Watch” and “Saved By the Bell” in the early 1990s came on the scene, the cartoons died off. It marked the end of Generation X’s childhood.

11

Sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle:

Roger (the only adult pilot in this flying circus) was voiced by Garry Owens (afternoon deejay on KMPC, Radio Announcer Dude on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and hysterically funny guy).

The show, like Tom Slick, Hoppity Hooper, Super Chicken, and George of the Jungle, was a Jay “Rocky and Bullwinkle” Ward production.

12

Ahh, great cartoons all. Wow, the Get-Along Gang…I almost forgot about them. Remember the Wuzzles? I still have a Bumblelion toy somewhere. :slight_smile:

13

Egads, am I the only one who remembers Voltron? Though to be honest, I don’t recall if that was Saturday morning or after-school. Come to think of it, I think it was after-school, since I seem to recall Saturday mornings being exclusively Looney Tunes / Merry Melodies.

14

The OP must be younger than I am; my main memories of Scooby-Doo are of the classic, pre-Scrappy episodes. Of course, they still all had the exact same plot—just a different setting and a different monster. And there was that one season when they had guest stars: Batman and Robin, the Addams Family, Mama Cass Eliot (surely I’m not hallucinating that one?)…

Superheroes were very big on Saturday morning TV, including the live-action shows (SHAZAM!, Electro-woman and Dyna-girl) as well as the cartoons (Blue Falcon and Dyno-Mutt, Hong Kong Phooey, and of course the Super Friends—was the first season, with Wendy and Marvin, really the best, or was I just younger and more easily impressed then?).

Land of the Lost

Jabberjaw

Laff-a-lympics

15

Fox still has their Fox Box block (TMNT, Sonic X, and some stuff I can’t remember). It was just called “Fox Kids” up until a few years ago (until they lost Power Rangers).

There’s Kids’ WB on weekends and weekday afternoons. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, The Batman, and others.

ABC Family has Jetix, which I love, because they show the mid-90’s X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons (along with the occasional episode of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, Hulk, Fantastic Four, and Iron Man) and old episodes of Power Rangers.

Then, of course, there’s Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, which tend to be showing cartoons during Saturday morning.

I was a total slave to Fox Kids when I was little. T-Rex, Dog City, The Tick, X-Men, Eek! the Cat, and Power Rangers.

16

The definitive volume for all of you is the Burke Brothers’ Saturday Morning Fever.

I used to love Saturdays because after the cartoons ended around noon or 1pm, Channel 56 in Boston showed the Creature Double Feature (old horror and Japanese Monster movies) for another three hours.

17

“All my life, Satuday morning cartoons–the best! Remember the two shrimps, riding the seahorses, little chaps, little cowboy hats, little pistols, bang-bang, rescuing the lobster from the … Swedish cook.”

Meep-meep!

Stranger

18

I was going to come on and talk about Voltron. But I think it might have been early morning weekdays with He-Man, Transformers, and Ghostbusters. I used to watch X-Men, Eek, The Tick, and all of those great FOX cartoons on saturdays, and then Sci-Fi would show MST:3K. My weekends were not very productive.

19

Even as a kid, I greatly preferred the Super Friends episodes where they expanded the team roster to include Green Lantern, Flash, Hawkman, and the made-up characters Samurai, El Dorado, and Black Vulcan, and they always fought the Legion of Doom, led by Lex Luthor. Those were later episodes, called “Challenge of the Super Friends.” Then they finally changed it to “Super Powers” (and showed it on Saturday mornings again) where they introduced Firestorm, Cyborg, and Darkseid and several other Jack Kirby Fourth World creations as the villains.

20

I remember Voltron, but I think that was after school for me, too. My brother was a big fan of that one. (As well as Inspector Gadget – also after school).

Saturday morning, if I got up real early, they also had The Incredible Hulk – not animated, but the actual Bill Bixby / Lou Ferrigno live action version.

The ones I remember most were:
Superfriends
Looney Tunes (of course)
Hong Kong Phooey (I had a Hong Kong Phooey lunchbox :))
Smurfs (was good until they introduced the little Smurflings or whatever they were)
Speed Racer

Thudlow Boink – I remember most of those you mentioned, including the live actions (Shazam, Land of the Lost). We must be close to the same era.

On Looney Tunes – When I was a kid, I always liked the Roadrunner cartoons the best. As I got older, I found that I really appreciated the sly humor of Bugs Bunny much more, and those are still now my favorites – the Roadrunner toons are just basically slapstick.

And in later youth (12-13 years old) there was the cartoon Dungeons & Dragons, which became a favorite, as all the other channels were moving to stuff like Muppet Babies and Snorks (Smurfs ripoff).