I had a toy very similar to the description in panel #1 — Johnny 7 OMA (One Man Army). No H-bomb detonator, though.
Who is the guy with the glasses in panel #3 supposed to be?
As a kid in the very early 1960s I can confirm the existence of SAturday Morning Cartoons. And, as far as I;m concerned, it didn’t matter if they were originally ru at a different time, and were just run again later on Saturday mornings – the point was that they decided to run blocs of cartoons on the day that kids would be home from school. I recall Crisader Rabbit (which was a pre-Rocky and Bullwinkle effort from Jay Ward. Although, ironically, most of the episodes I saw were really made in a second wave after Ward’s original effort). I recall Ruff and Reddy, which was Hannah -Barbera’s first made-for-TV cartoon, predating even Huckleberry Hound. It was pretty forgettable. There were lots of cirtually forgotten cheaply made cartoons, like The Mighty Hercules and Dodo, the Kid from Outer Space and the Syncro-Vox weirdos of Clutch Cargo and Space Angel. There was Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse (a Batman parody, but done by Bob Kane, who created Batman), reruns of Terrytoons, especially Mighty Mouse. The Trans-lux version of Felix the Cat. The wonderful Commander Bleep, whose hero was an alien who teamed up with a puppet and a caveman.
Sort of related to all this was Matty’s Funday Funnies, which originally aired Sundays (according to Wikipedia, Sunday afternoons, although I recall it being early evening), which featured Harveytoons (Casper the Friendley Ghost, Baby Huey, Herman and Katnip etc.), which morphred into Matty’s Funnies with Beany and Cecil, featuring Bob Clampett’s animated version of wha a decade earlier had been his puppet show. The “Matty” of the title was Matty Mattel, mascot of the Mattel Toy Co. (makers of Barbie, among a great many other toys).
Saturday morning cartoons ballooned in number and variety during the 1960s as the peak of the Baby Boomer’s surge came of the right age for them, with more nd more cartoons being made explicitly for Saturday mornings and turning the caroon blc into n hours-long orgy of animation running from six or seven in the morning until after lunch. Some was still reruns of older stuff, but it was joined by plenty of Hanna-Barbera fare and things from other sources like Filmation, and puppet shows like Fireball XL-5 from Jerry and Sylvia Anderson.
He looks kind of like a shrunken Barry Goldwater.
It is. The joke is that Goldwater was seen to be a passionate “Hawk”, so he’d love a toy like the Death-26. Especially if it was “for real”
Thanks, guys.
AUH2O.
Both of my younger brothers cancelled their streaming services and installed old style aluminum antennas on their roofs. I do not know how they obtain wifi but they refuse to pay for cable or wideband internet. I am still using cable for $200 per month, took down my old 1969 antenna in 1997 when I re-roofed my house
I would think regular outdoor antennas have around a long time, but motorized antennas really took off in the 1970s. Our family felt like “The Jeffersons,” “movin’ on up” when we got ours.
Speaking of Saturday morning cartoons, in the 1960s I recall every local TV station running a block of cartoons late in the afternoon on weekdays, usually 5 o’clock or so. Some of these were ancient cartoons originally made for theaters, like the very old Popeye shorts, Little Lulu, even Betty Boop! But with the advent of Hanna-Barbera, there were brand new cartoons produced only for TV. One of our local stations had quite a 5pm lineup: Monday was Quick Draw McGraw, Tuesday was the Woody Woodpecker Show (with an appearance by Walter Lantz, who produced them for theatrical use for Universal and repackaged them for TV); Wednesday was Yogi Bear, and Thursday Huckleberry Hound. 3 out of 5 days were H-B creations. On Friday they ran the live-action Adventures of Superman. Nowadays the former weekday cartoon time has local news.
I grew up in a south suburb of Dayton, Ohio, and would watch Uncle Al using the rabbit ears on our TV. I remember begging my mother to take me there so I could be one of the kids in the audience, but it never happened. Instead, she took me to a (similar but not syndicated) show out of Dayton called Clubhouse 22.
I’d like to second this. The “what places have you absolutely forgotten” thread reminded me of it because when I was 4 I went to a resort which had an indoor playground that looked a lot like a McDonald’s Playplace but they didn’t exist yet. Their outdoor playgrounds existed, but tended to be small except for occasionally having a Mayor McCheese tower. The large semi-enclosed ones didn’t exist when I was young, and now all of the playgrounds are gone. There may be some locations in tourist areas where the Playplaces still exist, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen one in just a regular old suburban McDonalds.
One of Goldwater’s slogans during the 1964 campaign was “In your heart you know he’s right.” Which prompted the retort, “In your guts you know he’s nuts!”