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Weekend Discussion Thread: Your Saturday Morning MemoriesThe idea for this thread came from J. Elvis, who tweeted this:
When I have memories of watching Saturday morning cartoons, this is the show onscreen: The animated series premiered 44 years ago today, Sept. 8, 1973, on ABC. I replied: So here’s the topic: When you think of watching Saturday morning cartoons, what image/video comes to mind? (How is this MST3K related?, you may ask. Well, remember, the Comedy Channel originally scheduled the show on Saturday mornings. Good enough for me!) 57 Replies to “Weekend Discussion Thread: Your Saturday Morning Memories”Commenting at Satellite News
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As a baby boomer, I remember watching The Flintstones and The Jetsons back in the early 60s. Lots of Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers too. There was also a local horror/sci-fi movie host showing classic films – many of which have since been riffed on MST3K. I was watching Bert I. Gordon, Roger Corman, and Godzilla films long before many of you were born. Today, I spend my Saturday mornings paying bills and doing housework. Growing up sucks. Great memories, though – long before we had to watch out for snakes.
Be sure to click my name to see my ongoing project: MST3K Filming Locations Then and Now.
basically my first 8 years or so involved getting up early, bowl of toxic cereal and then lose touch with reality for about 4 hours. occasionally making vague promises to the folks about cleaning something. a promise i usually forgot until the allowance got threatened. a few decades later it’s more or less the same routine except for the allowance, parents and the toxic cereal. damned cholesterol.
If nothing more, this will establish which are the old people here — when I was young enough to watch such things, there WERE no such things. Children’s shows were things like the live action Steve Reeves Superman, but they weren’t on in the mornings (mostly Saturday mornings were things like Cisco Kid and Sky King which, while juvenile in their plotting, weren’t really meant for kids).
Cartoons like Popeye (shown a lot) were shown in the late afternoons, when the kids were home from school and right before dinner. Saturday mornings we were expected to eat a quick breakfast and go outside to play, and that’s what we did (why in the heck would we ever want to spend more time INSIDE I have zero idea. When did it happen that children decided to spend more time in front of a box than outside?).
I was born in 1970 so the late 70’s were my wheelhouse. Scooby Do, The Pink Panther, Captain Kangaroo, and I’m not afraid to admit, The Smurfs in the early eighties.
Saturday morning television began early with Davy and Goliath trying to sneak some morality into our young lives, but the apex of entertainment really began with Jonny Quest zooming around the world with the coolest theme song ever. After that things tapered off with Quick Draw McGraw followed by American Bandstand sponsored by Brylcream which was the signal for boys all over to go outside and start up a game. To this day the sight of Dick Clark makes me want to get up and leave, may he Rest In Peace.
my saturday mornings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veaDEdVZryA
speak for yourself you young whippersnapper.
My first memory is of Beany and Cecil. And there’s a picture of me wearing a Huckleberry Hound sweatshirt, but I have only a vague recollection of that one.
But the shows I really remember were Underdog and Johnny Quest. Those were my favorites and I made sure to get up in time to watch them every week while eating a bowl of whatever cereal my mom had bought.
And THEN I spent the rest of the day outside, running around, making houses, being goofy. Good times.
and now kids cant run around outside. if little Johnny gets hurt, its someone else’s fault but little Johnny’s.
cant show some of the things in the Funny Company theme anymore.
Bugs Bunny. And friends, or whatever they called it. Get up on Saturday, and just kill time until Bugs Bunny came on. Duck Dodgers. The Long Haired Hare. The Rabbit of Seville. Daffy Dilly. Hareway to the Stars. And, of course, the Road Runner. Fabulous stuff. Mostly. The Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies from the 40s through 1963 still represent the pole star of my comedic universe.
I know now that good stuff all was made before 1963. It died then and can never be resurrected. What came after that was zombie Looney Tunes. Even pulling Chuck Jones out to do another Duck Dodgers or Road Runner couldn’t bring it back. So I’m sympathetic to those who insist that Season 11 isn’t the same. To an extent they’re right, and for a lot of the same reasons. I just think that quality of “Cry Wilderness” with Jonah is much closer to “Manos” with Joel than any Rudy Larriva Road Runner compares to “To Beep or Not to Beep.” Those later Road Runners and the ghastly Sylvester and Speedy Gonzales insult the intelligence of a six year old.
After that the Pink Panther. I don’t know what Pink Panther I was watching then, because I can’t find any of the good ones that I remember from the olden days. I’ve gone out and bought collections and none of them are familiar. Or that good.
After that, eh, who cares. I remember that the Banana Splits marked the end of the morning. Then my older sister insisted on watching “The Monkees.” Blech. That would drive me outside. A couple hours after that the afternoon monster movie would start. That’s where I first saw “Teenagers from Outer Space,” my introduction to the genre of less-than-excellent movies.
Besides others’ shared memories of The Jetsons, Johnny Quest, and The Flintstones, does anyone else remember the short-lived animated Beatles show? Maybe only us girls watched it, but I know my sister and I loved it. Silly me, I thought the real Beatles voiced their own characters but of course they didn’t. Ah, Beatlemania!
And while they’re not Saturday morning memories per se, I have pretty good recollections of many old classic and B movies shown on Saturday and Sunday afternoons — Them, Mothra, the Marx Brothers, Bogart, etc., so lots of MST3K fodder there.
My old man was a military guy, so his 6 kids were expected to be up by 7 (“Quit whining—I let you sleep in!”)and outside doing chores before breakfast. If not, we (and half the neighborhood) were awakened by the sweet sounds of his favorite train music blasting on the family console Hi-Fi. We could hear the looney tunes theme song playing next door and it had a lasting effect on me for sure. 50 years later, my Saturdays still start off with bugs bunny followed by mst3k. Making up for lost time.
My earliest Saturday morning memory–in fact, my earliest memory, period–is of watching 8 Man, the twisted Americanized anime about a murdered detective whose mind is stored in a super-android’s body so he can continue to fight crime. This US-made opening got pretty much everything wrong about its own show (including the character’s design) but the jingle is hilarious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTiysOs-91w
The cartoons themselves throughout the 70s when my brother and sister and I did most of our watching mostly blend together for me, but what I remember most fondly is “Schoolhouse Rock.” Those songs were still playing through my head decades later and once the DVD came out I added it to my collection. I also remember the little “In the News” segments narrated by Christopher Glenn that were similarly played during breaks.
Like many Johnny Quest, Flintstones, Jetsons. I’m going to cheat a little and include a favorite host.
My all time favorite cartoon host is Chuck McCann. He had many different shows and I can not recall which had cartoons. My favorite is when he would read the Sunday funnies and parody Dondi and Little Orphan Annie, eye cut outs included. He is really a talented guy and I admired him throughout my childhood. When I hit the teens his Oscar worthy performance in the Heart is a Lonely Hunter cemented my admiration for his many skills as an adult. A gem of a movie, check it out.
Shout outs to Officer Joe Bolton, Soupy Sales, Fran, Sandy Becker
Saturday was the only day of the week my parents didn’t have to struggle to get me and my siblings out of bed. We’d be up before them, watching whatever cartoons were on until about noon. The 1970s and early 80s were the heyday of Hanna/Barbera, who had shows on every network. Filmation had plenty of shows, too. Looking back on them, I can now see they were pretty cheap looking, with the barest effort put into most of them. I also noticed a lot of the old WB cartoons were being edited for violence and un-PC content. Often this would result in a cartoon being reduced to almost incoherence. The last Saturday morning cartoon I really liked was ‘Swat Kats’, but by then the Cartoon Network had started and the Saturday morning era began it’s slow demise. Still, I sometimes miss those days, when kids had run of the TV for a few hours and whatever bad thing going on in the world was replaced with superheroes and funny animals.
While I also remember “Superfriends” (like Josh, it’s more the original than the Wonder Twins version), I agree that, for me, Saturday morning meant “Schoolhouse Rock” and “In the News”. Or, in the late morning, switching to Channel 5 for The East Side Kids/Bowery Boys.
I remember Officer Joe Bolton on Ch. 11; he hosted the Our Gang/Little Rascals shorts. Capt. Jack McCarthy hosted the Popeye cartoons. And, if the reception cooperated, we could pick up Wee Willy Webber on Ch. 17 out of Philly, who hosted their afternoon lineup.
Like some others have mentioned, my Saturday morning memories kind of bleed into what some of the local Detroit stations offered after school during the week. Definitely agree with those who mentioned Johnny Quest that it is was a cool toon, especially the theme song. Also Scooby-Doo and The Banana Splits. Others that I remember that haven’t been mentioned yet: Space Ghost; The Herculoids; Rocky and Bullwinkle; Q.T. Hush (another cool theme intro); Top Cat; Magilla Gorilla; Kimba the White Lion; Speed Racer; Tom & Jerry. Also liked The Three Stooges and The Little Rascals/Our Gang. Of course, also as already mentioned, Bugs Bunny; The Road Runner; Underdog and so on.
One of my favorite memories of my late father was watching the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour on Saturday morning. We always wondered why the Coyote didn’t try a different line of products in his attempts to capture the Roadrunner. Acme just didn’t get the job done. We kids also loved the Archie cartoon when it started in the mid-sixties, already being big fans of the comic books (sorry Crow and Tom – that should be “graphic novels”).
I’ll have to admit to being younger than a lot of the people who’ve already commented: for me, “Saturday morning cartoons” snap my mind to the mid-1980s, when they were blurring into “weekday morning/afternoon syndication”… there’s also an added shot of nostalgic memory in that I could only really submerge myself in them visiting my grandparents, who had cable. Among all the “half-hour commercials” anyone older did seem to look down on, I’ll also admit my time-burnished recollections touch first on the more science-fiction-flavoured series (Transformers, Voltron, and so on) and then fixate on Robotech. It didn’t go to lengths insisting nobody was actually being killed in its repurposed Japanese animation (not that I had any inkling just where it had come from in my youth), even if it’s wound up pilloried by anime fans for tangling up beyond apparent comprehension the rights to bringing a popular franchise over here.
My memories of Saturday morning kid’s shows (not necessarily cartoons) are now limited to Superfriends, the Sid and Marty Krofft shows, and Tom Hatten presenting Popeye cartoons to the tune of the Little River Band’s Reminiscing. Oh, and Schoolhouse Rock.
Of course, each of these programs had their own special touch of peculiar insanity…. :-)
Another one for Bugs Bunny & Friends (or whatever CBS called it–random, usually edited classic Looney Tunes with some interstitial scenes between the regular cartoons). Also, That lemon-shaped dude who taught me how to make popsicles. No idea what he was called (I think that was on ABC). Thundarr the Barbarian and Dungeons & Dragons were also favorites as I got older and into action figures.
Then later, it was Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and The Tick. I guess I never really gave up my Saturday morning routine until I was well into adulthood :)
Superfriends was definitely a big part of my younger years. The first season, with Wendy and Marvin, was just OK. But when they started fighting actual villains, especially the Legion of Doom. that’s when it really got good.
And Schoolhouse Rock was always a favorite. When they announced the whole set of them were being made available on DVD, I pre-ordered it.
Then came the early 80s, with Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. Sure, I had watched reruns of the 60s Spider-Man cartoon, but this had a lot more actual characters from the comics. Even though I didn’t know who most of them were at the time.
I never really grew out of watching Saturday Morning TV. When that finally died off a few years ago, part of me died, I suppose.
Oh, I go way back to half of the 70’s cartoons that J&tB ever referenced. :)
Chopped Bugs Bunny (with the old interstitials left over from its old 60’s prime-time series), Scooby-Doo (the original, before they brought on Scrappy-Doo and Sonny & Cher, before they reduced it to just Shaggy & Scooby to make it easier for the writers, and before they decided to kiss up to Cartoon Network and the movie’s “kitschy” H-B bashing), Pink Panther (showed the vintage originals to the next generation and they were hooked immediately), and Schoolhouse Rock. (Should I mention seeing Schoolhouse Rock premiere on Chuck Jones’ old “Curiosity Shop”? Nah, let’s not disturb everyone by going that far back.)
In those days, there was no cable. Saturday morning was a religious ritual.
By the time we did get cable, Commander USA and MST3K S1 became a religious ritual, but the cartoons weren’t there anymore. :(
Wendy & Marvin was the last season that Bill Hanna & Joe Barbera were still overseeing H-B shows, so it was still “harmless”, and only going after ecological villains.
But for all of CN’s demonizing of all vintage Hanna-Barbera in the 00’s via Aquaman and Wonder Twins jokes (who else remembers that the Twins were Saturday-morning-plagiaristically based on Donny & Marie?), some DC writers said that “Challenge of the Superfriends”, where they actually fought the Legion of Doom instead of aliens and earthquakes, was their first great induction into the Holy Canon.
Honestly, what were we THINKING, seventeen years ago, just because an overambitious cable channel wanted to bump the reruns off their network to make room for more Dexter’s Laboratory?
After finding them at the library, I started going through all of Warner’s “decade” DVD-sampler collections of 60’s, 70’s and 80’s Saturday-morning cartoons (most of which are enshrined on Warner Archive boxsets) to literally find out which ones I missed–
And yes, as I recalled, there really wasn’t much on Saturday morning in the 80’s, if you didn’t happen to be into the Smurfs, Muppet Babies or Pee-Wee.
Ah, but Garfield and ALFTales…those were the VHS-setting bastions of Uber-Coolness of their day before the Tick came along: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry9H4pFIf8g
That, ahem, WATCH-shaped dude had a name (“Time for Timer!”), for those who remember when the ABC Afterschool Special used to be animated, and not about teen alcoholism.
We also learned how to make a “wagon wheel” out of cheese and crackers.
And not just The Tick, m’friend…That solid hour 90’s Fox block of The Tick AND X-Men: the Animated Series. You taped this and showed it to anyone who still dissed Saturday morning. Sadly, it was the last great finale. :(
And if you’re currently watching that sad Amazon “The Tick: In Name Only” commentary on the binge-TV era, hang your head in shame–
The original 90’s cartoon was literally twenty years ahead of its time in superhero-canon jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fIguw2DPLA
“And, if the reception cooperated, we could pick up Wee Willy Webber on Ch. 17 out of Philly, who hosted their afternoon lineup.”
Regarding the ‘younger generation’ referenced earlier, that’s something I bet a lot of them have VERY little real experience with…….actually having to WORK (i.e., by playing around with the antenna) at ‘tuning in’ an ‘over the air’ station, especially when the reception was persistently bad.
I live outside of Milwaukee, and every once in a blue moon, whenever the atmospheric conditions were JUST right (probably happened less than 6 times in my entire life), we would be able to get WGN Chicago (channel 9 !!!), LONG before it was known as a “Super Station”.
And if we were REALLY lucky, not only would we be able to tune in WGN, but it would just happen to occur when the Cubs were playing (again, this was WAY back in the day, when Cubs games seemed to be being broadcast just about every day during those long, hot, wonderfully lazy days of summer), making that game REQUIRED viewing, for as long as the reception would hold out (sadly, usually no more than an hour, if that).
And no, none of us really followed the Cubs (this was during the 70’s, the Brewers first decade of existence), it just seemed SO exotic to be able to watch a NATIONAL LEAGUE baseball game, when all we were used to seeing were American League teams (LONG before regular inter-league play), playing (and usually beating) our sorry (at that time) Brew Crew, either on tv, or out at Milwaukee County Stadium.
But I digress…
As far as Saturday mornings go, my era was basically from ’65 to ’75, so it was up by no later than 7am, to bask in FIVE (straight) HOURS of the tube’s glow, watching the shows many others have already mentioned (with ‘American Bandstand’ marking the end of that week’s cartoon fun!). Then, after a quick lunch, it was outside to ‘play’ until suppertime, followed by GREAT neighborhood games (‘kick the can’ being a PARTICULAR favorite!) until (and sometimes well after) dark!
Yep, life sure was sweet back then……Nobody gettin’ uptight, everything cool, no baggage or hang-ups……..everybody just hangin’ in there, me doing my thing, everybody else doing theirs.
In short, everyone living life, just bein’ mellow……..back in the Funky BAD Seventies (Ow, Ow, Boogie..)!!! ;-)
Cartoons & MST? Heck yeah. I don’t remember if Saturday as such, but among cartoons I watched:
Tom Terrific, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, and Crabby Appleton – I’m certain they must have been perhaps unconscious but still formative influences on Best Brains’ Weltanschauung.
Also there are substantial indications of a Baron Otto Matick & Clutcher stratum in the characterization of Dr. F & TV’s Frank.
As a child of the Eighties, Muppet Babies figures as prominently in my Saturday morning memories as it does in Season Four of MST3K. Other titles I recall liking at the time are Gummi Bears, Galaxy High School, Garfield and Friends, and the various Hanna-Barbera property spin-offs. Then there was the Ewoks and Droids Hour. Now I’m not one of those fanboys who doth protest too much by pretending to have been too cool to have liked the Ewoks. I even liked the two Ewok TV movies when they were first shown. Even so, I preferred the Droids portion for its SF action.
As for syndicated material, the champ was always Rocky and Bullwinkle. Of all the titles I’ve mentioned, R&B is probably the only one I could watch nowadays and still enjoy.
In parting, here’s an excerpt from a column written by one Mike Toole concerning Gatchaman and Sandy Frank mutating it into Battle of the Planets:
“The aforementioned terrible, added-in animation from Sandy Frank (apparently created under contract at Hanna Barbera) almost invariably involved the exploits of 7-Zark-7, a blatant R2D2 ripoff who spent the now murder-free minutes of the program lecturing the audience about stuff like: being nice and responsible, and not murdering people. Bo-ring. The members of the science ninja team, drawn in an alarmingly workmanlike fashion by HB’s animators, occasionally appeared to interact with 7-Zark-7 to make it seem like he was part of the series and not the trash can-shaped destroyer of childhood dreams. I mean really, who the hell did Frank and his people think they were fooling?! I’ll tell you who: me. It never occurred to me that 7-Zark-7 didn’t belong in the program when I was five years old. Go figure!”
Some other gems from my Saturday mornings the 60s/70s.
“George of the Jungle.” A Jay Ward creation about an inept Tarzan wanna be. Made into a not-too-bad live action movie in the ’90s, staring Brendan Fraser.
“Hong Kong Phooey.” Scatman Crothers as an inept crime fighting superhero disguised as a janitor. (I’m starting to see a pattern.)
It seemed to me that sometime in the 70s, comic Saturday morning died, supplanted by Superfriends, anime, Captain Planet, and other such shhhhurely excellent fare.
In the late ’80s and ’90s there seemed to be a renaissance of humorous Saturday morning cartoons.
As a 20 something, I liked Garfield. “Tu no eres Silvia!” still gets chuckles in my family. And his friends. Orson the hyper-competent pig, Wade the water fearing duck, Roy the underhanded rooster.
There was Disney’s Raw Toons, which seemed to have some of the wackiness of the great Looney Tunes. Anybody remember “Badly Animated Man?”
There was also one about bugs in the old West, which I remember as being pretty good. I can’t even recall enough to get a web search to work.
And the best of all, Animaniacs and its brilliant spin off “Pinky and the Brain.”
I”m going to see about adding some of this to my Saturday morning fare. My routine now is to get up at six (just like every day) and watch MST in peace, before the nit-pickers wake up. (“Why are you watching this terrible movie? What did he just say? Why did he say that? Is that joke? What does it mean?) A half hour warmup of cartoons would be great. Any suggestions of good stuff that’s available either on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Shout Factory, or some other legitimate web source?
Bugs Bunny, The Three Stooges, Kimba the White Lion, H. R. Puffnstuff, Scooby Doo, School House Rock, Kid Bits, Voltron, Speed Racer (which does not hold up over time)…
Lunch, and then booted out the door until the street lights came on or until you heard your name yelled out to come home.
Ah, nostalgia. *sigh*
I also loved Sunday mornings with Daedel Doors followed by Abbott and Costello. “Time of Their Lives” anyone?
I regret growing up. Should have never done it…
Must Watch: Bugs Bunny/Looney Tunes, Garfield, Scooby Doo (pre-Scrappy, of course), He-Man, Transformers, Inspector Gadget, Shirt Tales. Some of these were after-school shows as well at some point.
Would some times catch: Tom and Jerry, Charlie Brown, Dennis the Menace, Wheelie and Chopper Bunch, Sport Billy, Fat Albert, Muppet Babies.
Now wondering why in the name of The Holy Pumaman I watched this: Get Along Gang, Filmation’s Tom & Jerry, 80s Popeye, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Supercade (Donkey Kong Jr. and Kangaroo?!? What was I thinking at 6?), Pac-Man, The Wuzzles.
I can get pretty nostalgic about After-school cartoons and Saturday mornings until I remember what was actually on. It ain’t all meddling kids and Roadrunners.
Also, any time Rifftrax wants to riff on some 70s and 80s cartoon schlock I am all in — that goes double if MaryJo and Bridget have fun with some Rainbow Brite or something.
When I got to that in between age where you still want to watch Saturday morning cartoons but you know you are getting too old my uncle came to live with us down on the Texas Gulf coast and he began to teach me about carpentry. Instead of watching The Banana Splits (ughh) I was making useful things like doghouses out of scrap lumber. My uncle liked to give what would have been trash a new value and he passed on that practice on to me.
Today I finished building a picnic table out of the old cedar fence boards from a friend’s back yard in Victoria that got flattened by hurricane Harvey. It will replace the one that an oak tree fell on and smashed. I wonder if Jonny Quest’s dad and Race Bannon ever took enough time away from each other to teach Jonny and Hadji carpentry.
I’ll grant you Rubik, the 80’s Popeye, Pac-Man and Supercade, but c’mon, if 80’s Saturday Morning now had to welcome their new arcade-game overlords for kids’ attention, the Dragon’s Lair cartoon wasn’t all THAT bad, now, was it?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHug7aOzK9k
And I’m still not sure why, but the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon still gets disturbing degrees of 80’s cult-fan nostalgia that even gives me shivers.
“The Smurfs” was MY cartoon growing up.
It was warm, funny, clever, and had great heart.
It was nominated for the Best Animated Series Emmy every year for the nine years it was on, winning once.
Please seek out the original cartoon, not the awful movie abominations.
Warner Brothers has been very cheap and stingy about putting seasons on DVD, but here’s a smurfy episode from YouTube.
Enjoy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P9N4IqWmLSw
oohhhh no doubt… anyone who’s -anyone- knows their classic bugs bunny/wb toons, as that is as sacrosanct – if not more so to us aficionados – as disney animation. (me, i prefer wb!! ;0) but, each were their own holy domain, covering such an expanse as to almost obliterate all others… although, fortunately, they did not. (hell, i even like the ‘bill lava’ era of wb! ;0 has a special place in my heart… i’m still waiting for ‘the bill lava project,’ to go along with ‘the carl stalling project’ cd… ;0)
although i’d done it many times already before myself, this thread sent me back onto a youtube-voyage of yesteryear cartoons… i was a child of the seventies mainly, though a lotta stuff from the sixties got rerun… tom slick, superchicken! and crazy crossover ‘hippie ****’ like ‘sid and marty krofft superspecial’ stuff… that funny enough, i remember i was forbidden to watch, because that stuff had already permeated the bible-belt midwest with a ‘druggie-stuff for little kids’ reputation! (really?? ‘lidsville’ and ‘h.r. puffnstuff’?? ;0) so, years before i got denied playing d&d, the krofft bros. already beat them to the punch…
some of that ‘krofft supershow’ stuff did stick to my memories, like ‘wonderbug’, ‘elektra-woman and dyna-girl’, and the ‘bigfoot and wildboy’ thing – looked very much like an early ‘cry wilderness’ prototype!!
speak of which all, if you search for youtube saturday-morning memories – there’s those “cool” (quote-unquote) network preview shows of the saturday morning lineups; those are a hoot to see again! remember those things when they ran?? i remember seeing a few of those growing up… once again, only having three channels made choosing something to watch kind of an easy thing to do…
one (or two) reeeaally weird memories this yt search today brought back for me… “big john, little john” – a strange sherwood schwartz throwback i didn’t remember till i saw the opening/closing credit sample vid! (“he drank a little drink…” was the bit that did it for me) and, though i’d looked for this one before, there’s now more posted on yt of it – ‘the kids from c.a.p.e.r’ – an oddball live-action proto-monkess-crossed with, i dunno, ‘man from uncle’ thing. pretty dorky… i just remember the one crazy guy who’d start chewing bark off of trees when he heard the word ‘bananas’.
ok, so, well… as far as the ‘best’ thing maybe i got to see growing up out in the middle of nowhere, when the station would come in clear enough, was in the afternoons after school, i’d get to see ‘battle of the planets’… i suppose my first/only/earliest exposure to japanimation stuff, outside of the godzilla movies they’d also show occasionally in that after-school timeslot.
there’s some other weirdo scifi flicks they showed back then i still hadn’t come across in the old mst3k roster that are indelibly imprinted upon my braincells… i hope to find the titles one day and rediscover them! maybe… next season?? ;0…
p.s. mst3kme and any in the ‘smurfs’ thread…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0tlNZ6gVBc
p.p.s. i did manage to keep up just ’nuff into my college era to see peewee, ed grimley… and the most brilliant ‘the tick’… did manage to kind of wrap up the whole sat-morn era so succinctly… the pre-meme-worthy ‘cha’ and ‘i’d take a bite out of the mooooon for you, dear! i’d take a bite out of the moooon for you!’
p.p.p.s. i do guiltily remember also watching stuff like ‘harlem globetrotters’ and ‘josie and the pussycats’… lots of live-action stuff too like ‘shazam,’ ‘isis,’ ‘jason of star command,’ (probably) ‘ark II’ (the clips i looked at looked familiar ’nuff but not firmly in my memory ;0)… man, remember all the atari-cartridge commercials back then?? ;0 annnd, stuff like the ‘gilligan and skipper as astronauts’ show, what was that called?? … maybe last ‘classic’ fresh animation of that era would have been the filmation ‘flash gordon’ series, along with ‘jonny quest’ repeats (jq doesn’t age well… i checked out some dvds of it from my local library they had, and darned if they were LOL-worthy from my older age!)
This represents Saturday Morning cartoons to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WowalkW6lKg
What reminds me most of the weekends of my youth was KTLA channel 5, Los Angeles. If you lived in southern California in the 80s you remember channel 5 fondly. They showed the Little Rascals, Popeye cartoons with Tom Hatten hosting, and the Three Stooges at noon. What I would do was start out with the Little Rascals, (I think they were on really early, like 6:00 AM), Popeye was next, then some oddball live action shows like Wonderama or HR Puff n Stuff, that would get you to some Three Stooges at noon. After that was Soul Train I think! Talk about pop culture whiplash. I’d always watch the start, since it had a cartoon train after all, then the first few minutes because the host had a great voice. If I was lucky the Jackson 5 would be on, at least I had heard of them! After that it was time to go outside and play. Maybe that’s a topic for another day: what local TV channel do you remember from your youth?
AND KTLA WAS THERE!!!
As a kid- Jonny Quest, Top Cat, Scooby-Doo- as an adult- Ren and Stimpy.
Living…in the Land…of the lost lost LOST LOST LOST LOST!!! (then Sid & Marty Kroft closing logo… happy times!!!) :*)
As a thought, classic Doctor Who wouldn’t have looked too out of place in a Saturday morning line-up.
Actually, it was, in my neck of the woods. I’d forgotten that, for a while, Ch. 9 (WOR-TV) would run Tom Baker episodes on Saturday mornings at 11:00. They’d run the Time-Life commercial syndication version, with intros from Howard DaSilva. (Hey, who else but Ben Franklin could introduce the Doctor?) They ran it from part 1 of “Robot” to part 6 of “Invasion of Time” and back again. It wasn’t until PBS picked up the show that I saw any other episodes.
Thanks for the reminder.
In the late 50s, Shirley Temple. we got up at 6 & watched all the ST movies which were shown from oldest to newest every week. Followed by live action shows like SKY KING, CAPTAIN GALLANT, SERGEANT PRESTON, SUPERMAN, FURY, FLASH GORDON, THE ROY ROGERS SHOW, RIN TIN TIN. A few years later were MIGHTY MOUSE, LOONEY TUNES, FIREBALL XL-5, etc. Then in 1966 all the networks started showing new stuff like THE MIGHTY HEROES, HERCULOIDS, SPACE GHOST, etc. But the one image that always pops into my head is HERCULOIDS.
As a kid, I always liked to sleep in on Saturdays and would miss everything but like the last show, which I don’t remember. I do remember commercials though. One about eating cheese, one about sunshine on a stick (lemonade or orange juice in a freezer with tooth picks as handles). And that schoolhouse rock stuff.
And classic Doctor Who was basically a kids show, at least early ones. The Pertwee years kinda verged into Hammer horror at times which apparently got a lot of complaints.
NSFW:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py_lrSziRW8
Beat me to it! Don’t forget Q*Bert!
The shows I watched most at the time were Transformers, Thundercats, Dino-Saucers, Heathcliff & The Catillac Cats, Inspector Gadget, probably several incarnations of Scooby-Doo, whatever shows featured Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes, and Filmation’s Ghostbusters. The shows I watched less frequently or at least remember-Smurfs, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Alvin & The Chipmunks, The Raccoons, The Real Ghostbusters (never mind that Filmation had the name first). I’m not sure if this was on Saturday or not but I also watched Disney’s Ducktales.
Early on, I was beguiled and prodded onto the Lefthand Path by Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.
The horror. The horror.