Saturday Morning's All Right for Watching

Courtesy of a two-page center spread in Top Comics: Uncle Scrooge #2, let's set the Time Bubble for September 1967! South Vietnam holds its first elections! NASA space probe Surveyor V lands on the moon! Jim Morrison sings about getting higher on The Ed Sullivan Show! Harry Connick, Jr. is born! BBC Radio 1 is launched! But to heck with all of those things...The CBS Saturday Morning Cartoon Lineup trumps them all!:


(Click image to embiggen)

You young whippersnappers today with your Nickeledeon and your Cartoon Network and your Kids WB and your BBC America may find this hard to believe, but at one time American kids, hopped up on pure cane sugar and unfiltered cigarettes, had exactly three networks of Saturday morning TV viewing to choose from (except for the weird kids watchin' PBS). You had your choice of NBC, CBS, and ABC, and CBS surely was targeting the growing fans of comic books with these series, weren't they? According to this excellent survey page of 1967's Saturday mornings, ABC had CBS well-beat from 9:30 to 10:30 with the double-punch of the original Fantastic Four and Spider-Man cartoons, but I'd sure as heck be hanging onto CBS for the rest of the morning.

The banner on the ad reads "Saturday's Super Heroes," and hoo boy, they weren't kiddin': except for the day opening with (unshown in this ad) Captain Kangaroo and ending with The Road Runner, every single show on CBS's '67 lineup is science-fantasy heroic adventure. What's interesting is that of all the shows in the '67 CBS Saturday morning lineup, only two can probably be considered true "classics" (minus the word "camp" in front of that): Jonny Quest and Space Ghost. Jonny was in its third year, but no original episodes were being broadcast since the show's first season, perhaps contributing to its placement in the tail-end "graveyard" of the lineup at 12:30 PM. (But the cartoon lineup ran until 2 PM with The Road Runner!) Poor Space Ghost doesn't even get a picture in this cartoon ad; the man known south of the border as El Fantasma del Espacio was only in his second season, yet like Jonny, new episodes were produced only in season one and the rest of his run was re-runs. You can catch most of the other shows shown here on Boomerang and they haven't aged well, but those two seem to have stood the test of time. I'm fairly partial to the updated Space Ghost Coast to Coast and the Quest parody The Venture Brothers, and it's out of love for the original concepts that I came to enjoy the new ones.

By the early '80s the great art of action-adventure cartoons seemed to be at a nadir, replaced by gag cartoons like Heathcliff, The Smurfs, The Littles, Laverne and Shirley in the Army (their sargeant was a pig! Really!) and Fonz and the Happy Days Gang (they travelled in a time machine with a dog named Mister Cool!) Slowly the field began to build up again (Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was an early sign of the swing back) and by the mid to late 1980s we had turtles, transforming robots, real American heroes, and, by the early nineties, the height of the TV animation medium, Batman: The Animated Series. Which all goes to show: if you don't like what's on TV now, wait a while. Surely something you like will come along soon. Me? I'm waiting for the Gilmore Girls 2099 cartoon.

Purely to win brownie points with Tegan, here's a closeup of panel for The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure:



Secret messages? Way cool! I hope they spelled out ZJFZNZM RH XLLO ZMW MLG ZG ZOO OZNV.

Parents of today may think twenty-first century kids have a lot to keep track of—schoolwork, friends, instant messaging, Tivo, MySpace, MP3s, Gogurt, and a million other outside demands for time, which can dog-pile on the young 'uns of today and sadly lead to child stress and meltdown. Well, I'm telling you, those kids have nothing against the children of '67, who had to keep track of dozens of amazing Saturday cartoon shows in their pre-cell-phone limited memories! No wonder kids in the late 60s were snapping left and right! But Bully! (I hear you asking.) How the heck could we even keep track of such a wonderful line-up of senses-shattering action, adventure, magic and heroism back in the Summer of Love? Why, that's simple, true believers, because with the same thoughtfulness and generosity they will later show in allowing Julie Chen to report on both news and reality TV, CBS has provided a handy pocket chart:



Don't even bother asking Mom and Dad for permission to use the scissors, kids: just tear it out of your hard-earned comic! Who cares if you're ripping out a panel of Carl Barks's sublime work on the other side? No matter if you've just destroyed the future resale and collectible value of your weird-ass bumpkin Top Comic! Paste it in your scrapbook alongside all your Marvel Value Stamps! Just don't come crying to me when Mike Sterling tells you that Top Comic you want to sell to him is worth pennies instead of thousands because you tore out the freakin' chart!

So. Saturday cartoons. I miss 'em. And so do you.