The Couch Potato’s Guide to Saturday Mornings

By Geoff Carter

Last January, the MeTV Network, which unabashedly calls itself “America’s #1 classic television network” announced a new morning show, Toon in With Me, which airs Saturday mornings and features classic cartoons. It’s sort of a variety show featuring special guests, comedy sketches, and interviews designed to lead into Saturday Morning Cartoons, a three-hour collection of classic cartoons featuring Popeye, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, and more. 

For anyone who grew up during the sixties and seventies, Saturday morning was a combination of a children’s holiday, a clubhouse, and a fantasy play date (right in our living room). We’d get up at a godawful hour and start watching hour upon hour of cartoons—sometimes interspersed with live programming like Sky King, Mr. Wizard, or You Are There, or—later programs like H.R. Pufnstuf, The Banana Splits, The Monkees, or Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

But the cartoons were king. We already knew classics like Mighty Mouse, Tom and Jerry and Popeye that had originally been shown as fillers for feature presentations at the movie theaters. Some of the innovative work of Tex Avery and Bob Clampett—like Beanie and Cecil—were there at the beginning, too. But, following the Disney feature productions of Dumbo, Snow White, and Bambi, and the birth of Mickey Mouse, the team of Joseph Hanna and William Barbera ruled the roost.

Hanna-Barbera gave us everything from Tom and Jerry in their formative years to Yogi Bear to Top Cat to Huckleberry Hound to The Flintstones (an animated sitcom—and still running to this day) as well as its futuristic doppelganger, The Jetsons. The company perfected time-saving production techniques that allowed them to crank out dozens of cartoons in the sixties and seventies.

Animation continued to evolve over the sixties, giving us everything from an animated version of The Beatles to the espionage thriller Johnny Quest to animated comic books like The Archies. Cartoon bands were big for awhile. The Archies hit the charts with their single “Sugar Sugar” in 1969, the same year that Scooby-Doo premiered. Superheroes were also big in the sixties. We had animated versions of Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, and The Impossibles, another group of zany superheroes who had secret identities playing in a rock band. 

We even had Underdog, Secret Squirrel, and Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, tongue-in-cheek parodies of the superhero genre. In terms of social and political satire, however, nothing beat Rocky and Bullwinkle, a brilliantly conceived animation that resembled a variety show more than a Saturday morning cartoon. Rocky lampooned the Cold War, the military, and politics, among other revered institutions. 

Over the course of five decades, the networks churned out dozens and dozens of these animated classics. Hanna-Barbera had perfected the limited animation techniques (like when you see a character running with the same background looping behind him) that allowed them to produce their products at a prodigious rate. While their animation may not have been as painstakingly meticulous as a Disney product, they produced iconic characters like Peter Potamus, Snagglepuss, Magilla Gorilla, and more. 

Saturday mornings were iconic. We would set up TV tables and bring huge bowls of cereal into the living room to watch our shows. We would fight over what to watch. We wouldn’t get dressed until one, when American Bandstandcame on. And, like so many other traditions from our childhood, Saturday morning cartoons have gone the way of dodo bird—gone, kaput, extinct. 

In the eighties, as the videotape industry geared up and cable started featuring cartoons on networks like Nickelodeon, The Cartoon Network, and The Disney Channel, kids didn’t have to watch cartoons on Saturday morning. They could watch them whenever they pleased. Then, in the eighties, when many of the cartoons became little more than half-hour product placement ads (see G.I. Joe), the Saturday morning living room clubhouse just wasn’t that fun anymore. 

The last show I (in my arrested development) watched on Saturday morning was Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, a live-action variety show hosted by man-child Pee-Wee (Paul Rubens) and his cohort of friends including Reba the mail lady (S. Epatha Merkerson), Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne), Captain Carl (Phil Hartman), and Opal, Opal (Natasha Lyonne). Like Bullwinkle, it provided good fare for the kids but plenty of adult-sized portions, too.

Those days are gone. The magic of Saturday mornings when our parents were only too glad to let network TV baby-sit their bundles of joy, when kids ruled the roost—even for only one morning a week—was incredible. And the entertainment was great. We loved it. A lot of it was dreck, but some of the shows were actually thought provoking, or—gasp, educational. 

Mr. Wizard explained a variety scientific concepts to kids—and we didn’t even mind that it was educational. You Are There tried to bring history to life by having TV broadcasters cover events—like the burning of Rome—as if they were happening live. 

And the commercials—especially before Christmas—were great. Seeing commercials for products like the original G.I. Joe, Barbie Dolls, EZ Bake Ovens, Creepy Crawlers, and Twister were almost as much fun as watching the cartoons themselves.

The Couch Potato appreciates that MeTV is attempting to revive those precious memories to Boomers and Generation Xers, but it’s an impossible task. Those times are gone forever. With the advent of streaming services, CDs, and YouTube, a viewer can see virtually any program anywhere on demand. That special feeling cannot be recreated.

The irony of course is that it is freedom of choice robs children of today from the Saturday morning oasis of fun. Being huddled around the TV to watch programs designed specifically for us made for a sense of community, belonging, and identity. This was for us—the kids. Today, the plethora of choices has ended up isolating children into their own Private Idahos instead of bringing them into a communal Saturday morning kidfest. Like nearly every other aspect of our youth, that special feeling is irretrievable, except as a wisp of memory.

Featured Image: Children Watching TV by Victoria Borodinova at https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=384154&picture=children-watching-tv. License: CCO Public Domain