Despite the crudity of the process, when I was a kid, I watched a pretty substantial amount of TV. I've often thought that if my brother hadn't been such an active type, I would have never learned any sports or participated in any outdoor activities at all. This was especially true of Saturday mornings, which if you recall used to be set aside strictly for animated cartoons on all three networks. My brother actually had an elementary school teacher who consistently referred to the day after Friday as "Cartoonday", much to the detriment of several calendar-challenged second-graders, I'm sure.
I would get up before sunrise on Saturdays to watch, and I remember lying awake in the pre-dawn darkness, trying to figure out what time it was. When I first started this process, I would finally head for the only illuminated timepiece in the house, which was in my parents' bedroom. I would claim that I had had a nightmare so that I could climb into their bed and watch the clock until 6:00, when the programming day started. Of course, they caught on after about three consecutive weeks and gave me license to just get up when I wanted.
Looking back over the schedules (which, of course are listed in exhaustive thoroughness on Wikipedia), it looks like I started young... I remember catching a few episodes of "Sigmund and the Sea Monsters" -- one of the vast stable of Sid & Marty Krofft shows that would come to dominate throughout the decade -- and that ended before 1975 was over. I can remember other shows (or at least commercials for them) from the rest of that fall's schedule, when I was just about to turn 4.
Looking back over these timetables, it strikes me how many gaps in my memory there are, when I don't remember faithfully watching any of the shows on the three networks. I must have watched straight through, though, because I know by the time lunch rolled around I was a little woozy from already having soaked up six hours of cathode rays. But there's also a bunch that have stuck with me, and here are the ones that made the biggest impression... in roughly the order I remember them airing over the course of their respective mornings...
1. "The Big Blue Marble" (started in 1974): This was the first show of the day, airing at 6am in Dayton, Ohio, where we lived at the time. It was kind of a "60 Minutes" for kids, little documentary bits about kids' lives around the world. There might be a segment about a girl in China auditioning for an opera, then another about a Venezuelan kid riding in a rodeo. You know, stuff that would make you realize how you were wasting your life watching TV in America (if you were actually awake enough to form such a thought). There was also a bit where an animated globe would sing a song encouraging kids to write in and get matched up with a pen pal. An actual pen pal! Like, to write letters to! I never took him up on it, though.
2. "Underdog" (syndicated) - The opening notes of this theme song still send a creeping chill up my spine. In a good way. Imagine being a four-year old, watching TV in a dark room before anyone else is up, and seeing a giant, leering Simon Bar Sinister come lumbering between shuddering skyscrapers as it starts. I really liked this show, even though I didn't yet understand that it was a Superman ripoff, with dogs instead of humans. One weird difference was that Underdog got his powers from swallowing a pill that he took out of a secret compartment in his ring. Good luck getting away with that these days, Shoeshine Boy. By the time I got to this show in the 70s, it was already part of a trend where various shows produced in the 60s were chopped up and strung together anthology-style. Which is why I also am equally versed in "Tennessee Tuxedo" and "Go Go Gophers".
3. "Land of the Lost" (started in 1974) - Having gone back and watched some episodes of this in the last few years, I'm genuinely impressed by how ambitious the Krofft brothers were with this show. On what might be the lowest budget ever in live-action television, they managed to tell an epic, seasons-long arc about a family trapped in a weird alternate universe that somehow has dinosaurs, cavemen, and lizard aliens all at the same time. They used stop motion, first-generation greenscreen, and plain old spray-on rock to maintain the illusion, but what made it work was the show's tone. It had moments of levity, sure, but otherwise it was strangely dark, deadpan and mysterious. From the primal hissing of the Sleestaks (the aforementioned lizard aliens) to the decent, classically-trained actors and the ominous music, all the elements worked together to really sell the idea of impending danger and weird adventure.
4. "Jonny Quest" (syndicated) - Seriously, how can you hear the pulse-pounding theme song from this show and not be intrigued? This show originally aired in prime time in the 60s, but the stark realism of the animation and the adult sense of adventure made it a refreshing change of pace on Saturday mornings. It was a hybrid of James Bond and old movie serials, all starring a plucky kid with a cute dog, a token minority friend, and not one but two father figures -- one a scientist, the other a man of action. Of course, there was also a racial caricature of a recurring villain -- the (shudder) literally yellow-skinned Dr. Zin -- but what I liked despite that was the way a show that seemed to be rooted in scientific realism also dealt with giant robot spiders and walking mummies. The ante seemed to be upped that way, and I bought into it totally, especially when it ran alongside the much more current "Godzilla" cartoon, in an anthology block that had the clunkiest title imaginable, the hour-and-a-half "Godzilla Super Ninety".
5. "The Pink Panther" (syndicated) - Before I had ever been introduced to the (in my opinion) seriously hit-or-miss comedy films of Peter Sellers, I was a fan of this mute feline, who was always trying to put one over on The Little White Guy (seriously, that was his name). This is another case of music really putting the icing on the animated cake, since Henry Mancini's iconic theme song was used almost to the point of saturation. It was yet another anthology series, with the PP shorts interspersed with those of "The Inspector" (who, as far as I can tell, is supposed to be the Peter Sellers character from the movies), "The Ant and the Anteater", and the stupendously racist "Tijuana Toads" (don't ask).
6. "Hong Kong Phooey" (started in 1974): I've always been a Scatman Crothers fan. Some might think of him as "that guy who kinda reminds me of Louis Armstrong", but I wasn't even aware until I was an adult that he was a musician. Seriously, the dude was on "Chico and the Man", was in the movies "Silver Streak" and "The Shining", and his cartoon voice work included both Globetrotters and Autobots! But I knew him here first, in yet another Superman-with-dogs ripoff (this time, he's the janitor at the police station, who moonlights as a masked kung-fu master). But this was so different, namely that he would then rip off Batman by sliding down a chute -- hidden behind a fold-out ironing board -- to change costumes and jump into his car, which was either a take-out carton-shaped pagoda or a pagoda-shaped take-out carton ... yeah, we really didn't know from cultural diversity back in the day).
7. "Super Friends" (which went under about seven different titles between 1976 and 1983... including "The All-New SF Hour", "Challenge of the SF", and "The World's Greatest SF") - I don't remember this being a particularly good show, but it was always around, spanning the entire range of years that I actually watched Saturday morning cartoons. If you were into superheroes, you couldn't do much better than this one. They were all there, from the ever-present Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, down to folks you had never heard of (Black Vulcan? Apache Chief?... Anyone?), who were perpetually fighting against the Legion of Doom, a massive cadre of villains you probably never heard of either. These baddies' relative anonymity worked in their favor, and they were all kind of awesome in their own way (acromegalic zombie Solomon Grundy, the aquatic Black Manta, etc.). Even the Wonder Twins, who managed to mostly waste their shapeshifting powers due to animation budget restraints, and Gleek, perhaps the most annoying monkey-sidekick in the long, storied history of monkey-sidekicks, couldn't keep this show from being a cultural touchstone.
8. "Thundarr the Barbarian" (started in 1980) - Looking back, you can really tell "Star Wars" created major ripples that influenced all Saturday morning programming that came after. We were suddenly inundated with sci-fi shows sprinkled liberally with fantasy, nearly always with a rebel force of humans and aliens working together to defeat some manner of overlord. Thundarr fit right into this mold, but did it stylishly. The first time I saw the opening credits, where the world is thrown into Dark Age-style chaos when a comet passes too close to Earth and cracks the moon in half, I was hooked. A thousand years after this cataclysm, we find our heroes in a broken urban wasteland, where science and sorcery are indistinguishable. During a time when "Star Wars" movies were only coming out every three years, this made a fine stopgap.
9. "Dungeons and Dragons" (started in 1983) - The dice 'n' paper version of D&D was everywhere as the 70s bled into the 80s, so it really was just a matter of time before we got a show about a group of modern-day friends who get on the wrong ghost-train ride at an amusement park and end up in an alternate universe. There, they are forced to assume character classes and fight creatures that I was already familiar with from poring over rule books and monster manuals. I can really start to see how drawn I was to darker storylines, even in childhood... this show was rightfully singled out when the debate about violence in children's entertainment reached a head in the mid-80s, which prompted the creation of the PG-13 movie rating. It's too bad that "D&D" didn't run longer than 27 episodes, because near the end they were building toward some sort of series ending, which was a rare thing for American kids' shows, and would have been cool to see.
10. "The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show" - This show ran the entire length of time I was getting up early on Saturdays to watch TV, and drew on a vast library of over twenty years of old Warner Brothers cartoons, including dozens of Road Runners and all the various Duck Season/Rabbit Season incarnations. It was a cartoon version of crate digging, from Speedy Gonzalez (again, what is it with Mexican stereotypes?) and Pepe le Pew to Sam the Sheepdog. Of course, by the fateful autumn when I finally decided that sleeping in was a better use of my time, I had them all memorized, and could tell exactly where they had trimmed seconds off of the beginnings and ends to make room for more commercials, or taken out gags that were just a little too violent. It was like watching the evolution of Standards & Practices before my eyes.
After all these shows, I would sometimes be able to stumble through post-noon fare such as the "ABC Weekend Special" ("The Trouble with Miss Switch" was the only one I would make a real point of sticking around for), and occasionally "Fat Albert". I know I'm skipping over whole swaths of shows that didn't make the cut, either because they were opposite something else I liked better, or were part of weekday afternoon animation blocks (sorry, "Tom & Jerry", "Battle of the Planets", and "Star Blazers"!). But I can already see what I was gravitating toward: fantasy of any sort, with a hint of darkness and real threat under all the swashbuckling adventure.
By the time the rotating Filmation logo appeared over Bill Cosby's face at the end of "Fat Albert", it was time to get something to eat and spend time outside. And here, after all, was the genius part of Saturday morning TV bingeing. After I had journeyed for hours through worlds where civilization lay in ruins, where superheroes were around every corner, and where even a routine rafting expedition could land you in a bizarre alternate dimension, I could stumble out into the sunlight and happily realize that there was a still almost two full days before school started again. I had already lived a dozen lives, and the weekend had only just begun.
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