captain_slinky | Cartoons, as God and Nature intended them to be!

Cartoons, as God and Nature intended them to be!

I don't like the way Cartoons are born these days, debuting on some basic cable channel or (Lord forbid) some internet web site. It's just not natural!

Everybody knows that new Cartoons need to be born on the first Saturday in September, right after a Thursday or Friday night "Sneak Preview" of the new Saturday Morning Line-Up hosted by one of the networks prime-time "Stars" (usually a co-star or member of the supporting cast from a popular sit-com... somebody like the kid from Mr. Belvedere or Dwight "Howlin' Mad Murdock" Schultz).

Once the new baby cartoons have "hatched" on Saturday Morning, it's a Darwinian Survival-Of-The-Fittest Battle Royale at it's best!

Four competitors enter the arena every half-hour... ABC, NBC, CBS and "Syndicated" (which was replaced by "FOX" in the early 90's). Smurfs versus Monchichi! Ghostbusters versus Turbo Teen! Bugs Bunny versus Bravestarr! The victors came back next season to become a part of our shared Pop Culture Heritage, the losers were banished to to limbo till the next century when technology would allow them to be reborn via DVD and obsessive downloading, THE WAY THAT THE CARTOON GAWDS MEANT IT TO BE!

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Thundarr the Barbarian and Blackstarr anyone? Those were fun to watch. Nowadays, it seems that Saturday mornings are just one long, poorly scripted, commercials for sub-par toys.

You mean like Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines, Maxie's World, the Gobots, Poochie, He-Man, Glo-Friends, Inhumanoids, Lazer Tag Academy, Popples, Rubik the Amazing Cube...

I'll stop there. I could keep going. The 80's were bad about that, too. But they had so many good cartoons to make up for it.

I think that unless it's a toy commercial of some kind, it doesn't belong on Saturday Morning. Trying to think of a Saturday morning cartoon that WASN'T selling a product...

Yeah, toys and food, primarily. I remember lots of fast food commercials (McD's) and candy commercials (Twizzler especially for some reason).

Up closer to the Canadian border (where I grew up) the Twizzlers commercials were neck-and-neck with commercials for "Smarties" (Canadian M&M's in a box without an M on them).

Huh. I remember Smarties as a tangy, chalky, pastel-colored candy.

Those are *American* Smarties, miniature Sweet-Tarts in a roll. Both versions are still alive and well and selling to unsuspecting border-crossing children everywhere :) Check it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B2L4vjELF8

HELL YEAH!

I miss the old school Saturday mornings. I got up at about 6:20 AM, so I'd have just enough time to grab a bowl of cereal and sit down and get the antenna adjusted in time to watch the first cartoon at 6:30 AM. I'd watch through the morning until there were no cartoons or Saturday Morning Specials left, which was, on some days 12:30, and one year, even 1:00 PM! I'd get ticked off when they'd preempt cartoons with stupid sports. Unless it was horse racing or gymnastics. Those were the only okay sports.

Saturday mornings just kept shrinking, though, and now we're stuck with a mere handful of cartoons.

And no Fall Preview Nights for them! I miss those! How else could I get a good quick overview of everything coming up so I'd know what to be excited for and what to feel okay about skipping over to another channel for?

My husband and I just watch the Bravestarr/She-Ra/He-Man combo on 4.2? 5.2? on Saturday mornings, and if we're still feeling like cartoons afterward, we pop in one of our Smurfs DVDs (shhh! old bootlegs) and watch one or two of the 222 episodes we have. Sometimes we do that on Sunday mornings, too. Remember TNT and USA in the late 80's and early 90's? Loved watching their cartoons on Sunday mornings.

We should get together and recreate a Saturday Morning in the 80's sometime, complete with commercials (just maybe not so many). Cap'n Crunch and Cookie Crisp cereal for snacks, too! Just give me a week or two to pull together some stuff and get it onto my laptop and set up a playlist, then we could hook up the laptop to the TV and just let it play all morning. Russell would enjoy it. I'm sure Molly would love it, too.

That sounds kind of epic! Only problem is that it involves getting up so early and then getting to somebody else's house :( We should maybe synchronize playlists and agree to push play at 7am?

And do we go for Historical Accuracy, or viewer preference? I'm up for researching... we could create an LJ community for private sharing of the files needed, plan to do this on the morning of September 3rd?

Oooh, that's right. Part of the experience is crawling out of bed and staying in PJs all morning.

Sept 3rd sounds good. Let's start with some good ol' Historical Accuracy and update from there. Commercials can come from around the same time, give or take a couple of years, and bonus points for finding commercials related to the cartoons! Oh! And transitions between the shows and commercials, like the old claymation bits and that sort of thing.

Here's a couple of old schedules I pieced together from TV Guide scans a long time ago. There's probably more info out there nowadays, though.
http://80scartoons.net/81sched.html
http://80scartoons.net/84sched.html

We don't have to stick to one network.

I think 1984 is the way to go. The 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM hour we can grab one episode from each (usually about 11-12 minutes each), for a total of 55-60 minutes, and not have to decide between them. They're all good. For 9:00, I'm thinking we do one Muppet Babies episode (again, another short) and at 9:30, perhaps some Wolf Rock TV?. Dragon's Lair at 10AM? Kidd Video at 11? Littles at 11:30? Maybe a Weekend Special at Noon? Or do you think Spiderman and Hulk would be better?

I think this must have been from a Mountain time TV Guide, because I remember everything an hour earlier, including Captain Kangaroo. In fact, I'll see if I can't put some CK in at 7:30. I'm not getting up at 6:30, though. XD

I missed 10:30. I'm all over Saturday Supercade: cheezy video game cartoons FTW!

Saturday Supercade is a MUST!

Found my archive... itr was on retrojunk.com (of course)! http://www.retrojunk.com/details_articles/7571/

1984 is indeed a good year, or maybe '86... if we do '86 it'll be nice "Silver Anniversary" for most of those cartoons :)

Also, I have some nice bootlegs of the various "Preview Friday Night" shows I could share with you for research purposes :)

Yes, for, ahem, research purposes. I'd love to "research" those! XD

I say we do a different year every couple of months. 1984, then 1986, jump up to 1989, back to 1981, or something like that. And mix it up a bit.

I totally remember a couple of those ad spreads, especially the connect-the-dots puppy one! Those are awesome!

I was thinking of making it a yearly event, first Saturday of September (as it is written in The Good Book)... but then
we'd never get to all the years we want to do :( Every few months is the best way to go I guess, but we'll see how this first one goes :)

Looking through my Preview Night files, I've only got 1978 (featuring the Bay City Rollers!) and 1985 for NBC. Then for ABC I have 1982 and a bunch of the 1990's. And for CBS (the one I never got to see while I was growing up because our antenna couldn't tune in channel 7 for some reason) I have 1983, 1984 and 1985. Pretty sure I have access to more of them, though... I'll work on uploading these files tonight. ANy preference of public file transfer site? Megaupload is what I usually use, but I'm open to suggestions?

Megaupload is good for me.

We could also do a live G+ huddle during our events, if you have a webcam handy near where you're watching. I have a second laptop for work, so I could handle both easily. Then again, if we're all still in our PJs, we may not want webcams around.

If you're watching your Saturday Morning Cartoons in anything more provocative than a T-Shirt and Sweats, you're doing it wrong :P

I just set up a community for this event... http://saturday-am-80s.livejournal.com I'll make yu a mod as soon as you join up :)

Sounds good! There are also a few archives on-line of the Saturday Morning Line-Up comic book spreads they've done through the years that might help... I'll try to unearth those archives :)

We *might* be able to do this entirely through YouTube if we don't mind the mediocre-to-poor video quality... also allows us to publicize the event without putting people at risk for downloading and storing copyright infringing content on their hard drives...

I was just thinking... Cartoons were hard to come by when we were kids. We couldn't just go online and stream whatever we wanted. We couldn't get to the rental store often, and when we did, they usually didn't have all that much available. There was no Cartoon Network or Boomerang and Nickelodeon was just getting started. I think it wasn't until after cable networks brought more cartoons onto the scene that we started to see the degradation of the Saturday morning and weekday morning cartoons. And eventually, even the weekday afternoons, once the Disney stuff started to degrade in quality.

It seemed almost better when they were scarcer.

I have this conversation with Crystal A LOT. A very huge part of our social interaction for everybody over the age of 27 was our shared pop-culture experience. For the most part, we all grew up with the same 4 or 5 channels on TV. When you went to school on Monday you knew that everybody else on the playground had watched the same cartoons you watched, they had all watched the Disney Sunday Movie, they had all watched Battlestar Galactica, they had all watched Greatest American Hero. OUr social circles were based around what shows we watched; this swingset is the bridge of The Enterprise. You didn't watch Star Trek on Sunday afternoon? Go play with the some other kids, we're playing Star Trek.

Would a show like Star Trek have survived without it being the ONLY THING to watch on Sunday afternoon? Would it thrive in an environment like today's world where every bit of entertainment that was ever made in all of forever is available at your fingertips?

If not for boredom in the 1980's, I never would have watched and developed an addiction to about 90% of the stuff I know and obsess over today. Cheesy sci-fi movies, Star Trek, The Love Boat, Happy Days... is any of this stuff actually any good, or is it just good because I had no other choices?

Eddie Murphy used to have a comedy bit that applied, I forget the whole thing but it ends with a guy who's been starving in the desert for a week being given a glass of water and a stale saltine cracker. "DAMN that's a fine cracker! What is this? Is this gourmet or something? I have NEVER had such a FINE cracker in all my life! And this water! There's something special in this water, right?"

Kids born within the past 15 years or so (give or take a few years) will be the first generation of kids who can pick and choose what they grow up watching, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. If they decide that all they like is Science Fiction and so that's all they ever watch, how will they ever accidentally figure out that they also like John Wayne westerns because they had to sit through the ending to True Grit while waiting for Battle Beyond The Stars to come on at 4:30?

It's going to be interesting to see how this develops...

Yes! That's so true! I wouldn't have watched about 1/4 of the stuff I did if it wasn't for boredom. If I had a bunch of cable channels or the internet to watch just about anything I wanted, I would have skipped PBS for TNT or SciFi or CN. People try to talk about TV at work, but everybody seems to watch something different. It's rare to find someone who watches something I do, unless they're a total geek, and then certain things are just a given. But 20 years ago, we all watched the same episodes of Full House, Star Trek or DuckTales and we knew at least half our class did, too. It was so easy to find something in common to talk about. Nowadays with the myriad choices we encounter, we also don't appreciate it as much because it's so easy to get to. And we rarely encounter anything we weren't trying to find already unless we get bored and seek out something new. (Except for music. It's so easy to find different music, with sites like Pandora.) I get almost all my new stuff from friends anymore. Except anime. I do check out some new fansubs occasionally without any recommendations.

I think I'm babbling now. I have stuff to get done, so I better go do it. ^^;;

I'll work on compiling files this weekend and look for a way to rip from YouTube to my hard drive to get stuff I can't find elsewhere. I need to dig up some of my old IRC cartoon sharing hangouts, too.

Even if we DO watch the same TV shows as our co-workers, we're not watching it on the same schedule. How many times have I tried to strike up a conversation about a current show only to be shot down with a "OOOH don't say too much I still have 4 episodes of that sitting on my DVR at home!"

We live in an era of "Spoilers" :)

If you're not opposed to torrents, I have invites to tv-vault.me (a private tracker) that could help immensely...

Ooooh, definitely not opposed to the occasional torrent.

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Cartoons, as God and Nature intended them to be!

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