I'm sure you all remember these ads fondly, they often appeared in the very middle of comic books where the staples were. These ads for a given network's new Saturday morning line-up appeared in August, September, October, and sometimes November issues of Marvel, DC, and Archie Comics. Let's see if we can't recreate the fall of 1974 - Saturday morning - CBS.
8:00 am - The morning started off great with Mel Blanc doing the voice of a car in Hanna Barbera's Speed Buggy.
8:26 - In the News - a live-action show that every child hated and resented. Child bingo callers hosted, the kind of kids you'd never want to play with. I can't find a clip of it and it's just as well - I would've flipped the channel to ABC or NBC's Saturday morning line-up anyway. Strike one.
8:30 - Scooby-Doo Where Are You? New episodes of this particular incarnation of the Scooby gang ended in 1972, but the show was so damn popular it retained a timeslot of re-runs much like The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Show.
9:00 - Jeannie - Hanna-Barbera unofficially based this cartoon on the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, it was essentially a teenage version of that live-action show (which Hanna-Barbera had originally animated the opening titles for). Lesser stooge, Joe Besser, who played out the end of his career doing minor cartoon voices supplied the larnyx of Babu in this series.
9:30 - Perhaps my favorite of the unspeakably awful Hanna-Barbera concepts, It's The Partridge Family 2200 A.D. When you're clean out of ideas, launch your characters into outer space.
The opening sequence of The Partridge Family 2200 A.D. had, by far, the most riveting animation of the whole show. You can find a couple episodes of this enjoyable monstrosity as a bonus feature on the live action Partridge Family DVD sets.
10:00 - Mom and Dad are rolling out of bed to make breakfast for you, but you're pretty full from eating handfuls of cereal straight out of the box and screw the milk. Hanna-Barbera steals more than a bit from Sid and Marty Krofft's Land of the Lost with this (hyperlinked) cartoon - Valley of the Dinosaurs, the clip of which is not embeddable(?).
10:30 - It's the first non-news live action show of the day. During this era, Filmation was pumping out several live-action Saturday morning shows that would eventually get animated treatments. The first was this... Shazam! Eventually they would have a live-action show called The Ghost Busters starring Forrest Tucker, Larry Storch, and Bob Burns in an ape-suit. In the eighties they came out with the despicable animated version that confused several children searching for The Real Ghostbusters and Lorenzo Music's swell voice work in particular. More than a few confused parents ended up buying Filmation Ghostbuster toys for their incredibly disapointed children Christmas morning. But now Filmation's first foray into live action kiddie crap - John Davey as Captain Marvel AKA - Shazam!
11:00 - The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine - I mistakenly put the Hanna-Barbera produced Harlem Globetrotters cartoon in this slot earlier. If I had looked a bit closer at the comic book ad's fine print (which in reality are giant, bold , blue, capital letters!), I would have seen that it's the Globetrotters "LIVE IN PERSON." Saturday mornings were often peppered with hokey live-action comedy shows for kids more and more often through out the nineteen seventies. Personally, I would have prefered a cartoon, any cartoon, in their place. This program, presumably put together to cash in on the success HB enjoyed with the animated Globetrotters, featured our heroes delivering corny gags coupled with educational segments. Yeecch! It was put together by Yongestreet Productions who were also responsible for the first two years of Hee-Haw and the first season of The Sonny and Cher Show. The style of humor reflected as much.
11:30 - The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Comedy Show occasionally featured Gary Owens and Canadian cult-icon Billy Van. It also featured Murray Langston who would become rather famous, albeit for a matter of minutes, a few years later on The Gong Show as The Unknown Comic.
I never went for that live-action shit. I would've flipped the channel to ABC in a heart beat to watch this eventual classic that aired in the competing time slot:
12:00 pm - Noon, and back to CBS for Filmation's latest offering - The US of Archie with its psychedelic theme song, white-washed history, and moog synthesizers.
12:30 - Education in my cartoon? Screw you Filmation. It's Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids.
1:00 - The cartoons are done for the day but the CBS Children's Film Festival is on - and who cares? Just those kids who liked being creeped out. A different hour long film/special each week - most networks did something like this eventually. Not neccessarily a giant scary bunny - but something far less interesting in the same kind of format.
Only one strike against me - and it was only for a four minute news thing. Not bad. Visit soon and we'll grab a different comic book advertisement and do it again!
8:00 am - The morning started off great with Mel Blanc doing the voice of a car in Hanna Barbera's Speed Buggy.
8:26 - In the News - a live-action show that every child hated and resented. Child bingo callers hosted, the kind of kids you'd never want to play with. I can't find a clip of it and it's just as well - I would've flipped the channel to ABC or NBC's Saturday morning line-up anyway. Strike one.
8:30 - Scooby-Doo Where Are You? New episodes of this particular incarnation of the Scooby gang ended in 1972, but the show was so damn popular it retained a timeslot of re-runs much like The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Show.
9:00 - Jeannie - Hanna-Barbera unofficially based this cartoon on the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, it was essentially a teenage version of that live-action show (which Hanna-Barbera had originally animated the opening titles for). Lesser stooge, Joe Besser, who played out the end of his career doing minor cartoon voices supplied the larnyx of Babu in this series.
9:30 - Perhaps my favorite of the unspeakably awful Hanna-Barbera concepts, It's The Partridge Family 2200 A.D. When you're clean out of ideas, launch your characters into outer space.
The opening sequence of The Partridge Family 2200 A.D. had, by far, the most riveting animation of the whole show. You can find a couple episodes of this enjoyable monstrosity as a bonus feature on the live action Partridge Family DVD sets.
10:00 - Mom and Dad are rolling out of bed to make breakfast for you, but you're pretty full from eating handfuls of cereal straight out of the box and screw the milk. Hanna-Barbera steals more than a bit from Sid and Marty Krofft's Land of the Lost with this (hyperlinked) cartoon - Valley of the Dinosaurs, the clip of which is not embeddable(?).
10:30 - It's the first non-news live action show of the day. During this era, Filmation was pumping out several live-action Saturday morning shows that would eventually get animated treatments. The first was this... Shazam! Eventually they would have a live-action show called The Ghost Busters starring Forrest Tucker, Larry Storch, and Bob Burns in an ape-suit. In the eighties they came out with the despicable animated version that confused several children searching for The Real Ghostbusters and Lorenzo Music's swell voice work in particular. More than a few confused parents ended up buying Filmation Ghostbuster toys for their incredibly disapointed children Christmas morning. But now Filmation's first foray into live action kiddie crap - John Davey as Captain Marvel AKA - Shazam!
11:00 - The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine - I mistakenly put the Hanna-Barbera produced Harlem Globetrotters cartoon in this slot earlier. If I had looked a bit closer at the comic book ad's fine print (which in reality are giant, bold , blue, capital letters!), I would have seen that it's the Globetrotters "LIVE IN PERSON." Saturday mornings were often peppered with hokey live-action comedy shows for kids more and more often through out the nineteen seventies. Personally, I would have prefered a cartoon, any cartoon, in their place. This program, presumably put together to cash in on the success HB enjoyed with the animated Globetrotters, featured our heroes delivering corny gags coupled with educational segments. Yeecch! It was put together by Yongestreet Productions who were also responsible for the first two years of Hee-Haw and the first season of The Sonny and Cher Show. The style of humor reflected as much.
11:30 - The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Comedy Show occasionally featured Gary Owens and Canadian cult-icon Billy Van. It also featured Murray Langston who would become rather famous, albeit for a matter of minutes, a few years later on The Gong Show as The Unknown Comic.
I never went for that live-action shit. I would've flipped the channel to ABC in a heart beat to watch this eventual classic that aired in the competing time slot:
12:00 pm - Noon, and back to CBS for Filmation's latest offering - The US of Archie with its psychedelic theme song, white-washed history, and moog synthesizers.
12:30 - Education in my cartoon? Screw you Filmation. It's Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids.
1:00 - The cartoons are done for the day but the CBS Children's Film Festival is on - and who cares? Just those kids who liked being creeped out. A different hour long film/special each week - most networks did something like this eventually. Not neccessarily a giant scary bunny - but something far less interesting in the same kind of format.
Only one strike against me - and it was only for a four minute news thing. Not bad. Visit soon and we'll grab a different comic book advertisement and do it again!
1 comment:
That's a great idea. One quick correction, you have the wrong Globetrotters show on there. The one in the ad is the live action series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0DqGbvFAgg
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