Nearly 100% superheroes!

Hey, I remember Saturday morning cartoons!

It's so weird now that they're gone from the networks. This must have happened while I was in the service. What year did they go away? Was there any media hooplah about it? Saturday morning cartoons were a staple.

What are we telling our kids today? "When I was your age, we didn't have Cartoon Network! We had to get up early on Saturday morning to watch cartoons!"

I remember back in the 70's on the Friday night before the new Saturday morning season started the networks would run a sneak peek of the lineup....those were the good old days.

Edward

Also...am I the only one who until about the age of 7 or so referred to Saturday as "Cartoon Day!!!"?

I remember watching most of these ( a number of them are available on Boomerang ).

I was about 3 or 4 years old when these were on.

Mighty Mightor was a favorite, as was Shazzan. ( The winged-camel "Kaboobie" actually had Scooby Doo's voice a couple of years before Scooby showed up. )

I remember watching the Aquaman show too. I didn't watch the Herculoids until they replayed them in the late 70's.

I avoided some of these superhero shows to watch stuff like Wacky Races and George of the Jungle.

I seem to recall the old Spider-Man and Fantastic Four cartoons being on the air around this time-frame as well.

That ad above was for CBS's 1967-68 season. Here's the one from the previous year:

Yep, same season, but on ABC:

Notice the time schedule in the first one. The network programming ran from 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM! Six full hours of kid programming.

Domestic cartoons became more about shaping young minds and less about entertainment.

What I miss are the networks showing Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry, Cartoon Network doesn't shop those around any longer. Imagine - the current generation of Children aren't being saturated with Bugs and Daffy like our generation was. Nobody is doing humor for humor's sake. We're getting some decent Saturday Morning animation, but not any good Cartoons!

The call goes out for The Mighty Heroes!

It's a damn shame that there is so little "pure" entertainment for kids anymore. Look at the ads above. How many of those shows were designed to be "thirty minute ads" like so many of the cartoons of today? Give me The Herculoids and Johnny Quest anyday over the likes of The Transforemrs or The Power Rangers.

Well, I thought the Transformers cartoons of the 80's were well written and performed, despite being based on a toy line.

Too many cartoons are about telling teen and kid "real life" stories and not teen and kid fantasies. Super-Hero cartoons are about Adults acting with Kid mentalities - Powerful, Self-Assured, without Ambiguity, bold Four Color morality (not Black and White, but not murky Gray either), living within a specific set of rules (Heroes don't kill, etc.).

If you look at the success of Power Rangers, Pokemon, and YuGiOh and look at what sort of rules those shows follow, they all follow these classic Super-Hero conventions. They mix it up some for flavoring - the narrative has gone into a more soap opera styled continuity rather than a stand-alone episodic story, but watch YuGiOh and The Herculoids side by side and you can sense they share the same core.

The difference being that The Herculoids wasn't an extended ad for a collectible card game, or a line of action figures.

I spent many, many Saturday morning hours watching cartoons and wrestling. My father would often chastise me for not going outside and enjoying the day.

I can still remember the days when I would wake up very early in the morning (earlier than a school day), take my allowance and run to the local convienance story just a few houses away and buy a 16 oz soda, a bag of chips, some twinkies (or cupcakes) a candy or two and plopping down in front of the television for hours of mindless fun. Ahhh, those were the days.

My daughter watches Playhouse Disney every Saturday, all of it animated or computer animated except The Wiggles (which is partly animated). It's much more about learning than anything else these days -- sort of sad that they don't have many real stories.

We need to create a bridge from the iddle kiddie edutainment to child entertainment. I remember when I was five some of the coolest stuff was GI Joe with Kung Fu Grip that came with a story book and record and watching Underdog. At the same time I was watching Captian Kangaroo, Mr Rogers, and Sesame Street.

I got new Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol.2 on DVD. My son and I watched about an hour of Road Runner cartoons last night. Great stuff. I guess that's about the only way that "classics" like these will be passed on to the next generation.

Thank heavens for nostalgia DVD collections! Where commercial television falls down, the DVD juggernaut picks up the slack. I dearly enjoy my Rocky and Bullwinkle DVDs and can't wait to introduce them to my nieces and nephews. If anyone wants to buy me the Wacky Races for my birthday I won't complain. We need to bug Ralph Bakshi into putting out The Mighty Heroes (though with the amazing success of the The Incredibles maybe he's already trying to).

Boy it just reminds me of two things. How far comics have fallen (for kids) and how much I hate Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

I think this is at the root of the problem. Bugs Bunny and Wile Coyote were perfect entertainment. Remember some of the crazy ideas that germinated out of fantasizing? Gee, what a concept.
Nowaday, however, some shmuck would sue WB for his kid getting the idea that he should send off for an ACME Atomizer-whatchamajigger. Its because they are relying on certain aspects of technology to take over the portion of their lives that they have shrugged off of their own shoulders.

aahhh, those were the days!!!! i couldn't wait for Saturday mornings when Superheroes ruled!!!:D

Mighty Mightor!! Space Ghost!! Superman!! Spider-Man!!
The Fantastic Four!! Herculoids!!

Makes me miss my childhood...**sniff, sniff**