Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you? We got some work to do now. Finally, its 8:00am and time for what the three networks variously promoted as Funshine Saturday, Socko Saturday, and Super Star Saturday. Five solid, unadulterated, sugary hours of pre-adolescent entertainment featuring the comedic stylings of The Banana Splits, Bugs Bunny and Road Runner, The Groovy Ghoulies, or Rocky and Bullwinkle.
The 1970s are the “golden age” of Saturday Morning Children’s Television. You see, adults had it all backwards. Their Saturday Night Fever never held a candle to our Saturday Morning Fever.
So, settle in with a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, and adjust your fire retardant, footy pajamas. I’m Joel Rhodes “Telling History.”
In television’s first decade, children’s programming typically aired on weekday afternoons and early evenings. Then in 1964 the Hanna-Barbera animation studio led a cartoon migration from primetime to Saturday mornings, first with The Jetsons followed by their stone age counterparts The Flintstones and later The Adventures of Jonny Quest. By 1967 all three networks had densely packed Saturday morning programming between 8:00 and noon with their own seasonal schedules.
Animation and advertising are the reasons! Hanna-Barbera pioneered cheap, mass-produced “limited-animation” shows, essentially recycled sequences with minimal action or characters movement. And once advertisers understood that Saturday mornings attracted huge audiences of exclusively children, commercials for toys from Kenner, Mattel, Hasbro, and sugary breakfasts cereals like Count Chocula and Fruity Pebbles proliferated. Who doesn’t remember - “We’ll be right back, after these messages.”
Unlike primetime ratings, it wasn’t quality writing or artistry that determined a show’s success, but cheap production and ad revenue. But what adults considered trash; children found treasure. Superheroes (or Superfriends) dominated early in the 1970s, then comedies: The Go-Go Gophers, Wacky Races, The Archie Show, and Scooby Doo; a masterpiece. Visionaries Sid and Marty Krofft produced live-action fantasies with trippy puppets: H.R. Pufnstuf, Lidsville, and Land of the Lost. There were also cartoon versions of proven primetime series: Brady Kids or The Addams Family. School House Rock and Fat Albert provided educational or what networks called “pro-social” programming.
For preadolescents – five to twelve-years-old – these goofy shows served as a cultural touchstone and rite of passage. Saturday morning television performed what scholars call a “bardic” function: a social practice providing youth with a common language, a shared repository of jokes, reference points, and play that shaped childhood’s contours.
Elaborate rituals developed. Television test patterns called the faithful to the living room at the crack of dawn before parents awoke. For the only time all week, children claimed control of the channels and menu. Situated just so on a comfy couch in blankets or pillow forts, and accompanied by favorite toys, audiences broke their fast with cereal or peanut butter toast eaten in front of the TV – and replenished during commercials – lest you miss Dudley Do-Right’s shenanigans. With the volume low, and no means of recording, careful show planning required studying scheduled network lineups and being prepared to switch channels when interest waned. Invariably, power struggles ensued given differing tastes among older siblings, often reconciled by harmonizing together Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you? We need some help from you now!
Despite its timeless feel, these sacred youthful ceremonies are gone now. For kids it usually ended with the teenage years – when adolescents preferred to sleep in – and for broadcasters when cable challenged networks profitability. The last real Saturday morning cartoons aired quietly in 2014, with no fanfare, and without so much as a a Tttthhhh, that’s all folks…
