saturday_am_80s | 1981 11:00 on NBC: SPACE STARS

At 11 in the morning on NBC in 1981 was a brilliant bit of cartoon recycling and pop-culture leaching that went by the name "Space Stars". Watch those opening credits and just try and figure out what super-popular movie franchise they were trying to ape (HINT: it wasn't "Battle Beyond The Stars").

This was, in my opinion, an excellent twist on the old Hanna-Barbera tradition of packaging a few reruns of different shows together and calling it "New". Here you had two classic HB cartoons - Space Ghost and The Herculoids - packaged with two new cartoons - Teen Force and Astro & The Space Mutts - for a full hour. But instead of just dipping in to the pre-existing back catalog of Space Ghost and Herculoids cartoons, they actually MADE NEW CARTOONS! And on top of that, they had the four cartoons actually do quite a bit of criss-crossing and guest-starring! I loved this concept A LOT, and if the first half-hour of it weren't up against The Super Friends, I would have been totally addicted to it!

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I'm all "Space Stars? I've never heard of..." and then "Oh! It's just Space Ghost/Herculoids. Okay then!" ;)

So. Many. Repackagings.

-The Gneech

Welll... Space Ghost, Herculoids, Teen Force and Astro & The Space-Mutts... of course, I only ever saw any two of them at a time...

When Fred Silverman was president of daytime programming for CBS, he commissioned Hanna-Barbera to produce action cartoons for the Saturday Morning schedules in the late 1960s (1966 had the premiere of "Space Ghost" and 1967 had the "Herculoids" premiering). Silverman also added a H-B mystery solving show titled "Scooby Doo" in 1969.

Fred Silverman joined NBC as chief of programming and had the original 60s "Space Ghost" reruns (along with "Frankenstein Jr" segments without "The Impossibles") added to the schedule to boost ratings around 1979. "The original "Herculoids" program were added to the NBC schedule around 1980 when the cartoon studio employees for H-B, Filmation, and Ruby-Spears went on strike. Seeing the good ratings from both H-B classics, he commissioned Hanna-Barbera to create new episodes for the 1981-1982 schedule under the umbrella title of "Space Stars".

Also adding to the comfortable feel of the new show was that many of the original series voice actors (Gary Owens as Space Ghost; Mike Road as Zandor, Igoo, and Tundro; Virginia Gregg as Tara; Don Messick as Gloop, Gleep, and Zok) were still in good vocal acting form to reprise their original roles.

I enjoyed the show although my local NBC station in San Francisco pre-empted the series for most of its network run in favor of local kids shows or for NBC Major League Baseball and sports coverage (East Coast games aired in the morning on the West Coast).

We have forever spoken ill of the Saturday Morning Sporting Matches - College Football, NBA Basketball and Golf being the wort offenders... we feel your pain :)

So you seem to know a bit on this subject, figure I should ask; did they continue to use the Alex Toth model and style sheets on this (the "Sapce Stars" version) of Space Ghost? Parts of it look spot-on, and others are... off, I guess?

Not really sure if Alex Toth himself was involved with the designs in the new episodes of Space Ghost or Herculoids...but it could have been.

The Phantom Cruiser was redesigned for the Space Ghost stories.

Bummer :( I can always tell the difference in episodes by how the ships on the show look (including the Phantom Cruiser), and despite a WEALTH of information on Space Ghost stuff I've never been able to confirm or deny that those ships were designed by Toth or by somebody jut doing a Toth-esque style :(

I don't remember this show specifically, but I remember as a kid thinking those crossovers and such were awful fun.

I know, right? They further blurred that dangerously razor-thin line between fantasy and reality for me :)

1981 11:00 on NBC: SPACE STARS

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