1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

Tune in to your local ABC affiliate at 10:30 on Saturday morning in 1980 and you'll see the HOLY GRAIL OF COMIC GEEKDOM, "Thundarr The Barbarian". That video embedded above is en espanol because all the US versions I could find have had embedding disabled... but the voice-over is perfect at setting the tone for the show:

The year: 1994. From out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction! Man's civilization is cast in ruin!
Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn...

A strange new world rises from the old: a world of savagery, super science, and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice! With his companions Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sunsword against the forces of evil.

He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!

This cartoon has a pretty impressive comic book background! Created by Steve Gerber (the guy who created "Howard The Duck" which is SO MUCH BETTER than the movie would have you believe) with character design and story concepts from Alex Toth (Space Ghost, Super Friends) and Jack "King" Kirby (Fantastic Four, Captain America, Thor, Nearly Every Marvel Comics Character)!

Ruby-Spears Productions would go on to make two full seasons of Thundarr before it went off the air in 1981, and if you've never watched it you really owe yourself a favor. Swords-n-sorcery-n-apocalyptic-dystopia has never looked better!

(Also aired at 10:30 in 1981)

The Flintstones Comedy Show (not to be confused with the Flintstones Comedy HOUR of 1973) was on the air Saturday mornings from 9am till 10:30 (AN HOUR AND A HALF?!?!?) on your local NBC affiliate in 1980. This revival of the classic Hanna-Barbera stone-age family featured six different segments: The Flintstone Family Adventures (standard Flintstones stories featuring the Flinstones & the Rubbles doing late-70's/early-80's stuff), Bedrock Cops (Fred and Barney are now police officers assisted by the Shmoo as a trainee under the direction of Sgt. Boulder), Pebbles, Dino and Bamm-Bamm (Teenage Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm solving mysteries with Dino, in the tried-and-true HB Scooby-Doo formula), Captain Caveman (a prequel to the 1970's "Captain Cave-Man & The Teen-Angels" cartoon that showed Captain Caveman in his natural stone-age setting), Dino and Cavemouse (The Flintstones version of Tom & Jerry), and The Frankenstones (a hybrid of The Addams Family, The Munsters and The Flintstones).

My biggest complaint about this cartoon was that it seemed to be on ALL MORNING LONG. Flintstones were okay in small doses, but 90 MINUTES??? Three different half-hour time slots where I could have been seeing ANYTHING ELSE??? Nope, that's too much.

(Also aired in a much shorter 30-minute version at 8:00 in 1981/1982, and then as "The Flintstone Funnies" from 1982 till 1984 - check out the hilariously inept re-working of the intro!)

(Cross Posted from Tumblr)

THE TOM & JERRY COMEDY SHOW - If you tuned in to your local CBS affiliate at 8:30 in the morning on Saturday in 1980, you would have witnessed this cartoon. Mercifully, there was only one season of this particular Tom & Jerry cartoon. Much like the Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jekyl cartoons of this age, this was a modern attempt to make new cartoons with classic characters while following the guidelines presented by Concerned Parent Groups. Gone were the wacky slapstick violent antics and instead we had a series of situational comedies. Just dreadful :( This show technically had two seasons, but the second season was nothing but reruns.

(Cross Posted from Tumblr)

At 9am Saturday morning over on your local ABC affiliate station in 1980 you could tune in to see one of my all-time favorite BIZARRE CARTOONS of all time, “THE FONZ AND THE HAPPY DAYS GANG”. Originally broadcast from November 8, 1980 until September 18, 1982, this show was pretty darned incredible. If you can disassociate the show from it’s prime-time origins (“The Fonz” has a product of the popular sitcom “Happy Days”), what you have is a story about a 1950’s “Greaser” with semi-magical powers traveling through time trying to set things straight with the help of a super-evolved dog that is capable of walking up-right and rudimentary speech, his two straight-laced Teenage friends and a girl from the farthest reaches of time and space who has provided them all with a Time Machine so that they can hopefully reset the time lines and return them all to 1957 where they belong.

This show is more “Doctor Who” than “American Animated Sit-Com”! Give it a try some time!

(also aired at 9:00 in 1981)

(Cross-Posted from Tumblr)
Going to start chronologically here, for posterity sake! If you were to go ahead and wake up bright-n-early at 8am Saturday morning in 1980 and tune in to your local CBS affiliate, odds are you would have seen 'The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle' produced by Filmation, and aired from 1979 to 1981 on CBS with over 32 episodes produced. These cartoons were, quite frankly, terrible. They were part of a glut of revived classic cartoon characters that included the likes of Tom & Jerry with “Adventures” that were so over-censored that they were barely watchable.

This is a cartoon that, in my opinion, suffered from TMIS (Too Many Ideas Syndrome). Let's count them, shall we? We have:

• A vintage cartoon character who is a
• Ghost, but
• A rebel who doesn't conform to stereotypes and has a
• Best buddy older mentor who
• Accepts the alternate lifestyle of his little buddy and they're
• Guardian Angels for
• Two female police officers in
• A male-dominated sexist society in
• Outer-Space of
• The far-off future of 2179 where they
• Fight crime and
• Solve mysteries

Pretty simple, right? And I won't even include my own personal theory that Casper is the ghost of Batman (I have PROOF!)

Please feel free to leave your memories, stories, fun facts and whatever you want to say about Casper and The Angels in the comments below. And don't forget to go and vote for this show in our Best of 1980 Poll if you feel that this show is deserving :)

In the interest of saving myself a bit of time, I'm going to group all the Looney Tunes package shows in this one post and try to tag it accordingly.

Why? Because look at this list:

• The Bugs Bunny / Road Runner Show
• The Daffy Duck Show
• The Sylvester & Tweety / Daffy & Speedy Show
• The Bugs Bunny / Looney Tunes Comedy Hour
• The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show

Every single one of those shows was the exact same show; recycle some of the hundreds of hours of Looney Tunes cartoon shorts from the past (then) 30 years for consumption of the masses. But unlike the Hannah-Barbara repackaging hours (discussed elsewhere in this community) where they just took last year's cartoons and smashed them together to make a "Power Hour", The Looney Tunes were a special cross-over cartoon that was important to the success of Saturday mornings in general. Grammy and Grampy remembered watching the cartoons in the theaters, Mom and Dad remembered seeing them on TV as early as the 1960's, and now the kids of today had something in common with the previous generations to talk about and make everybody feel good about Saturday :)

So let's here it for Bugs and his pals! Share your thoughts, memories, and other discussion points in the comments below! Oh and hey! If this was one of your favorites? Don't forget to go and vote for it in our Best Cartoon of 1980 Poll! I *think* 1980 is the only year that will have Bugs Bunny represented, even though the Looney Tunes were a staple of Saturday Mornings all through the 1980's just because I don't have the space to list them every year :)

What is it the kids these days say? "Haters gonna hate"? Is that "Jiggy" enough? Am I speaking "Dope"?

The title of the cartoon was just "Scooby-Doo And Scrappy-Doo", and it introduced the world to a cultural MILESTONE known as Scrappy-Doo.

Now I don't have much of an opinion in any direction regarding the entire Scooby-Doonivers of cartoons... Scooby-Doo is not as beloved to me as it is to so many others. To me, Scooby-Doo was a bottom feeder. Channel m7 has College Football, channel 5 has Golf, channel 12 has some religious show on... oh, Scooby-Doo is on channel 4. And since I'm certainly not going to waste this sunny Saturday morning on dragging my fat little 7-year-old butt outside like my Mom keeps saying I should do, I guess I'll watch Scooby-Doo.

Scrappy-Doo was a bit annoying, sure... but no more annoying than a cowardly hippie with an eating disorder and a giant dog with a speech impediment (imho).

Agree? Disagree? Share your own thoughts, opinions and memories in the comments below and hey! If this is one of your favorites? Why not head over there and vote for it in our Best Cartoon of 1980 Poll!

Fat Albert & The Cosy Kids premiered in 1972, sure, but it wasn't till the 1979/1980 season that they made a drastic change to the show which forever separated the show in to two very distinct "Pre" and "Post" eras.



That's right... THE BROWN HORNET. Just in case the moral message of the show wasn't being ham-fistedly shoved down your throat quite fast enough, they decided to break in to the middle of every episode to have a fictional show WITHIN the show blatantly state and deliver the moral message to you. THat's effin' BRILLIANT!

Please feel free to leave your favorite memories, stories or other thoughts in the comments below. And hey, if this is one of your favorites? Don't forget to go and vote for it in our Best Cartoon of 1980 Poll!

Another hold out from the 1970's that continually got repackaged along with other cartoons. I think this particular old-timer is notable mainly because of GODZOOKI. Godzooki was like Scrappy-Doo 1.0, a prototype which spawned a very specific type of annoying character that everyone hated.

Still though, if you're a fan feel free to leave your comments, stories, remembrances and other whatnot here in the comments to share with others. And if it was a favorite of yours, don't forget to go and vote for it in our Best Cartoon of 1980 Poll!