11:00 on ABC in 1984 was the tipping point for Scooby-Doo, namely with The Scary Scooby Funnies - which I like to think of as the '80 Page Giant Annual" of 1980's Saturday Morning Cartoons.

80 Pages of comics, 4 of which are all-new, the rest is reprints going as far back as the dawn of comicdom.

The current "New" Scooby-Doo cartoon in this season was the second season of The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries, which brought the whole gang INCLUDING SCRAPPY-DOO together for the first time ever in a series of two 11-minute adventures, followed by The Scary Scooby Funnies which was a random repackaging of pretty much every Scooby-Doo series of "The ABC Years" that had featured just Scooby, Shaggy and Scrappy. Out of the full hour of Scoobcentric programming, you could end up with 45-minutes of "Vintage" Scooby-Doo and a single 11-minute "New" adventure.

This was the last season of Scooby Doo that would follow the traditional stand-alone mystery adventure story structure.

(I defy anyone to find full episodes of this show in English!)

On Saturday Morning in 1978, the ABC Weekend Special aired an animated adaptation of Jane Thayer's "The Puppy Who Wanted A Boy", the story of a puppy named "Petey" who becomes attached to a young orphan named Tommy. One of the most heavily repeated of all the ABC Weekend Special episodes, the next 4 years of ABC Weekend Specials included such titles as "The Puppy's Great Adventure", "The Puppy's Amazing Rescue" and "The Puppy Saves The Circus". In 1982, The Puppy got a co-starring title role in The Scooby And Scrappy Puppy Hour, and then finally in 1983 he got his own half-hour show at 11am on ABC. See? If you start at the bottom, you CAN work your way to the top!

This cartoon featured The Puppy and his friends searching all over the world for Tommy and his adoptive family, then in the second season opener they FOUND the boy and traveled all over the USA with them having adventures where they met and teamed-up with a flying puppy named "Glyder" (his ears were so large he could use them to fly like Dumbo the elephant).

No matter who I ask about it, nobody seems to know why there's such an embargo on this beloved Ruby-Spears classic other than "I dunno, I think it's something with the rights being tied-up?" This is really sad, because this was an incredible series of cartoons!

Reruns were later picked up and aired on CBS as "The Puppy's Great Adventures".

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In 1982 at 11am on ABC was a little slice of cult legend, misdirected ambition and same-old same-old in the form of the hour-long Scooby & Scrappy Puppy Hour. This show was the first (and I think only?) collaboration between the Saturday Morning Juggernauts, Ruby-Spears and Hanna-Barbera. The first half-hour of the show consisted of three 7-minute shorts, a mix of "Scooby and Scrappy-Doo" (the version where Scooby, Scrappy and Shaggy travel across the country as the "Fearless Detective Agency" and get involved in typical spy or criminal cases) and "Scrappy and Yabba-Doo" (Scrappy-Doo's adventures with his uncle Yabba-Doo and Deputy Dusty in the wild west), followed by a full 30-minute episode of "The Puppy's New Adventures" in the second half-hour. The Scooby/Scrappy-related shorts were written and voiced at Hanna-Barbera Productions, but animated and edited by Ruby-Spears Enterprises.

(Also aired at 10:00 starting in the Spring of 1983)

At 11 in the morning on CBS in 1981, you could find an... *interesting* little show that I can only assume was created by a committee of Time Traveling Marketing Executives at Filmation, BLACKSTAR.

Buck Rogers crash-lands on He-Man's planet (Eternia) and teams-up with characters from Thundarr and a small platoon of Smurfs so he can fight The Thundercats foe (Mum-Ra) for the other half of a magic sword, because there should always be a sword.

Or, in the words of the narration:

"John Blackstar, astronaut, is swept through a black hole, into an ancient alien universe. Trapped on the planet Sagar, Blackstar is rescued by the tiny Trobbit people. In turn, he joins their fight for freedom against the cruel Overlord, who rules by the might of the Powerstar. The Powerstar is split into the Powersword and the Starsword. And so with Starsword in hand, Blackstar, together with his allies, sets out to save the planet Sagar. This is his destiny".

In later years when I was watching this on VHS, every time the end of the narration came and he says "I am John Blackstar", I liked to follow it up with "...And I'm an alcoholic." HI, JOHN. "It's been one week since my last drink, the last time I saw a Trobbit, but I feel like I might lapse and..." and then the episode would start and it was all just hi drunken nightmare/fantasy, week after week.

Never had much use for this cartoon... sorry I don't know much more about it. It was on opposite two other shows that I liked a heck of a lot better, and it was on a channel that we didn't receive very well with our antenna :/

Although there were only 13 episodes produced (a single season), the reruns continued to air at 1:00 in 1982 and 1983.

Please leave your memories/opinions/thoughts in the comment below :)

Starting at 10:30 Saturday morning on NBC in 1981, Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends debuted. It followed the adventures of Spider-Man, Iceman and Firestar as they fought crime in New York while also occasionally I don't think I've ever met a person over the age of 30 who hasn't seen this show and has at least one favorite episode :) What most people *don't* know is that it was the animated world's first (and possibly only?) *sequel*.

It all started in 1978, with the DePatie-Freleng Studios (founded by two Warner Bros. Cartoons alumni, director/producer Friz Freleng and executive David H. DePatie) producing a few higher-quality Marvel Comics cartoons such as The New Fantastic Four and Spider-Woman (previous incarnations of Marvel characters in cartoon form had been somewhat pathetic in their animation). In 1980 they made a single season of a new Spider-Man cartoon for syndication that was VERY well received. SO WELL RECEIVED, in fact, that it inspired the buy-out of the animation department of DePatie-Freleng and renaming it to MARVEL PRODUCTIONS (the folks who were behind dang near every beloved cartoon of the 80's.

Recognize any of these?

• Muppet Babies
  
• Transformers
  
• GI Joe
  
• Jem
  
• My Little Pony
  
• Inhumanoids
  
• Fraggle Rock (animated)
  
• Dungeons & Dragons
  
• RoboCop: The Animated Series
  
• Dino Riders
  
• Defenders Of The Earth

It all started right here, with Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends :) Often teaming with Sunbow Entertainment, these guys pretty much defined 1980's action/adventure animation!

So anywho, about it being a sequel. Unlike other cartoons that change the model sheets from season to season or from series to series in order to keep things unique (see the artistic and design evolution through animated Batman, Justice League, modern Spider-Man shows, etc) and copy-rightable as distinctly different properties, Marvel Productions used the existing model sheets and backgrounds from their syndicated Spider-Man cartoon and added just a few new characters.

This paid off BIG for Marvel Productions in 1984 when they decided to repackage the previous three seasons with the syndicated Spider-Man episodes, instead of making new episodes.

This show had many different incarnations over the course of the 80's, and each on will get their own entry in this community because they had a distinctly different opening title sequence for each one. In one way or another, Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends was on Saturday Morning TV all the way through 1986.

In The New Adventures of Batman & Robin, the "Dynamic Duo" fights crime in Gotham City, encountering the classic Batman rogues gallery as well as some original villains. Complicating matters is Bat-Mite, a well-meaning imp from another dimension called Ergo, who considers himself Batman's biggest fan. As a result, he wears a variant of Batman’s costume and attempts to help him, only to often create more problems (although he is occasionally an asset). Missing is Alfred, the faithful butler of Batman's alter ego Bruce Wayne; also notable in this series are the inverted colors of the "R" on Robin's costume.

This was an excellent Filmation cartoon from 1977 featuring the voices of Adam West and Burt Ward (the live-action Batman & Robin from the 1960's Batman TV show). This cartoon stayed closer to the more serious Batman comics that were being published by DC Comics at the time, with the glaring exception of BAT-MITE (who is an honorary member of the Scrappy-Doo Club).

Only one season of this show was ever made, and it was then re-packaged over and over again till some undetermined year of the early 80's.

Once they figured that they could shuffle the episodes in to the Super 7, they kind of abused it and over-ran the show. Still awesome, though!

The Heathcliff And Dingbat Show (1980 Saturday morning at 11am on ABC) was a Ruby-Spears show that mainly featured Heathcliff (or as he was known in our house, "Not Garfield") This season ran for 13 episodes and included backup segments with Dingbat and the Creeps, who were created for the show. "Dingbat and the Creeps" revolved around the adventures of three monstrous characters who were self-employed as "Odd Jobs, Inc." which consisted of Dingbat, a vampire dog who used a bat-shaped novelty straw to eat most foods, Sparerib, a strangely rotund skeleton with the ability to change himself into useful items (such as a floor lamp, which he did in the opening credits), and Nobody, a gravelly-voiced jack-o-lantern who led the team and often found them various work.

This show had no chance in my household. My Brother was a die-hard Garfield fan, and Batman was on another channel. Sure it had Thundarr as a lead-in, but it was easy to change the channel :)