1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

Pryor's Place (1984, 11:30 on CBS) is generally believed to be one of the more ill-conceived Saturday Morning programs of the 80's that looked great on Paper. In 1984, traditionally adult-themed comedian Richard Pryor was riding a wave of popularity with kids thanks to movies such as "The Toy" and "Superman III", and so a bunch of Hollywood-types started offering him kid-friendly projects, most of them being just terrible (one pitch I heard of was a kind of revamp of the Super Globetrotters theme, only with Pryor providing all the voices for an "Ethnic Super Team" - he walked out of the meeting, insulted).

Sid and Marty Krofft (makers of H.R. Puffinstuff, Land Of The Lost, etc) were the only ones who pitched him a show that wasn't racially insulting; a cross between Sesame Street and Mister Rogers Neighborhood, where Pryor could populate the entire street with characters of his creation. Partially inspired by the recent trend in those noted programs to touch on more "serious" issues such as Death, Pryor was inspired to take the offer.

Unfortunately, there were the censors at Standards & Practices. Perhaps because of Pryor's reputation as a controversial and profane comedian, the censors seemed to to keep an extra-harsh judgmental eye towards the rough drafts, scripts and even finished episodes of the show before they even hit the air. As a result, the aired episodes came off as being extremely dark and moody. A combination of mixed reactions, poor ratings and lengthy delays from the S&P Censors resulted in the show being cancelled before the end of the year.

The show had potential... it even had Ray Parker Jr doing the theme song and in the opening credits!

In the wake of 1982's very profitable Pac-Man Cartoon advertising shenanigans, the folks at Ruby-Spears started snapping up the rights to pretty much every and any video game they could get. They didn't have a network, they didn't have a promise... they just realized that this was how it's going to work and so they did it knowing that the advertisers and the networks would come.

And so at 8:30 on saturday morning in 1983, CBS premiered "Saturday Supercade", a conglomeration of 11-minute videogame-based cartoon segments that weren't strong enough to carry their own half-hour series yet somehow, when lumped together, proved to be quite a ratings powerhouse!

The first season included segments on Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Pitfall Harry, Frogger and Qbert. Summaries:

DONKEY KONG escaped from the zoo and is chased around by Mario and Pauline (seems legit).
DONKEY KONG JR is looking for his dad and teams up with a teenager on a motorcycle to find him (Aww sweet).
PITFALL HARRY, his niece Rhonda, and a cowardly Mountain Lion(!?!) search for treasure
FROGGER is an investigative reporter(?!?)
QBERT is a 1950's teenager(???)

The second season dropped Pitfall Harry, Donkey Kong Jr and Frogger so they could ad "Kangaroo" and "Space Ace", which were both SO MUCH more like what they sound like than any of the previous season's cartoons had been.

Also aired at 9:30 and 11:30 in the 1984/1985 season

In 1981 at 11:30 in the morning on ABC, you would see Heathcliff ANd Marmaduke (along with a very catchy theme song). Officially considered to be the second season of the 1980 Heathcliff and Dingbat Show only with Marmaduke instead of Dingbat (obviously), they made 25 episodes of this version ( as opposed to just 13 "Dingbat" episode) which is why you probably remember the Marmaduke titles better than the Dingbat ones, if you remember them at all. Also note that this is a Ruby-Spears joint, NOT the DiC "Heathcliff and The Catilac Cats" version that was syndicated a few years later.

Drak Pack was an action/comedy cartoon that aired on CBS Saturday Morning between September 6, 1980 and September 12, 1982. It was produced by Hanna-Barbera for a total of 16 episodes before it was mercilessly cancelled.

The series centers around three young men: Drak, Frankie and Howler, descendants of Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, and a werewolf. To atone for their ancestors' wrongdoings, the three are recruited by the REAL DRACULA (who they call "Big D") to be a kind of under-cover super hero team that saves the world from Doctor Dred and his assorted henchmen who go under the collective name of "OGRE" which may have stood for something but I forget. The Drak Pack look like regular young folks (college age maybe?) until they do a three-person high-five ("High Fifteen?") known as the "Drak Whack", which allows them to transform in to their monstrous forms.

This, more than any other show, is the one I am afraid to revisit because I loved it so much as a child. Part of my love for it was because I only ever got to see ONE EPISODE, and then never saw it again because of stupid College Football (aka "Saturday Morning's Arch Enemy"). But this show stayed with me all my life as the motivation for getting in to animation history and whatnot.

Do you hav any memories of this show? Was it really as epic as my memories seem to think it was? Leave a comment below!