1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

First, the description - A live-action show about a Monkey named Roxana Banana who is given super-powers by aliens and has wacky adventures. COULD ANYTHING POSSIBLY BE MORE PERFECT?!?!?

Folks, you know me. You know that I have a *fairly extensive knowledge* of 1980's Saturday Morning Programming, right? I mean, hey, I *did* start up a whole Preservation/Reenactment Society, after all... I know my way around a 1980's TV Guide and a 13-channel television dial (14 if you count the UHF).

So believe me when I say that I'm *pretty sure* this show didn't actually exist.

In 1984 i was *obsessed* with Oragutans, chimpanzees and "Monkeys" in general. I sold little baskets of fruit at our corner grocery store in order to reach my goal of buying myself a monkey that could drive me to school, wear pajamas, rollerskate and smoke cigars for my amusement. When i started seeing ads for this show in my comic books, I WENT NUTS! I HAD TO SEE IT!

I tuned in every Saturday at noon, only to find some stupid local educational show airing there instead, to be followed by an episode of Spider-Man & His Amazing Freinds before they moved on to Sportball programs. This is when I first learned about how Network Affiliates and Local Educational Programming quotas, and I was assured by the person who wrote me back from KING (the local NBC affiliate that I had written an 11-year-old letter of complaint to) that the show was airing in other cities but not the greater Seattle area.

HOWEVER! In the 30 years since it supposedly aired on Saturday mornings, I have not met a SINGLE PERSON who has actually SEEN, with their OWN EYES, a single episode of this show! Lots of people kind of think they maybe saw an episode, but ends up it was one of the many Orangutan-centric movies of the time ("Any Which Way But Loose", "Going Ape", "Canonball Run", etc).

To further my claim that this show never existed, I submit the fact that on ALL THE INTERNET, the only image you'll ever see of the show is the one I have posted at the top of this entry. No other pictures, no clips, no video, no theme song - NOTHING. Presumably produced by Hannah-Barbera, even the Wikipedia page doesn't seem to know anything about this show and/or if there's any proof to back up it's existence!

This makes me sad - I really want there to have been a show about a monkey given super-powers by aliens :(

In 1983, CBS started their official broadcast offering at 8:00 with the Hanna-Barbera show THE BISKITTS. The Biskitts are a group of tiny anthropomorphic Robinhood-esque dogs who live on Biskitt Island and guard the crown jewels of Biskitt Castle while also performing good deeds for the underprivileged inhabitants of their tiny island. The villain of the series is the king's mean-spirited, wasteful, younger brother King Max who rules the neighboring Lower Suburbia. In lieu of a proper coronation, Max constantly schemes to steal the royal treasure with the help of his hench-hounds Fang & Snarl and his jester Shecky. The Biskitts are also in danger of being captured and eaten by a large wildcat named Scratch.

And then they were almost killed by ANOTHER group of anthropomorphic animals, The Shirt Tales

See, when The Biskitts was first ordered and presented to advertisers, they all thought they had a genuine hit on their hands. LITTLE ROBIN HOOD PUPPIES!!! It looked like The Smurfs, only with TALKING PUPPIES! How can you go wrong with PUPPIES???

PUPPIES!!!

Provided that the show could pull in the ratings, The Biskitts were poised to be the next Smurfs, with toys, comics, posters, books, sheets, tissues, school supplies - you name it! Provided that the kids would tune in...

The mid-season rating came in and it seemed that children everywhere agreed - The Biskitts ranked somewhere between "The Morning Farm Report" and "Just turning off the TV so we can go outside and play". They tried for a FULL SEASON ROTATION (Fall and Spring) to make this show click with the kids, but it just didn't happen.

Meanwhile, some magical shenanigans were underway behind the scenes! The fickle finger of fate was stirring things up in several place at once to make sure that this show reached the proper audience! All at once, these seemingly unconnected thing happened:

• CBS was pestering Hanna-Barbera over misrepresentation of this show, insisting that H-B "Fix it".
  
• NBC, realizing that they couldn't win the Saturday Morning Ratings Game with re-packaged reruns, were looking to streamline and modernize their Saturday Morning line-up.
  
• Patriotism in America was on the rise thanks to The Cold War.

SO! CBS cancelled the second season of Biskitts at the last possible moment. NBC Cancelled Shirt Tales to make room for stuff like Kidd Video. Hanna-Barbera pledged to provide the Armed Forces Network with more "fresh" programming than ever before, "for the troops".

Hanna-Barbera said "Hey CBS! We've got a proven performer for you, SHIRT TALES!"

Hanna-Barbera said "Hey Armed Forces Network! We've got a super-fresh cartoon for you, THE BISKITTS!"

So come Fall of 1984, The Biskitts were replaced by The Shirt Tales AND The Armed Forces Network started showing The Biskitts to the children of our troops stationed abroad, primarily Europe and Asia. That SHOULD be the end of the story, but...

The Biskitts achieved a level of popularity on the Armed Forces Network that they had hoped for here in the States! CRAZY! CBS was supposedly FURIOUS and said something akin to "How DARE YOU take away our wonderful show and replace it with this mediocre cast-off from NBC? GIVE US BACK OUR BISKITTS!"

And so in the Spring of 1985, The Shirt Tales went away and were replaced with re-runs of The Biskitts. Theory was that The Biskitts had just been "before it's time" in the US, but once again it tanked in the ratings and was gone by Fall of 1985.

HOWEVER, as a happy footnote for all you Biskitts fans? The Armed Forces Network continued to rerun the 13 episodes (26 11-minute segments) all the way through the 80's, giving them an international notoriety rarely seen by a single-season cartoon :)