1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

In our last Friday poll, it was decided that The Bugs Bunny / Road Runner Show was the absolute best thing on your Saturday morning TV in 1980. Shockingly, Thundarr The Barbarian came in second place while The Daffy Duck Show (which had ben voted as The Best Thing On NBC in 1980) recieved *zero votes*. Numbers are weird sometimes :/

And so we come to THE LAST 1980 POLL!

[Poll #1921386]

When voting, try to think of which one of these channels you would be okay with just leaving on ALL DAY LONG. Like, let' say your TV i broken and it only gets one of these channels - which channel do you hope you're tuned in to?

Last week it was overwhelmingly decided by the members of this community that The Bugs Bunny / Road Runner Show was the bet thing on CBS Saturday Morning in 1980, with Fat Albert & The Cosby Kids coming in a distant second. I was saddened to see that my beloved Drak Pack cam in at a three-way tie for third with the likes of The Tom & Jerry Comedy Show and The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckyl. There's something wrong with you people... terribly, terribly wrong :(

SO! ONWARD AND UPWARD! This week's Friday Poll:
[Poll #1919129]

Time to instigate a tradition around here - THE FRIDAY POLL! Here we have, complete with hot links (in case you forgot what each cartoon was about) a poll to determine once and for all which was the BESTEST CARTOON IN THE 1980 ABC LINE-UP!

If you've never seen them, you could vote for the one you think might be cool to watch :)


[Poll #1916682]

The Tarzan/Lone Ranger/Zorro Adventure Hour from Filmation has been mentioned here before, but for continuity sake let's bring it up again.

Filmation had a ton of 15-minute adventure cartoons featuring Tarzan that they kept running and re-running with various new cartoons all through the 1970's and well into the early 1980's. This show was officially called an "Adventure Hour", although it rarely went hast 30 minutes per scheduled episode. For 1980 and 1981, the Tarzan cartoons were packaged with brand new Lone Ranger and Zorro cartoons as part of a bait-n-switch scam that I've never ever forgiven them for; I'd tune in hoping to see a new Lone Ranger cartoon and ALWAYS get an episode of either Tarzan and Zorro, or just a double-dose of Tarzan re-runs :(

They are why I have trust issues.

The ABC Weekend Special was a weekly 30-minute anthology TV series for children that aired Saturday mornings on ABC from 1977 to 1997. It featured a wide variety of stories that were both live-action and animated, so it totally counts as a Saturday Morning Cartoon in my opinion.

Many people confuse The ABC Weekend Specials with the ABC Afterschool Specials, so let's get this straight right now - Similar to the ABC Afterschool Special that had started five years previous, the ABC Weekend Special differed in that it was primarily aimed at younger viewers following ABC's Saturday Morning cartoon lineup, whereas the ABC Afterschool Special was known for its somewhat more serious, and often dramatic storylines dealing with issues concerning a slightly older teen and pre-teen audience.

Basically, if it felt like you were supposed to learn something about life and/or adolescents from it? It was an ABC Afterschool Special.

Unfortunately, to further complicate matters, they took a bunch of the ABC Afterschool Specials that had been aimed at slightly younger audiences and re-packaged them into episodes of The ABC Weekend Specials.

The ABC Weekend Specials were a huge downer to me, as they signified the End Of The Cartoons. Oh sure, I could probably flip around the dial a bit and find some syndicated cartoons, or over on ABC they always had re-runs of Jonny Quest and The Jetsons if there wasn't a sporting event of any kind that they could air. The ABC Weekend Special meant I had to go get dressed :(

So here's something interesting - Oh, not the cartoon mind you... The All-New Popeye Hour (Saturday Morning at 10:30 on CBS in 1980) was your average hour-long animated series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions that had been on the air since 1978. This show tried its best to retain the style of the original Thimble Theatre comic strip (Popeye returned to his original costume and "Brutus" to his original name of Bluto), while complying with the prevailing content restrictions on violence. Because of those helpful parental watchdog groups and their restrictions on violence in TV cartoons for children at the time, in this version Popeye did not throw punches to get back at Bluto; he often lifted him, with his own hands or with machinery, and hurled him away. This series marked the last time that Jack Mercer would voice the spinach-eating sailor. Mercer died in 1984, one year after the show was cancelled by CBS.

...But that's not the part that I find interesting.

No, what's REALLY interesting (to me, at least) is that all three networks - ABC, NBC and CBS - programmed their Saturday morning of 1980 so that NO CARTOONS WOULD START AT 10AM!!! They all programmed 90-minute blocks for 9am, or a half-hour block followed by a full hour block so that NO SHOW would start at 10am!

That's WEIRD!

In 1981, this show kept the 10:30 time slot but was cut down to 30 minutes and renamed "The Popeye & Olive Comedy Show". Oddly enough, I can't confirm or deny that they ever actually made a new opening title sequence for "The Popeye & Olive Comedy Show" and I distinctly remember being confused when I would tune in on Saturday morning only to see the "The All-New Popeye Hour" opening and thinking I had a full hour till the next cartoons started on this channel. Imagine my HORROR when I flipped back to this channel during the first commercial break of the 11:00 hour only to find that the cartoon had changed at 11 and I missed the first 5 minute of the new show!

Continuing our exploration in to the highly forgettable collective of cartoons known as The Super 7, this morning we start with one that even *I* don't remember - MANTA AND MORAY.

This Filmation cartoon ran for all of 7 episodes that got re-ran over and over again over the course of the early 80's and featured Manta (Monarch of the Deep) who was the last survivor of the ancient civilization of Mu. Mu was destroyed by a terrible explosion, but Manta was engulfed by a wave of unknown radiation, and placed into a form of suspended animation deep beneath the waves. He was discovered and awoken by Moray, a human woman, whom he subsequently married. He is amphibious, but cannot be away from water for too long or he will weaken and die. He is able to communicate with the creatures of sea and land.

Moray (voiced by Joan Van Arc) was raised by dolphins after the plane her parents had been flying in crashed into the sea, she learned to live in the ocean. She discovered Manta, whom she managed to revive. They got married and pledged themselves to protecting the seaworld from any who would threaten it. She is an excellent swimmer, able to hold her breath for incredibly long periods.

They also had their own "Scrappy-Doo", a sea lion named "Whiskers". But as with most of the Filmation Scrappy's that were created in the late 1970's, Whiskers was mercifully unable to speak.

Okay, this one is difficult... bear with me as we travel all the way back to 1977 (again).

"The Young Sentinels" was a Filmation cartoon that debuted on Saturday mornings in 1977 and was quickly renamed "Space Sentinals" in the middle of their very short 13-episode first-and-only season. In this series, a racially-diverse assortment of Roman mythological figures Hercules (white as white could be) and Mercury (Asian) and Astrea (Black), a character created specifically for the series, to form a superhero team to protect mankind from their base on... the moon? I want to say the moon. Maybe it was a spaceship. Their main bad-guy was the "sinister" villain Morpheus, who is also an Earthling given powers in the same manner as Hercules, Mercury, and Astrea, but far earlier. However, those who had given Morpheus his powers had erred by giving him a variety of powers rather than one specific power; he had rebelled and turned to evil.

In 1978, they made 5 more episodes (so it could fit in to the "Super 7" line-up) and changed things up a bit. Same basic story, only they ditched Mercury and Astrea, and the team was now assembled by an animated version of the live-action super-heroine "Isis". Added to the team now were Merlin the Magician, Sinbad the Sailor and... SUPER SAMURAI!!!

I love the Super Samurai character :)

Super Samurai was a small Japanese boy who could become a giant steel (robotic?) suit of glowing, flying Samurai armor! HOW COOL IS THAT???

So when the "Freedom Force" segment and opening credits came up in the Super 7 line-up, you never knew if it was going to be Freedom Force or Space Sentinels...

Kicking off our week of in-depth investigation of the Frankenstein Monster of Saturday Mornings known as "The Super 7",we have the earliest of the cartoons featured: TARZAN LORD OF THE JUNGLE.

Starting in 1976, this half-hour adventure offering from Filmation was by far the most faithful adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, and featured a number of "lost cities" from the novels. The rotoscoped animation is based upon the work of Burrough's favorite Tarzan artist, Burne Hogarth. Tarzan is intelligent and well spoken, rather than the "Me Tarzan, You Jane" of many films. His sidekick is N’kima the monkey (since the chimpanzee "Cheeta" was an invention of the movies but kids were expecting to see a monkey dag-nabbit).

There were 6 seasons of this cartoon stretching from '76 to '82. First season was 16 episodes. Next year they added 6 more. Then 6 more. Then they said "Y'know what? Kids don't know the difference" and just kept shuffling the existing episodes in to shows like "Batman & The Super 7", "The Batman/Tarzan Adventure Hour", "Tarzan & The Super 7", "The Tarzan/Lone Ranger Adventure Hour" and for the final season, "The Tarzan/Lone Ranger/Zorro Adventure Hour".

And so it begins...

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 :)