1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

NOW look what you've done... you've made Skeletor ANGRY!

We put this off as long as we could in hopes that the tie would break itself... Skeletor and I didn't want it to have to come down to this, but in our last Friday Poll THERE WAS A FOUR-WAY TIE!!!

We simply can't leave it hanging like that, and so I have decided that THIS WEEK, it's a Battle Royale between those Top Four Cartoons of 1984 because THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!

[Poll #1932818]

Also, I'd like to ask that you all do your darndest to pimp our next 1980's Saturday Morning Historical Reenactment Society Watch-Along on Saturday, September 21st (TWO WEEKS!!!) so we can have our biggest watch-along ever! You MUST know somebody who would like to watch cartoons with us on Saturday morning, don't you? Bring 'em along! It's FREE, and we promise that it won't get preempted by College Football or Golf :)

The ABC Weekend Special was a weekly 30-minute anthology TV series that aired Saturday mornings on ABC from 1977 to 1997, and was generally known in my home as "The last chance to see some cartoons before American Bandstand. It featured a wide variety of stories that were both live-action and animated.

The 1981/1982 season was the fifth season of this show overall, and featured many re-runs of the past 4 seasons mixed with the new half-hour episodes:

• "The Puppy Saves The Circus", featuring the increasingly popular character of "The Puppy" and his friends saving a circus
• "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", an adaptation of the classic Mark Twain short story
• "Bunnicula", which I have embedded above, the story of a vampire bunny
• "Miss Switch To The Rescue" parts 1 and 2, the second Weekend Special to feature the popular Miss Switch character
• "The Joke's On Mister Little", a story of two boys who play pranks on the titular Mister Little (and NOT the first episode of "The Littles")

Been meaning to do this for quite some time, figured I'll make it my regular Saturday Morning Thing for a while...

The ABC Weekend Special was a weekly 30-minute anthology TV series that aired Saturday mornings on ABC from 1977 to 1997, and was generally known in my home as "The last chance to see some cartoons before American Bandstand. It featured a wide variety of stories that were both live-action and animated.

I'm going to start cataloguing the different seasons for us here so we can really appreciate which year our favorite one-shot Saturday morning shows may have come from. I get lots of questions about "mystery shows" that people vaguely remember from their childhood, and I'd say a good 90% of them were ABC Weekend Specials!

The 1980/1981 season of this show was the fourth season over all. Notable episodes that had come before this included the introduction of The Puppy (1977 "The Puppy Who Wanted A Boy", 1978 "The Puppy's Great Adventure" and 1979 "The Puppy's Amazing Rescue") and Miss Switch (1979 "The Trouble With Miss Switch"), both of which would make multiple appearances on 1980's Saturday Mornings.

The 1980/1981 season featured:

• "Scruffy" parts 1 thru 3 (which I've embedded the first part of above), the super-depressing story of a homeless puppy trying to find a home (produced by Ruby-Spears)
• "Arthur The Kid", a live-action tale of a kid who helps some old west outlaws become famous
• "Zack & The Magic Factory" parts 1 and 2, a live-action tale where a nerdy kid puts on a magic show for bullies
• "Mayday! Mayday!" parts 1 and 2, two kids have to go and find help after their family crashes their plane in the Sierra mountains.

Last week it was decided thast CBS Television had the best Saturday Morning Line-Up of 1980, due in no small part to that perenial favorite "The Bugs Bunny / Road Runner Show". Will they be able to retain that title through this next round of Friday Polls where we discover who was the best of 1981? Only time will tell...


[Poll #1922678]

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.

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.

First, the straight data. The Kid Super Power Hour With Shazam was a live-action/animated comedy/action/cartoon show that aired at 9:30 on NBC starting in 1981, and was produced by Filmation. The live-action segments were your standard vaudeville jokes and skits performed by attractive people in spandex super hero suits. The animated segments were of either "Hero High" (animated versions of the live-action spandex vaudeville folk) or "SHAZAM!" (animated adventures of the famous Superman knock-off of the 1930's). How many episodes were there? Good question...

See, this show is one of my favorites AND one of my most frustrating.

One of the first bootlegs I tracked down when I got in to "Tape Trading" (VHS tapes) back in the late 80's was Hero High. I paid $30 for 3 video tapes full of The Kid Super Power Hour With Shazam, which the seller swore were the only 9 episodes that were ever made.

When The Internet happened, I discovered that the order from NBC was for at least 13 episodes - four more than what I had paid for.

Since then, in my attempts to find the entire series, I have heard people claim that there are as many as THIRTY-EIGHT EPISODES of this show - and INSANE amount of episodes for a weekly Saturday morning cartoon!

I know for a fact that there were only 12 8-minute SHAZAM! cartoons produced, and the rights to them are owned by Warner Brothers who has no plans to ever make an official release.

I know for a fact that there were 26 8-minute Hero High cartoon segments produced, and they are available on DVD.

Combining those two might get us to the fabled 38 episodes, but since this was an hour long "block" of cartoons that regularly showed 4 or 5 cartoon segments along with the live-action vaudeville, I'm assuming that my 9 episodes are closer to the true number of episodes than 38 ever could be.

Wish I still had those tapes, even if they WERE on Betamax tapes :(

(Sorry for the poor sound quality, it was the only ORIGINAL 1981 OPENING with the voice-over that I could find)

Saturday morning at 8:30 in 1981, NBC and Hanna-Barbera made history with the debut of The Smurfs. What can I tell you that isn't already common knowledge (to people like us) about this show? Fred Silverman (President of NBC at the time) had bought a Smurf doll while on vacation in Colorado (the toys started hitting US shelves as early as 1976) and Fred thought "Hey, I'll bet that would make a good cartoon".

Anybody else know any good stories about The Smurfs?

The Kwicky Koala show from Hanna-Barbera aired at 8am on your local CBS station starting in 1981, and only lasted one season. The show is a pretty forgettable comedy anthology, mostly notable for being among legendary cartoon director Tex Avery's final works. Avery died during production in 1980.

The show consisted of a mish-mash of relatively fresh and original comedy concepts that were unfortunate victims of an overzealous network of censors, corporate interests and parental watch-dog groups who feared anything that might even come close to being actually funny (I'M BIASED).

Kwicky Koala was a cross between Tex Avery's "Droopy" cartoons of the past and a Road Runner/Speedy Gonzalez theme. Wilfred Wolf was always trying to catch Kwicky for some undisclosed reason (either money or cartoonibalism, I think?), and Kwicky used the natural faster-than-light capabilities of a Koala(?!) to outsmart him and escape.

The Bungle Brothers were the vaudeville dogs who kind of hosted the show, and/or were always trying to sell their vaudeville act and become big stars. They didn't really have a PART in the show, just the little intros and endings of each episode.

Crazy Claws was a wildcat who used his sharp wits and equally sharp claws to evade the fur trapper Rawhide Clyde and his dog Bristletooth in a National Park run by Ranger Rangerfield. I don't remember much about this one other than how my buddy Kevin always said that Crazy Claws reminded him of his favorite X-Man, Wolverine (he bought a copy of Incredible Hulk #181 for $8 and back in 1981 that was just stupid-expensive for one comic book, but I digress...)

Dirty Dawg was the story of a homeless vagrant dog and his best friend (a rat named Ratso) as they tried to better their lives, and Officer Bullhorn as "The Man" who constantly foiled them.