1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

(No matter how often i hear it and KNOW that he's saying "Horace J. Honeypot", to me it always sounded like the mayor was saying "Horace J. Onion-F*cker". Listen and see if you agree!)

By 1985, The Berenstain Bears had been featured in a gazillion "Easy Reader" books and even a few prime-time animated specials, so why not bring them to Saturday Morning television? CBS, who was always looking for new cartoons that could potentially fill that ever growing "Educational And Informative" mandate, took the chance and put The Berenstain Bears at the head of their Saturday Morning line-up in the 8:00 slot.

Never seen it? One-line summary: Little House On The Prairie, with bears instead of people, but the kids are thoroughly modern 80's kids.

Sheesh! Are there ANY new cartoons of 1984 that DON'T have some crazy story behind them?

In 1984, NBC kicked off their official broadcast Saturday morning with a half-hour of The Snorks at 8:00. The most successful of all the Smurfs knock-offs, The Snorks are the product of underhanded business dealings, Dutch pop-star negotiations and an honest-to-gosh 3-minute LOST TREASURE OF THE 80'S!

You can blame Freddy Monnickendam.

Freddy was a Belgian businessman, plain and simple, who negotiated the rights for Father Abraham (real name: Pierre Kartner, a well known and respected Dutch performer) to sing "The Smurf Song":

(YOU MUST WATCH THIS TO UNDERSTAND!)

This negotiation (which proved to be quite financially agreeable for all parties involved) lead to Freddy Monnickendam becoming THE GUY who negotiated all of the Smurfs merchandising beyond the comics. Freddy is the reason we have a Smurfs cartoon!

Freddy is also the reason we have a Trollkins cartoon :(

Remember back in the write-up of The Trollkins where I told the tale of Peyo seeing the finished committee-aproved version of The Smurfs (aka "Trollkins") and he reportedly said "That is a very nice cartoon, and I can hardly wait to see what you can do with a GOOD concept like my Smurfs"? FREDDY MONNICKENDAM WAS THE GUY ON PEYO'S SIDE OF THINGS WHO TOLD HANNAH-BARBERA THAT THE TROLLKINS VERSION WAS OKAY AND TO GO AHEAD WITH IT!!!

Freddy was the first executive producer of The Smurfs, but Peyo wanted the Smurf cartoons to be as faithful as possible to the world he had created in his comics, and Monnickendam preferred to make the cartoons more "mainstream" - (aka "Scrappy-Dooified"). This led to fast deterioration of relations between the two men, ending in court cases about the division of the rights and the money involved.

Freddy was pretty open about how he though Peyo was foolish to not allow these big, important American Marketing Executives to make The Smurfs in to something that would be a sure-fire hit (like "Trollkins"), and if HE owned The Smurfs, out-right, he could -

Hang on. A light bulb of villainous ingenuity appeared over Freddy's head, his eyes turned in to dollar signs, and he rubbed his hands together in sheer delight at the awesomeness of his evil plan...

He hired an artist/designer by the name of... crap. Can't remember his name. Freddy hired a guy who took the smurfs, replaced the heads and put them underwater. Freddy rushed this concept right along. Now that he had connections at Hannah-Barbera, he was able to push this concept through production and create a three-minute "Pilot" that, although it is on production schedules and notes and was paid for through billing and was well received by the test groups according to the reports, NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN IT OR KNOWS WHERE IT IS.

Little tiny bit of it (about 15 seconds total) showed up on the NBC Saturday Morning Preview Show that year, but that's it. It's a bonafide lost treasure of The 80's :)

Freddy maneuvered quickly, buying up all the rights to The Snorks and just waiting for the Smurfs-like money to come rolling in.

So now you know the secret behind The Snorks; created out of spite by a Belgian businessman to try and teach a nice cartoonist a lesson :)

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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 :)

"SPEED BUGGY!??!" I can hear you yelling at your computer screen. "But Captain!" you protest, "Speed Buggy is a Saturday morning cartoon produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions and broadcast on CBS from September 8, 1973 to August 30, 1975 that followed the adventures of an anthropomorphic, fiberglass Dune Buggy and his teenage friends as they solved Scooby-Doo-esque mysteries! What's it doing under the heading of 1982?!?!?"

Blame Bo and Luke Duke.

The Dukes of Hazzard was an extremely popular and high-rated hour-long prime-time television show on CBS Friday nights. Having seen the success of prime-time-to-animation transition shows such as The Fonz, Laverne & Shirley (as well as historically successful cartoons of The Partridge Family, Gilligan's Island and Star Trek), CBS decided they wanted to diversify and bring them Duke Boys to Saturday Mornings. "Hey, Hanna-Barbera, can YOU make us a Dukes of Hazzard Cartoon?" they asked, and since Joe & Bill could never say no, they did all the work needed to get a cartoon done (model sheets, story boarding, voice casting, script writing, etc) and everything was ready to go! Bring in the celebrities in, record the dialogue, bring the actors in again for a final voice-over and...

In the spring of 1982, as filming was due to begin on the fifth season of the prime-time show, series stars Tom Wopat and John Schneider did not report to the set due to a contract dispute. Catherine Bach (their cousin "Daisy") also considered walking out due to similar contract concerns, but Wopat and Schneider convinced her to stay, insisting that settling the dispute was "man's work" (actual quote). Rather than cave in to the demands of the talent, CBS pulled the old "YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL. YOU CAN BE REPLACED" move and hired two new actors, Byron Cherry as Coy Duke and Christopher Mayer as Vance Duke.

"Hey, uhm... Hanna-Barbera? You guys can change all the animation and voice-over and everything before September, right?"

Hanna-Barbera said no, we CAN'T do that are you CRAZY it's not that simple, but CBS (at this point crazy with Ceasar-esque power) said something akin to YOU WILL HAVE A CARTOON READY THAT FEATURES OUR NEW GUYS AND LOOKS NOTHING LIKE THE OLD GUYS OR YOU'LL NEVER WORK IN TELEVISION AGAIN, and so H-B said well I guess we can try but we can't guarantee anything so maybe you shouldn't put it on the Fall Schedule...

...And CBS proceeded to promote that a Dukes Of Hazzard Cartoon would be the first cartoon in their 1982 Saturday Morning Line-up.

There are different accounts of what happened next, but the facts are these:

• The affiliates were told that they would have a Dukes Of Hazzard cartoon at 8:00 Saturday morning, September the 18th.
• The network and the affiliates sold advertising based on the projected number for a brand-new Dukes Of Hazzard cartoon.
• CBS received a shipment from Hanna-Barbera labeled "The Dukes Ep 01".
• The shipment contained re-run of the 1973 Speed Buggy cartoon.
• Advertisers and Affiliates were PISSED OFF.

The official story is that CBS was aware of the possible Speed Buggy substitution, having communicated with H-B and said something like "Well if you CAN'T get us a Dukes of Hazzard cartoon in time, just send us SOMETHING to do with cars and racing" and intended to compensate affiliates and advertisers only in the event that H-B could not get the Dukes cartoon completed in time.

Popular Theory (and my personal favorite) is that CBS remained stubborn and threatening, so H-B sent them a box labeled "The Dukes" as a decoy while they frantically wrapped production on the new version of The Dukes, with lots of "Gee I don't know how this happened, we finished production a week ago, it must have been my new intern, we're tracking it down right now, blah blah blah" excuse till the Spring of 1983.

Spring of 1983 saw only one new cartoon debut, "The Dukes". More about THAT when I get to 1983 :) Also, it all became a moot point because Coy & Vance only lasted one season before the contract disputes were settled and the proper Duke Boys were back, making the second season of The Dukes SO EASY for Hanna-Barbera to produce since they were 98% done and in the can :)

At 11:00 on ABC in 1981, you would get to see a little how called "Super Friends" for the very first time.

Not "The Super Friends" as it had been when it debuted in 1973.

Not "The ALL NEW Super Friends hour which debuted in 1977.

Not "The Challenge Of The Super Friends" of 1978.

Not "The World's Greatest Super Friends" of the 1979/1980 season (which we have already covered in this community)

No... this is SUPER FRIENDS. So what's different about this series, other than the snappy new title sequence? The short answer is Length and El Dorado.

Up till this series, all the incarnations of the Super Friends had comprised of half-hour adventures, but the only new content for THIS serie were seven-minute shorts. Each episode of Super Friends would feature a rerun from one of the previous six years and three new shorts. These new adventures featured appearances by the 5 "Big Guns" (Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Batman and Robin) plus The Wonder Twins (Zan, Jayna and their space-monkey Gleek) and the occasional "Guest Star" roll by other heroes of th established DC Universe (Flash, Green Lantern, etc). Also heavily featured were past episodes that included "Ethnic" character such as Apache Chief, Black Vulcan and Super Samurai. The only NEW character introduced this year was the Hanna-Barbera-created hero El Dorado, who was added to the show to provide further cultural diversity. This would prove to be one of the longer-lived incarnations of the series (three years).

(Also aired at 8:00 in 1982 and 1983)

Tune in at 9:30 on Saturday morning in 1980 to your local ABC affiliate and you'll see "The Richie Rich / Scooby-Doo Show (And Scrappy Too!)" Yeah that's the actual title... Scrappy even ruins the NAME of a show!

This was another "package show" produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions, featuring a pretty lenient mix of re-runs and new content. This was the sixth Scooby-Doo saturday morning cartoon show, and was the only Hanna-Barbera package series for which Scooby-Doo was given second billing. But that's understandable, considering that this was Richie Rich's animated debut :)

(Also aired in the 8:00 spot in 1981)