1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

The 1985 season of The ABC Weekend Special brought us another 9 new half-hour episodes, including the experimental live-action "The Adventures Of Teddy Ruxpin" (embedded above). WHAT?!?! LIVE-ACTION TEDDY RUXPIN? That's CRAZY!

Ken Forsse was the man who created Teddy Ruxpin, the first domesticated animatronic produce for childhood companionship. Ken had gotten his start at The Walt Disney Company and with Sid & Marty Krofft, and had helped to create a new kind of kids show that combined puppetry, animatronics and green-screen animation in to something completely new and different. See "Welcome To Pooh Corner" from the earliest days of The Disney Channel for a prime example.



Now that mister Forsse was striking out and making a name for himself with Teddy Ruxpin, he went ahead and made a "pilot episode" of sorts for a show featuring his creation, using the new show format that he had helped develop. It was AWESOME, but it quickly became apparent that without the deep pockets of a corporation like Disney behind it, a show like this was just too cost-prohibitive.

Lucky for us, too, because they scrapped the whole thing and gave us one of the most epic episodic animated programs of all time with the animated "Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin" that went directly in o syndication (but more on that another day, when I'm writing about non-network Saturday morning stuff).

Days Of Wonder (the company selling Teddy Ruxpin) recouped their losses by taking the live-action footage they had and selling it to ABC for use in their ABC Weekend Special.

The full line-up of new episodes included:

• The Adventures of Con Sawyer and Hucklemary Finn (Part 1 and 2)
  
• Jeeter Mason and the Magic Headset
  
• Cap'n O.G. Readmore's Jack and the Beanstalk
  
• Pippi Longstocking (Part 1 and 2)
  
• Columbus Circle
  
• The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin (Part 1 and 2)

(Please excuse the crazy custom CBS Story Break editing of The Secret World Of Og that is embedded above - it was the only version of the original that I could find, and the uploader has found a unique way of getting around YouTube Copyright restrictions by creating something from it that has never existed - BRILLIANT!)

The 1983 season of The ABC Weekend Special introduced 9 new half-hours of programming to add in to the mix of constantly recycling past seasons, my personal favorite being The Secret World Of Og (embedded above). The new segments included:

• The Haunted Mansion Mystery (Part 1)
• The Haunted Mansion Mystery (Part 2)
• The Red Room Riddle
• Horatio Alger Updated: Frank and Fearless (Part 1)
• Horatio Alger Updated: Frank and Fearless (Part 2)
• All The Money In The World
• The Secret World of Og (Part 1)
• The Secret World of Og (Part 2)
• The Secret World of Og (Part 3)

This season included a disproportionate ratio of live-action to animated episodes, but The Secret World Of Og made it all worthwhile :)

(I defy anyone to find full episodes of this show in English!)

On Saturday Morning in 1978, the ABC Weekend Special aired an animated adaptation of Jane Thayer's "The Puppy Who Wanted A Boy", the story of a puppy named "Petey" who becomes attached to a young orphan named Tommy. One of the most heavily repeated of all the ABC Weekend Special episodes, the next 4 years of ABC Weekend Specials included such titles as "The Puppy's Great Adventure", "The Puppy's Amazing Rescue" and "The Puppy Saves The Circus". In 1982, The Puppy got a co-starring title role in The Scooby And Scrappy Puppy Hour, and then finally in 1983 he got his own half-hour show at 11am on ABC. See? If you start at the bottom, you CAN work your way to the top!

This cartoon featured The Puppy and his friends searching all over the world for Tommy and his adoptive family, then in the second season opener they FOUND the boy and traveled all over the USA with them having adventures where they met and teamed-up with a flying puppy named "Glyder" (his ears were so large he could use them to fly like Dumbo the elephant).

No matter who I ask about it, nobody seems to know why there's such an embargo on this beloved Ruby-Spears classic other than "I dunno, I think it's something with the rights being tied-up?" This is really sad, because this was an incredible series of cartoons!

Reruns were later picked up and aired on CBS as "The Puppy's Great Adventures".

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 :(