1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

It is generally accepted and agreed upon that THIS SHOW was "The Beginning Of The End" for Saturday Mornings. Up till this point the Parental Watchdog Groups, Marketing Executives and Overzealous Censors had only had an effect on NEW cartoons being produced... but at 8:00 Saturday morning in 1985 on ABC, a precedent was set that changed the entire dynamic of Saturday Morning Cartoons FOREVER.

After numerous years of volleying the Looney Tunes cartoons back and forth between CBS and ABC (resulting in a few seasons where there were Looney Tunes cartoons on both channels under different names), CBS finally backed out of the bidding and let ABC snatch up the exclusive network broadcast rights - but at a cost. Marketing, Censors and Watchdogs had just a few simple requests...

No Speedy Gonzales (because he was racist), and no Tweety Bird (because he was GAY).

Speedy was racist because he spoke with an accent, and Tweety was Gay because he spoke was pretty and spoke in a high voice.

Despite the ludicrous accusations, ABC went ahead and pulled the Speedy and Tweety cartoons that had been running for the past 15 years without question or hesitation. The Censors had their foothold - NOTHING was safe from this point forward. They could now retro-actively censor, edit and otherwise ban whatever they liked for any old reason, knowing that there would be no questioning of The Great And Powerful Standards & Practices Board.

Saturday Morning, was doomed :(

(Cross posted from Tumblr)

Starting at 9am on Saturday Morning at your local CBS affiliate, you could see the long-running Bugs Bunny / Road Runner Show! This cartoon show, which was just a repackaging of Warner Brothers cartoons that had been produced up till 1962, bounced around the Saturday Morning TV dial so often you never really knew what channel it was going to show up on. But in the morning of 1980, it was on CBS...and it was like a Rosetta Stone of Childhood Memories. Parents, grandparents, older siblings... EVERYBODY knew the 5-to-8-minute adventures of Bugs Bunny and friends and so this cartoon was a common language that could bring generations together :)

(Also ran at 9:00 in 1981, 9:30 in 1982/1983)