1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

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.