1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

Pac-Man ran for only two seasons from 1982 to 1983, and was the first Hanna-Barbera animated series based on a video game.

Link to our live event can be found at https://new.livestream.com/accounts/4759302/events/2404607 for the next 6 hours! Our broadcast day began at 7am and will run till some time after noon, so see you there! If you're having any problems let me know via the comments here and we'll try to get things straightened out right quick for ya!

This is the most annoyingly complex entry I've ever had to make in this community, so bear with me and please excuse the cluttering of your Friends List. Usually I like to start these posts with a video clip of the show in question, but this one has no real official opening that I can find or even really remember...

It had been a long standing tradition on Saturday Morning to take several different cartoons that had 15-to-30-minute segments and slap them together in to an hour-long show of randomness in order to help boost new shows with existing show ratings. But here in 1982 they had something new to drop in to the mix; SEVEN MINUTE SEGMENTS.

First, the returning champion who had successfully survived being paired with Scooby and Scrappy; Richie Rich (follow the link for my crackpot theories about that).


And then we had the newcomers, The Little Rascals (who had no official opening credits of their own) and Pac-Man.


Although Pac-Man had been the STAR of the ABC Friday Night Saturday Morning Preview Show, it was for some reason decided that he needed to be introduced as part of a cartoon block interspersed with Richie Rich and Little Rascals bits. I've never ben able to confirm or deny a reason for this other than the assumption that they didn't have a full season worth of Pac-Man cartoon segment completed in time to fill a full half-hour show of its own on a weekly basis.

This infuriated me as a kid who tuned in Saturday morning expecting Pac-Man and getting only 7-to-15 minutes of the yellow fellow out of an entire hour of programming.

NEXT YEAR (1983) Pac-Man will get his own proper full half-hour show, and The Little Rascals will *kind of* get an opening title sequence when they make an awesome mash-up opening featuring Richie Rich, Little Rascals and new comer The Monchichis... buit till then we get this slapped-together Frankenstein of Saturday Morning snippets.