1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

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In the wake of 1982's very profitable Pac-Man Cartoon advertising shenanigans, the folks at Ruby-Spears started snapping up the rights to pretty much every and any video game they could get. They didn't have a network, they didn't have a promise... they just realized that this was how it's going to work and so they did it knowing that the advertisers and the networks would come.

And so at 8:30 on saturday morning in 1983, CBS premiered "Saturday Supercade", a conglomeration of 11-minute videogame-based cartoon segments that weren't strong enough to carry their own half-hour series yet somehow, when lumped together, proved to be quite a ratings powerhouse!

The first season included segments on Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Pitfall Harry, Frogger and Qbert. Summaries:

DONKEY KONG escaped from the zoo and is chased around by Mario and Pauline (seems legit).
DONKEY KONG JR is looking for his dad and teams up with a teenager on a motorcycle to find him (Aww sweet).
PITFALL HARRY, his niece Rhonda, and a cowardly Mountain Lion(!?!) search for treasure
FROGGER is an investigative reporter(?!?)
QBERT is a 1950's teenager(???)

The second season dropped Pitfall Harry, Donkey Kong Jr and Frogger so they could ad "Kangaroo" and "Space Ace", which were both SO MUCH more like what they sound like than any of the previous season's cartoons had been.

Also aired at 9:30 and 11:30 in the 1984/1985 season

The Saturday Supercade became a fixture in the CBS Saturday morning line-up starting in 1983 and ending at just about the time that everybody started buying Nintendo gaming systems. During the time that this cartoon reigned, it contained cartoon versions of some of the biggest stars of the Video Game Arcade Revolution (that didn't already have their own cartoon shows)!

• Frogger
• Donkey Kong
• Donkey Kong Jr.
• Q*Bert
• Pitfall!
• Space Ace

And if you were lucky like *I* was, they also followed up your Saturday Supercade with a syndicated episode of the video game show STARCADE!!! Full episodes of that show are available for streaming on the linked website :)

Leave your Saturday Supercade and/or Starcade memories in the comments below, and if the Saturday Supercade was your favorite part of Saturday morning in 1983, don't forget to go vote for it in our Best Cartoon of 1983 Poll!