1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

Kicking off our week of in-depth investigation of the Frankenstein Monster of Saturday Mornings known as "The Super 7",we have the earliest of the cartoons featured: TARZAN LORD OF THE JUNGLE.

Starting in 1976, this half-hour adventure offering from Filmation was by far the most faithful adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, and featured a number of "lost cities" from the novels. The rotoscoped animation is based upon the work of Burrough's favorite Tarzan artist, Burne Hogarth. Tarzan is intelligent and well spoken, rather than the "Me Tarzan, You Jane" of many films. His sidekick is N’kima the monkey (since the chimpanzee "Cheeta" was an invention of the movies but kids were expecting to see a monkey dag-nabbit).

There were 6 seasons of this cartoon stretching from '76 to '82. First season was 16 episodes. Next year they added 6 more. Then 6 more. Then they said "Y'know what? Kids don't know the difference" and just kept shuffling the existing episodes in to shows like "Batman & The Super 7", "The Batman/Tarzan Adventure Hour", "Tarzan & The Super 7", "The Tarzan/Lone Ranger Adventure Hour" and for the final season, "The Tarzan/Lone Ranger/Zorro Adventure Hour".

And so it begins...

Through the late 1970's and early 80's, CBS filled up to TWO HOURS of their Saturday Morning line-up with what I like to call "The Filmation Fill-Ins". These were cartoons that had no real home. I have no idea where they came from, I have no idea what their original purpose was, all I know is that they didn't have enough of any one cartoon to make an entire season worth of cartoons, so they slapped them together in the most random ways to fill up that programming wasteland. In the video above I thionk you'll see The Super 7, Web Woman, Manta and Moray, Freedom Force and Super stretch & Micro Woman. But the headliners for these mash-up cartoon blocks were really Batman, Zorro and/or Tarzan.







I have some fond memories of this cartoon dump... I was a big fan of ACTION cartoons :) If this is one of your favorites too, then leave some comments and then head on over to our Best of 1981 Poll to vote for it :)