[identity profile] captain-slinky.livejournal.com


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.

The 1981/1982 season was the fifth season of this show overall, and featured many re-runs of the past 4 seasons mixed with the new half-hour episodes:
  • "The Puppy Saves The Circus", featuring the increasingly popular character of "The Puppy" and his friends saving a circus
  • "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", an adaptation of the classic Mark Twain short story
  • "Bunnicula", which I have embedded above, the story of a vampire bunny
  • "Miss Switch To The Rescue" parts 1 and 2, the second Weekend Special to feature the popular Miss Switch character
  • "The Joke's On Mister Little", a story of two boys who play pranks on the titular Mister Little (and NOT the first episode of "The Littles")
[identity profile] captain-slinky.livejournal.com

(I defy anyone to find full episodes of this show in English!)

On Saturday Morning in 1978, the ABC Weekend Special aired an animated adaptation of Jane Thayer's "The Puppy Who Wanted A Boy", the story of a puppy named "Petey" who becomes attached to a young orphan named Tommy. One of the most heavily repeated of all the ABC Weekend Special episodes, the next 4 years of ABC Weekend Specials included such titles as "The Puppy's Great Adventure", "The Puppy's Amazing Rescue" and "The Puppy Saves The Circus". In 1982, The Puppy got a co-starring title role in The Scooby And Scrappy Puppy Hour, and then finally in 1983 he got his own half-hour show at 11am on ABC. See? If you start at the bottom, you CAN work your way to the top!

This cartoon featured The Puppy and his friends searching all over the world for Tommy and his adoptive family, then in the second season opener they FOUND the boy and traveled all over the USA with them having adventures where they met and teamed-up with a flying puppy named "Glyder" (his ears were so large he could use them to fly like Dumbo the elephant).

No matter who I ask about it, nobody seems to know why there's such an embargo on this beloved Ruby-Spears classic other than "I dunno, I think it's something with the rights being tied-up?" This is really sad, because this was an incredible series of cartoons!

Reruns were later picked up and aired on CBS as "The Puppy's Great Adventures".

Profile

saturday_am_80s: (Default)
1980's Saturday Morning Historical Preservation Society

March 2017

S M T W T F S
   1234
567 891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031 

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated May. 22nd, 2025 11:22 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios