The Case of Saturday Morning Cartoons
Picture it: You’re in second grade, coming off a rigorous school week. You open your eyes to a quiet house on a Saturday morning, and sneak downstairs. No one else is awake, and the TV is all yours. You have a seat with a bowl of cereal and turn on your favorite Saturday Morning Cartoon…
If you grew up in the 1960s, maybe you watched Magilla Gorilla, the Flintstones, or Johnny Quest. If you were a 90s kid, maybe you watched Captain Planet, Recess, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. No matter the programming, Saturday Morning Cartoons was a tradition that spanned nearly 6 decades. It’s a shared experience had by children of multiple generations, which makes it pretty special. Today, we will discuss the history of the Saturday Morning Cartoon, and highlight some of our favorites from our childhood. We will not be able to cover many shows from other decades, but maybe we will do another episode down the line!
What do we mean by Saturday Morning Cartoon? Pretty self explanatory. Cartoons that aired on Saturday mornings, usually during time slot of 8am to 12pm. This tradition would flourish from the late 1950’s to the late 1990’s. There are still a few remaining cartoon shows on the major networks on Saturday mornings, but not many.
History:
The first cartoon produced for television aired in 1950 and was called Crusader Rabbit. It consisted of 5 minute long episodes and ran for three seasons. Created by Alexander Anderson and Jay Ward, its main characters were Crusader Rabbit and his sidekick Ragland T. Tiger, or “Rags”
In the late 1940’s, a producer named Jerry Fairbanks sold NBC on a new concept: a TV show meant solely for TV. Networks were looking for kid-friendly content to show on Saturday mornings, but no cartoons had been created specifically for this purpose
Since the days of radio broadcasts, the peak time for children to tune in, was between 10am and noon on Saturdays.
Even though Crusader Rabbit was moderately successful, many networks stuck with kid-friendly live-action programs instead.
The success of Crusader Rabbit inspired many more television cartoon character packages. And Jay Ward would even go on to produce The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
Until the late 1960s, a number of Saturday-morning cartoons were reruns of animated series originally made for prime time. The first true “Saturday morning cartoon” was Mighty Mouse Playhouse. We all know who Mighty Mouse is, a cartoon version of Super Man (was even originally called Super Mouse)
Mighty Mouse was a gamble for CBS back when they brought it to their Saturday Morning line-up in 1955, but it was the incredible success of this show that ushered in a new era of made-for-TV cartoons.
The character first appeared in 1942 in many theatrical films, however, what really brought the character into the mainstream was television. Mighty Mouse Playhouse ran on CBS for 12 very successful seasons.
In order to cut costs, animators made sure to use cost-cutting techniques that would also save a lot of time. Hanna-Barbara was well-known for these techniques. They would often use similar character models for shows. They designed characters with wide collars so they could easily animate them turning their heads, would only move characters’ mouths when they were talking and nothing else in the frame, and so on. The Jetsons, The Flintstones, and Johnny Quest all come to mind when we think about these techniques.
Where animation might have been lacking, the shows would make up for with wit! The shows were well-written with some adult humor to appeal to the whole family.
The Shows:
Pepper Ann (ABC, 1997-2001)
Created by Sue Rose and aired on Disney’s One Saturday Morning on ABC. New episodes ran until 2000 and reruns ran for another year after.
Pepper Ann was the very first animated television series for Disney to be created by a woman and would be until 2015!!
Tom Warburton served as lead character designer for the series. He would later go one to create Codename: Kids Next Door.
The show is a comedy about a 12-year-old Pepper Ann who manages to put other kids off by her slightly-nerdy behavior, constant bad timing, and insistence on trying to be cool. And to make matters worse, she’s just started middle school. Which we all know is a nightmare!
Pepper Ann voiced by Kathleen Wilhoite.
Twin Peaks
Family Guy
24
Gilmore Girls
Recess (ABC, 1997-2001)
The show was created by Paul Germain and Joe Ansolabehere.
Recess premiered in 1997 on ABC, as part of the One Saturday Morning block, and ran for 6 seasons. The show was successful enough to be syndicated to other channels including Toon Disney (now Disney XD) and the Disney Channel.
Recess follows the lives of six fourth graders, Theodore Jasper “T.J.” Detweiler, Vince LaSalle, Ashley Spinelli, Mikey Blumberg, Gretchen Grundler, and Gus Griswald, as they go about their days at Third Street Elementary School.
TJ voiced by Andrew Lawrence
Vince voiced by Rickey D’Shon Collins
Spinelli voiced by Pamela Adlon
Mikey voiced by Jason Davis
Gretchen voiced by Ashley Johnson
Gus voiced by Courtland Mead
A major point of the show is that the students at school represent a microcosm of our society complete with its own government, class system, and even a monarchy. They are ruled by a sixth grader named King Bob, and the society has a long list of rigid values and social norms.
Animaniacs (Fox, 1993-1995; The WB, 1995-1999)
Animaniacs was created by Tom Ruegger. It is the second animated series produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment in association with Warner Bros. Animation, after Tiny Toon Adventures.
The show first aired on Fox as part of its Fox Kids before moving to The WB. It initially ran a total of 99 episodes and one movie.
Most episodes were composed of three short mini-episodes, each starring a different set of characters. (Think Saturday Night Live style).
Hallmarks of the series included its music, memorable catchphrases, celebrity caricatures, and humor directed at an adult audience.
A reboot of the series was announced by Hulu in January 2018, with two seasons to be produced and are expected to air starting in 2020.
Yakko voiced by Rob Paulsen
Wakko voiced by Jess Harnell
Dot voiced by Tress MacNeille
The Bugs Bunny Show (CBS, 1978-1985) AKA Looney Tunes
This went by many names over the years
The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour
The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show
The Bugs Bunny/Looney Tunes Comedy Hour
The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show
The show was originally broadcast as a primetime half-hour on ABC in 1960, featuring theatrical Looney Tunes cartoons with new linking sequences hosted by Bugs Bunny, produced by Warner Bros.
After two seasons, The Bugs Bunny Show moved to Saturday mornings, where it remained for nearly forty years.
In 2000, the series at the time (The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show) was canceled after the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies television rights became exclusive to Cartoon Network.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (syndication, 1987-1990; CBS, 1987-1996)
The initial motivation behind the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series came from wanting to make toys based on the characters. However, because the comic-book characters only had a small following, the company Playmates Toys was uneasy about moving forward. They requested that a television deal be acquired first, and after the initial five-episode series debuted, the toy company released their first series of Ninja Turtles action figures 1988.
The show was in Saturday morning syndication from 1988 to 1989 and became an instant hit. The show was expanded to five days a week and aired weekday afternoons until 1991. Starting in 1990 (with a different opening sequence), the show began its secondary run on CBS’s Saturday morning lineup. The full series ran until 1996, when it aired its final episode.
The show helped skyrocket the characters into the mainstream and became one of the most popular animated series in television history. By 1990, the cartoon series was being shown daily on more than 125 television stations, and the comic books sold 125,000 copies a month.
Captain Planet (TBS 1990)
Captain Planet and the Planeteers is an animated television program created by Ted Turner and Barbara Pyle that focuses on friendship and environmentalism.
The show aired on TBS in 1990 and ran for two years, then came back under the title, “The New Adventures of Captain Planet”. This version aired from 1993 to 1996.
Pyle cites that the inspiration for the five Planeteers came from real people that she met during the show’s pre-production.
The show’s intro theme was composed by Tom Worrall. “Captain Planet, he’s our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero!”
The show may have only lasted 6 years, but the impact it had on society has lasted much longer. The Captain Planet Foundation (CPF) was founded in 1991, when series producer Barbara Pyle negotiated a percentage of the show’s merchandising revenue to empower young people.
Captain Planet voiced by David Coburn
Kwame voiced by LeVar Burton (earth)
Wheeler voiced by Joey Dedio (fire)
Linka voiced by Kath Soucie (wind)
Gi voiced by Janice Kawaye
Ma-Ti voiced by Scott Menville
Honorable Mentions:
Proud Family
Little Bear
Babar
Berenstain Bears- Michael Cera voiced Brother bear
Voltron