One of the secondary joys of rereading my own comics as part of my Silver Age Reread is rereading the ads. Sometimes house ads for other books
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But not always. Last weekend I was flipping through the 1969 first issue of DC’s reprint SF book, From Beyond the Unknown (with a Joe Kubert cover) —
—when I came across CBS promoting its fall Saturday morning schedule for the 1969-70 TV season. Including a new show called Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
It’s one of the first shows I remember catching after arriving in the US, along with The Brady Bunch. Emphasis on “remember” because it’s unlikely I caught Scooby and the gang without watching any of the other ‘toons on this list.
I do wonder who the heck needed a handy checklist in their pocket to remember the TV schedule. Isn’t that what TV Guide was for? But it does capture the sense in those days that sitting and spending Saturday morning watching cartoons was cool fun. An event.
As to my own viewing, I do remember catching Dastardly & Muttley but not when.
I don’t remember Perils of Penelope Pitstop until I watched it in reruns a couple of years later.
Likewise I don’t recall meeting Sabrina until well after this season.
My memory could be correct — who knows what else I might have been doing Saturday morning? — but maybe not. No way to know now (Don’t worry, I won’t lose sleep over it).
Catching the first episode of Scooby-Doo is, in hindsight, more of a landmark than I’d have guessed. Sure, it was a fun show, but if anyone had asked me to pick which of these characters would be going strongest in the 21st century, I doubt I’d have picked Scooby and his friends. Which shows my marketing savvy is no better than my total recall.
