Last month I took a look at ads for CBS’ 1969 Saturday morning lineup. It included the TV debut of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, and Scooby-Doo, not to mention Monkees reruns.
That’s a lineup worthy of respect. ABC’s? Not so much.
Casper gets some respect simply for being around decades. The Smokey Bear Show? The effort to turn Smokey into a forest ranger watching over his animal buddies is nothing anyone needed to catch, though I know I did, at least a couple of times.
The Cattanooga Cats, about an anthropomorphic singing group, is best remembered for the psychedelic backdrops when a cartoon wrapped up, and for the exceptionally cheap animation. The backup cartoons were no better. Autocat and Motormouse was Tom and Jerry — on motorcycles! It’s the Wolf was a standard wolf vs. sheep and sheep dog cartoon. Around the World in 79 Days — can modern-day Phineas Fogg inherit a fortune by beating his namesake ancestor/s time around the world? — wasn’t good (and they get Phileas Fogg’s name wrong) but it was at least interesting.
Hot Wheels and The Hardy Boys at least had the advantage of name brands, though I never saw either of them. And lord, the mention of the Hardy Boys Plus Three reminds me the success of the Archies inspired far too many cartoon characters to form pop groups.
I never caught Sky Hawks and have nothing to say about it.
Here we have two shows I watched and enjoyed. Adventures of Gulliver has him living among the Lilliputians, searching for his missing father and avoiding Leech, an evil captain who wants a treasure map in Gulliver’s possession. This one was already a rerun in ’69, having wrapped its one season of new shows the previous year.
Fantastic Voyage was another rerun from ’68. Based on the movie it had a team of shrunken adventurers plunging into all kinds of weird and entertaining government missions.
I’ve no idea if I’ll come across an NBC ad for the year. If I do, I’ll post another of these.
Cattanooga Cats, a bit like the Hair Bear Bunch only not as tall.
Probably marginally more popular too.
Interesting thought about all those cartoon characters needing to be in a band and break out into song during the show; Archies, Josie & Pussycats, Cattanooga Cats, Groovy Ghoulies, Hardys, how many others?
Charlie Chan’s kids on “The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan” had their own garage band. The protagonists of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids were a rock-and-roll band, as were the Impossible a decade earlier. Rick Springfield appeared (as himself, interdimensional adventurer Rick Springfield) in Mission: Magic but I don’t recall him singing.
There’s a joke in one issue of Scooby Doo Team-Up where the kids notice the superhero team the Impossibles look a lot like the rock group the Impossibles — oh but that’s ridiculous! It would the stupidest secret identity ever!
Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles! I’d forgotten about them!
Also probably marginally more popular than The Hair Bear Bunch, who were not a rock group, as far as I know.
To the best of my memory, they were not.
The Future Quest limited series does a good job incorporating the Impossibles into the same setting as Jonny Quest, Birdman and Space Ghost.
My impression is that in the UK the Hair Bear bunch is much more popular than the Cattanooga Cats – I know people who quote from Hair Bear Bunch
I have doubts as to whether Cattanooga Cats was ever broadcast on my side of the pond (unless you count the second series with shorter episodes, a changed title and only one (Auto)cat – the highlight of that being the talents of Paul Lynde (as Mildew Wolf))
I remember when America re-edited Gatchamen as the Battle of the Planets they added segments of the group playing musical instruments
The only show I remember pictured there is Fantastic Voyage
I have some familiarity with Battle of the Planets, completely missed them being musical.
And yes, Paul Lynde’s sneering voice is always a plus.
I’ll add that the one Japanese series Zillion in which teenagers were fighting the bad guys had a made-for-video sequel in which they had become a band “the White Nuts” (If I remember rightly it had the 3 heroes, their mechanic and their boss’ assistant)
Re: Battle of the planets-Sandy Frank added inferior footage of the Phoenix flying through space, the team relaxing in a rec room (playing ping pong, playing guitar, and reading, and the footage of 7-Zark-7, to cover the scenes cut, for violence, and also (in the case of Zark) to bridge the narrative and claim that ships that are blown up are robot ships.
The Hair Bear Bunch was much higher rated and more popular than the Cattanooga Cats. HBB was brought back twice, to fill in gaps in the schedule and then released into syndication. CC was not seen after its network broadcast until repeated on Boomerang. At one point, the USA Network was showing HBB reruns, in the 80s.
Hot Wheels had some great character designs from Alex Toth.
At this point in time, CBS ruled the Saturday morning roost, as well as prime time; but, that was about to change. Fred Silverman came over to the network and revamped their lineups and turned ABC into a powerhouse. He overhauled their Saturday Morning lineup and programmed it like prime time, with one show leading into another, to keep viewers on the network. He also hurt Filmation pretty badly, after he banned purchasing any programming from them, after the failure of Uncle Croc’s Bloc, with Charles Nelson Reilly. They were stuck selling to NBC and CBS (with better luck with CBS), before venturing into syndicated distribution, in the 80s. Silverman had a close relationship with Hanna-Barbera, going back to CBS.
Thanks for the Hair Bear Bunch info. I think I only caught them a couple of times.
IIRC Battle of the Planets was the one where they also cut or rephrased dialogue showing the leader of the bad guys was an alien god.