Chapter One Weirdo Superheroes: The Origins of Saturday Morning Eight A.M., Saturday, 1974. Children all across the United States are staring at television sets with slack jaws and glassy eyes. A mother somewhere is concerned. An advocacy group is writing a report. A congressman is denouncing the FCC. A sanctimonious intellectual is writing about the vast wasteland of television. A child psychiatrist is recording his experimental subjects smacking Bozo the clown upside the head after watching cartoons. Us? Tim is ten, Kevin is five. We're with the rest of the nation's kids, probably watching The Bugs Bunny Show on ABC. If we're lucky, maybe they'll show "Duck Amuck" or "Wabbit Season." If we're in a really strange mood--or maybe if Tim briefly loses his dictatorial control over the television dial--the set is tuned to Lidsville instead. But how did we get there? Only ten years earlier, in 1964, there was children's television, but Saturday morning didn't really exist yet. (Neither did we.) Ten years before that when our parents were still teenagers--children's television was in its infancy, taking baby steps with Howdy Doody and Kukla, Fran and Ollie . Radio still held a central place in American popular culture for both kids and adults. So where did Saturday morning come from, how did it evolve, and where is it going? Origins are always a tricky matter, and endlessly debatable. But it seems clear to us that "Saturday morning" as we refer to it in this book really began to take shape after 1960. Yes, there were numerous children's TV shows before that time. Yes, children's entertainment had some kind of association with Saturdays all the way back to radio's high-water mark and probably before that. But children's TV was much more evenly distributed throughout the week during the fifties, and, like most television between 1945 and 1958, those early children's shows also depended heavily upon their radio antecedents. The ritualistic experience of watching television, mostly cheaply animated cartoons, from dawn to noon on Saturdays didn't mature into its familiar shape until the mid-1960s. Saturday morning was not merely a more intense version of the kidvid of the 1950s: it also became (and remains) one of the primary battlegrounds for conflicts over television and its impact on American life. Saturday morning not only became a different kind of experience for its viewers in the 1960s, it became a quintessential shorthand reference to the supposedly degraded quality of television in general. Saturday morning also became a crucial generational rite of passage for the children who consumed it, a gold mine of in-jokes and cultural reference points. In ways that are only just now being recognized, Saturday morning also changed the shape not just of television but also popular culture as a whole. Kids' cartoons nurtured new audiences, they generated new forms, they produced new ideas and attitudes. We're not just talking about television on Saturdays in this book: we're talking about a total cultural institution, capital-S capital-M Saturday Morning. The fifties laid the groundwork, or course. Both legitimate researchers and paranoid goofballs like Frederic Wertham (a psychiatrist who led a notorious crusade against horror comics at the height of the cultural paranoia of the fifties) began to turn their attention to the relationship between children and television during the fifties. For every careful and balanced study written in this early phase, there was an equally weird and alarmist one. For example, in the early fifties, one orthodontist claimed to have diagnosed a new dental problem, "television malocclusion," described as "an abnormal arrangement of the teeth likely to be caused by Junior's cradling his jaw in his hand as he watches television." In 1957, a British official conjured the specter of an entire generation of disfigured children who would be afflicted with "TV squint." Similar complaints were made around the same time about "TV slouch" and other syndromes. The late fifties were also drenched with concern over a semimythical creature shambling across the front pages and the silver screen: the "juvenile delinquent." The film delinquent might be defined by Marion Brando or James Dean, but he--or she--was a lot more likely to be played by a grade Z performer in paranoid films like I Accuse My Parents or The Beatniks . Alarmed at the spread of forms of terrifying nonconformity like Elvis records and premarital kissing, more than a few "concerned parents" followed the lead of Wertham and his peers in blaming mass media--and especially television--for spreading delinquency. Television's general reputation was blackened further by the notorious quiz show scandals of the late fifties and other instances of bribery and corruption. It all added up to a general transformation of the public mood: television was seen increasingly as a social menace, and children appeared particularly vulnerable. From this beginning to the present day, people concerned about television's general impact on mass audiences have expressed their overall fears by talking about the impact of television on children. Children became--and remain--the perfect symbolic substitute for the mass audience as a whole. Critics could condescend to children without fear of reprisal, while they felt a bit more inhibited about voicing such opinions about adult audiences. However, the programs which initially occupied advocates concerned with children and television were not, for the most part, programs expressly intended for children, nor were they shows airing on Saturdays. In the late fifties and early sixties, it was allegedly violent mainstream programs like The Untouchables that attracted the most attention. In what would later become a familiar refrain about television, some critics also alleged at the time that television news and documentaries were compromising the innocence of childhood and producing a preternaturally "adult" population of youth. In fact, Saturday mornings in the late fifties were relatively deserted. Only about a quarter of the total network programming for children could be found on Saturdays in 1958 as compared with over 50 percent a decade later. On NBC in 1959 and 1960, one could find The Howdy Doody Show, Ruff and Reddy, Fury , and Circus Boy . ABC had The Soupy Sales Show at noon and nothing more. CBS had Captain Kangaroo, Heckle and Jeckle, The Mighty Mouse Playhouse, Sky King , and in 1960, The Magic Land of Allakazam and Deputy Dawg . Early animated characters who appeared in syndicated programs included Crusader Rabbit, Colonel Bleep, and the hilariously inept Clutch Cargo, all of whom were prone to show up on Saturday schedules at some stations. At this point, some kids' shows like Captain Kangaroo were praised by advocacy groups ( Howdy Doody , in contrast, near the end of its run, was straightforwardly dismissed by one advocacy group as "monotonous or stupid"); but for the most part, television designed explicitly for children was ignored by social critics. Some of the shows that would later be associated with Saturday viewing made their first appearances during this period between 1958 and 1961--but not on Saturday mornings. The first cartoon characters to come out of a new animation studio founded by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were a host of anthropomorphic animals--Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quickdraw McGraw, Snagglepuss, Augie Doggie, Dixie and Pixie. The Flintstones also made their first appearance at this point. At their inception, most of these characters were syndicated via the Kellogg's Corporation and typically appeared in the late afternoons or early evenings before mixed audiences of adults, teenagers, and children, just like the Terrytoon characters Heckle and Jeckle, who had originally appeared on television in the early evenings during the mid-1950s. Of the earliest Hanna-Barbera offerings, only Ruff and Reddy initially appeared as a network offering on Saturday morning. The first Hanna-Barbera programs for television were intended to be the televisual equivalent of the animated short films that had preceded movies for many years, which is unsurprising given that both William Hanna and Joseph Barbera worked for MGM's animation department for many years. With The Flintstones and then, in 1961, Top Cat , Hanna-Barbera went even further: these animated shows were intended to air on an equal basis with other prime-time programming. Nor was Hanna-Barbera alone in this ambition. In 1961, Kayro Production's animated Calvin and the Colonel , a thinly disguised version of Amos and Andy , appeared on ABC during prime time. And yet, when The Jetsons appeared on prime time in 1962, it lasted only a season there, countered by solid ratings for Walt Disney's Wonderful Worm of Color and the live-action Dennis the Menace. The Jetsons was moved to Saturday mornings, thus beginning the exodus of animated programming from the evening hours--an exodus that was completed when The Flintstones finally left prime time in 1966. There were a few appearances of prime-time cartoons between The Jetsons and the move of The Flintstones --most notably The Adventures of Jonny Quest , which appeared there for a season in 1964--but by the time The Flintstones finally moved to Saturday mornings in 1967, all three networks were airing a densely packed assortment of cartoons (and a few other types of shows) from 8 A.M. to noon. Many of these cartoons were produced by Hanna-Barbera. By 1968, this new and concentrated form of children's television--Saturday morning--was becoming profitable and would likely become more so. Strange but True Saturday Morning Facts According to the authors of Cerealizing America , Frankenberry cereal initially caused the shit of anyone who ate it to turn pink. Among the many television-related medical problems described by researchers in the fifties were: television malocclusion , abnormal arrangement of the jaw caused by cradling your jaw with your hand while watching TV frogitis , leg deformity caused by viewing TV in a froglike posture TV squint , permanent squinting expression from watching too much television tired-child syndrome , fatigue and headache caused by too much TV watching. The cure: don't watch television. Victoria Fromkin's invented language Pakuni on Land of the Lost was based on the Akan languages of present-day Ghana. Almost all of Hanna-Barbera's early funny-animal characters wore something around the neck so that the animators didn't have to worry about keeping the appearance of their necks consistent. Way before David Letterman made a comedic sport out of biting the network hand that fed him, Jay Ward, the creator of The Bullwinkle Show, was perpetually getting in trouble for making fun of his bosses at NBC. Among other jabs, he used to host picnics at the Plaza Hotel where the box lunches included "roast peacock." Other developments influenced this buildup of cartoons on Saturdays, most importantly FCC chairman Newton Minow's "vast wasteland" speech in May 1961. Minow's speech was the direct consequence of television's troubles of the late 1950s and the subsequent recasting of television as a morally troubling technology. In the speech, Minow described television as vapid and repetitious. Children entered the picture pivotally about a third of the way into the speech. Minow argued that "ratings should have little influence where children are concerned." Like many commentators in the early 1960s, Minow's first concern was with early-evening viewing by children rather than Saturday morning programming, which was still poorly developed. However, Minow did argue that "there are some fine children's shows, but they are drowned out in the massive doses of cartoons, violence and more violence." Minow's words set the terms of debate over the impact and meaning of television for decades to come. What is striking, then, is the centrality of children to Minow's condemnation of television broadcasters. Over the long term, the most lasting impact of the speech has been on the debate over children and television. (One sign of its enduring impact came in 1995, when Minow himself published a reexamination of his speech entitled Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television and the First Amendment .) Later, in September 1961, Minow gave more emphasis to children's programming in another speech, in which he spoke of lighting "a few million candles" to take "our children out of the darkness." In this address, Minow further suggested that the primary problem was not violence but the fact that most children's shows were simply "dull, gray and insipid." Minow's general condemnation of the emptiness of television found a ready audience--the "vast wasteland" line has been repeated many times since and mutated into such clichés as "five hundred channels and nothing on." During 1962, what was actually happening to Saturday morning programming? ABC added Top Cat and Beany and Cecil to its late-morning schedule and picked up The Magic Land of Allakazam (previously on CBS). NBC began the year airing Pip the Piper, The Shari Lewis Show, King Leonardo, Fury, Make Room for Daddy, Championship Debate , and 1,2,3--Go! ; by the end of the year, they had added The Bullwinkle Show and Ruff and Reddy . CBS continued to air Captain Kangaroo, The Mighty Mouse Playhouse, The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show , and Sky King while also adding The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Video Village Junior , and The Alvin Show . At first glance, these schedules hardly seem different from those characteristic of the late 1950s: an indifferent hodgepodge of animated and live-action programs--indeed, many of them, like Sky King , were reruns of shows produced in the fifties. But 1962 was also something of a subtle watershed. Not only did it mark the arrival of Hanna-Barbera shows originally intended to air in the evenings ( Top Cat ), it also saw a key replacement of a live-action quiz show ( Video Village Junior ) with a cartoon ( The Alvin Show ). Nineteen sixty-two also marked the appearance of Jay Ward's animated characters Rocky and Bullwinkle on Saturday mornings, though they had been on in various other time slots, including late Saturday afternoons, since 1959. Bob Clampett's puppets Beany and Cecil also made their first Saturday morning appearance, although in animated form. The density of programming on Saturday mornings increased during 1962. Shows that aired previously at other times were moved. Even more characteristically for Saturday morning, a cartoon was selected to replace a live-action show primarily for reasons of cost. The net effect of the Minow-inspired focus on children's programming was to increase the awareness among television executives of the nature of the possible marketplace for children's shows. Executives harkened to Minow's call for programming even as they largely ignored his specific recommendations about what type of children's programs should be added. Each network also attempted to placate Minow by adding a self-consciously educational program to the schedule in 1962--NBC's Exploring , ABC's Discovery , and CBS's Reading Room --but all three shows were on life support from the outset. Discovery lasted the longest, until 1971, though its weekday format only lasted a year. The whole moral furor that had begun in the late fifties and culminated in Minow's speech helped to produce a rush to fill Saturday mornings with children's shows while simultaneously removing any trace of children's programming from weekday hours, where more profitable audiences could be pursued or affiliates and independent stations wished to make their own programming decisions. * * * "I cannot watch the shows. They're all cartoons, and to my mind, cartoons are not television because the figures can't really be humorous like live show characters. The kids have really become accustomed to animation, but they need live people."--Soupy Sales, quoted in Gary Grossman, Saturday Morning TV * * * As a consequence, from 1963 to the end of 1964, the three networks significantly expanded their offerings on Saturday mornings and decisively shifted their programming toward animation. ABC picked up The Bullwinkle Show during this period, and added The Porky Pig Show, Hoppity Hooper, Shenanigans, Cartoonies , and Casper, the Friendly Ghost as well as continuing to show Beany and Cecil . NBC and CBS similarly added shows--the first of Gerry Anderson's bizarre sci-fi shows made in "Supermarionation" appeared ( Fireball XL-5 ), along with the cartoons The Hector Heathcote Show, Linus the Lionhearted , Total Television's Underdog and Tennessee Tuxedo , and Hanna-Barbera's Quickdraw McGraw and The Jetsons . Older programs like Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Wizard maintained a place on Saturday mornings, as did reruns of live shows like Dennis the Menace that had originally aired in other time slots. In the meantime, critical assessments of the relationship between children and television continued to mount up. In the fall of 1964 a major study conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics described a TV-caused illness known as the "tired-child syndrome." The victims of this new syndrome were primarily "sensitive" children who spent six to ten hours watching television on Saturdays and Sundays, resulting in nausea, headaches, fatigue, and appetite problems. The most crucial feature of the report was its characterization of the syndrome as a form of "addiction" to be cured by withdrawal. The notion that television represented a drug--and all of the rhetorical baggage that went with this metaphor--would develop subsequently into one of the most powerful indictments of Saturday morning. By the mid-sixties, with the children of the baby boom clustered between the ages of fifteen and two, advertisers had a much better idea about what to do with an audience of children. The popularity of television-inspired crazes like Davy Crockett's coonskin cap had helped advertisers recognize this audience's potential. Though the relative popularity of individual Saturday morning shows--as determined by their ratings--had a significant influence on programming decisions, network competition on Saturdays was also ruled increasingly by some markedly odd forces (in comparison to normal prime time). A serious flop remained, as always, a real problem, both in terms of its ability to attract viewers and its ability to attract advertising. But a show with middling-to-poor ratings was almost as steady a producer of revenue as a popular show, simply by fact of its placement on a Saturday schedule. The Maturation of Saturday Morning: 1965-1969 By the 1965 season, the foundations of Saturday morning programming--and thus of the Saturday morning phenomenon--had been laid. Former head of CBS daytime programming Fred Silverman told us that the introduction of the immensely popular new animated program The Beatles in the fall of 1965 "turned the morning upside down" and spurred all three networks to order new shows. Even before the premiere of The Beatles , however, Saturdays had filled up with both animation and advertising. From 1965 to 1968, the final pieces of the puzzle were assembled, creating a full schedule of network shows from early in the morning to the early afternoon on Saturday; meanwhile, the extraction of network children's shows from all other times of the week was more or less completed. Studios like Hanna-Barbera, Jay Ward Productions, and Filmation produced a host of new cartoons for television. The networks formally recognized the importance of children's television by restructuring their corporate hierarchies. Concerned critics formed new and influential organizations which focused much more centrally on Saturday morning programming. This all led in 1967-68 to protracted struggles over "violent" cartoons that served as the template for all subsequent fights regarding the Saturday morning phenomenon. Many of the new shows were what critics derisively termed the "supers"; action-adventure programs that often centered on a superpowered character of some kind. The Beatles had been added just before the superhero craze, and lasted through part of that craze. A few shows from other genres, like The Magilla Gorilla Show and George of the Jungle , were added to the schedule as well during the same period, while other characters like Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear continued to appear in syndication. But these were the years of Space Ghost, Spider-Man, Jonny Quest (relocated from prime time), the Herculoids, Shazzan, Batman, Superman, Aquaman, and Super President. Even the funny-animal shows took on an action-adventure tilt with the addition of Hanna-Barbera's The Atom Ant Show and Secret Squirrel , while other comedic shows like Mighty Heroes and Underdog also took their basic cues from the superhero genre. (Continues...) Excerpted from Saturday Morning Fever by Timothy Burke and Kevin Burke. Copyright © 1999 by Timothy Burke and Kevin Burke. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
