Novel Completion Queries, Day Six

Posted on March 21, 2015    Posted by      131 Comments

Is the novel finished? NO

Today’s question: Favorite Saturday morning cartoon, if you are of an age to remember when cartoons were only shown on Saturday morning (if you’re too young for that, spare a moment for those of us who suffered in such deprivation).

My answer: The Bugs Bunny show (in its various incarnations) because even at a single-digit age, I could tell the difference in quality between that and, oh, Superfriends (not that I didn’t watch Superfriends. I did. I had standards but they were very flexible).

You?

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131 Comments on “Novel Completion Queries, Day Six”

  7. Totally on the Bugs Bunny Show as well. Strangely enough, in the 60s there were loonie tune shows some time after 5-6pm. I know this because my Dad would watch this upon returning from work if he wasn’t in bed with a migraine. It was mostly Road Runner shows though.

    Also a big fan of Space Ghost and Johnny Quest.

  8. Looney Tunes, all the way. And Sparkyplants, you mean the Schoolhouse Rock songs. I loved them too. I can still recite the preamble to the U.S. Constitution to this day.

  9. All the Bugs Bunny shows. Which is weird because just today I was thinking of the one where all the actors from Jack Benny Show played themselves as mice.

    “What do you think they’ll do with the Kaiser?” Comedy GOLD, people.

  10. Also a shout out to Eightman, Agua Boy and Gigantor. They were mostly in the late afternoon weekday slot in the 60s (along with–ohmigod–Dark Shadows). Still loved my anime.

  11. I grew up in Holland with the same kind of viewing restrictions. Two national TV channels and that was it.
    The two series I remember watching at friends’ places (my parents did not have a TV) were The Smurfs. I didn’t care much about the blue little pests, though I liked the evil cat quite a lot. The other one I really loved was ‘Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines’.

    Muttley and that Smurf cat should have had their own series…

  13. Love the original Looney Tunes. The only modern (post-1960s or so) LT I like is “Carrotblanca,” (late 90s, I think), the rest of it I’m just not that impressed with. Love Tom & Jerry, but only from about ’45-’67. The earlier stuff wasn’t that good, and much of the later stuff wasn’t either. The notable exception was the full-length TV movie from just a coupla years ago, “Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes.” I thought that cartoon was very well done, and paid nice tribute to a lot of the original MGM cartoon characters–Droopy, Butch, etc.

  16. I’ll do two:
    My favorite memory of watching the cartoons? Watching Rocky and Bullwinkle with my dad on weekend mornings.
    My favorite cartoon? 80’s Transformers.

  17. Captain N. The antenna would only catch that channel’s signal under certain conditions. On those rare Saturday mornings when it did, I remember thinking that show was the best thing ever. If I could watch it now, I’d wager it didn’t age well. But as a Nintendo loving kid, it was awesome.

  18. Two choices: Bugs Bunny (for the classic humor and slapstick) and Thundarr (for epic post-apocalyptic adventure).

  19. Bugs (of course), Rocky & Bullwinkle (of course), and a big shout out to George of the Jungle (“Shep not elephant; Shep big peanut-loving puppy dog”), which included Superchicken (“you knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred”) and Tom Slick. And let us not forget the Jetsons.

  20. Rocky and Bullwinkle..and the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, Boris and Natasha, Mr. Peabody and Sherman.. While they were funny when I first saw them, when I rewatched them as an adult and GOT more of the humor, I realized how wonderfully warped and subversive they truly were! Nothing today comes close.

  21. I loved them all but my mother limited us to one or two shows. I’m too old to remember which were my favorites. The best was when my parents weren’t home for some reason and I could watch all morning. Yes. My memory is fading. Probably on purpose.

  22. I don’t know the name of the cartoons, but the first I remember watching were kind of stick figure things, mostly mice as I recall, and they were always fighting. Way before Bugs Bunny. Some quick research reveals they were “Early Bird Cartoons featuring silent stick figure cat and mice episodes from the 1920’s” but I can’t seem to find any images of them. I wasn’t alive in the 1920s! That’s just what was on my family’s TV in the late 1950s.

  24. I can still sing the theme songs to Superchicken and the ’60s Spiderman (“Is he strong?/Listen, bud/He’s got radioactive blood!”). Love me some Bullwinkle and Bugs Bunny as well. Perennial favorites: Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century, the opera ones, and the episode of Road Runner with the flying sticks of dynamite.

    BTW, speaking of Superfriends, Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension has reviews of the whole series. Example: http://jabootu.net/?p=3554

  25. I’m old enough to have started watching Saturday morning cartoons (in black and white, of course), sometime in the spring of 1956. We got some 1940s Warner Bros Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig, including the wartime propaganda stuff you won’t see today, with Hitler and Tojo caricatures.

    But we also got Popeye, when his nemesis was still named Bluto, and Betty Boop — cartoons that were definitely meant for grownups and were full of racist stereotypes and implied sexual situations that wouldn’t pass muster today.

    My favorite was the Popeye cartoon with Bluto as Sindbad the Sailor and the roc, This post prompted me to go look it up and I found it on YouTube in color! It’s in public domain.

  26. Bugs Bunny is my all time favorite. Especially those done by Chuck Jones. Well down below on the next tier are Scooby Doo, Tom and Jerry and Starblazers.

    now I’m gonna spend the rest of the day with these happy memories.

    Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!
    Duck season, wabbit season, fire!
    The world’s supply of eludium phosdex is alarmingly low!
    Perhaps I, foppish though I am, am the Scarlet Pumpernickel?
    I will hug him and squeeze him and I will name him George.

  27. Bugs Bunny for me too. I remember my father waking me up early on Saturday mornings to watch them. It wasn’t until years later I realized that the main reason he was waking me up was so the macho Air Force pilot wasn’t sitting by himself in the living room watching cartoons!

  28. When I was a cartoon aged lad, Bugs Bunny was not a Saturday morning cartoon. It was shown in the evening, along with the other adult oriented cartoons, like The Flintstones. I had to share the TV with my Grandfather to watch those.

  29. Jonny Quest ruled when I was a lad. Space Ghost was right behind him. I also liked the Mighty Mouse cartoons from the 40’s.

  30. Big Looney Toons/Duck Dodgers fan. I still occasionally watch when the shows pop up on satellite TV here in the UK. I also have fond memories of Crusader Rabbit from when I was really young.

  34. As a kid it was probably Scooby-Doo and the various derivative Scooby-Doo-like shows that followed. (Anything with kids pulling the masks off of lighthouse keepers who were pretending to be ghosts to scare away the local populace.)

    As an adult, I really liked Eek! the Cat. What other Saturday morning cartoon show did an episode based upon Apocalypse Now?

  35. Saturday mornings in the UK had a couple of hours of kid-related shows, either on ITV or the BBC (only three channels when I was a kid) You’d get a bunch of cartoons, some games involving people getting gunked, a live action serial of some type and then that was it at noon, because bloody football would start. Or motor racing, or horse racing. Or darts, for god’s sake! I remember G-Force with fondness and some incomprehension.

  36. Speed Racer, the original one, oh and Battle of the Planets, even had the lunchbox for that one!

  37. Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space, the Jetsons, Superfriends, Star Trek, Jackson 5, Harlem Globetrotters, the Osmonds (What? It was the 70s). It’s incredibly hard to name a favorite Schoolhouse Rock, but the Preamble is definitely up there.

  39. I always love the Pink Panther show, but after a while it was obvious that there were never any new ones. They tried to ameliorate that by adding “And Friends” stuff with the ant & aardvark, a shark (I think) and some other animal ones. Of the Looney Toons ones, I enjoyed the roadrunner skits the best.

  41. Bugs Bunny, of course, and Rocky and Bullwinkle; Johnnie Quest and Popeye. There was also the Beatles cartoon in the 60s. The Indianapolis station would mix Three Stooges with the cartoons.

  42. The Bugs Bunny stuff always ran the risk of running some of the later crap — the older the better typically. The ones above are favorites, along with “Design for Leaving” with Daffy trying to sell Elmer Fudd the House of Tomorrow.
    There were some wacky shows I liked that I’d probably hate now: Houndcats, Impossibles, Hong Kong Fuey… it’s sad that Cartoon Network, like so many other channels, gave up its mission statement of bringing the classics back.

  43. Gigantor–I can still sing the theme song! (I maintain I only watched Wacky Races because I liked Penelope Pitstop’s go-go boots.)

  44. I loved me some Looney Tunes! I remember they were even still showing Speedy Gonzalez at the time. As I recall my favorite episodes involved the two very polite ground squirrels. In hindsight there was obviously some influence towards Chip and Dale, but I don’t know in which direction.
    I think Justice League was the one with all the super heroes and Superfriends had the Wonder Twins. I liked Justice League, but even as a kid I was put off by Superfriends’ heavy handed preaching.
    I liked Thundarr, and tolerated the smurfs, but I remember being really excited to watch a lot of the Hanna Barbara cartoons. I enjoyed the adventure like Johnny Quest (and have enjoyed Venture Brothers), and Space Ghost, but I especially enjoyed the one with the family on the jungle planet with all the cool animals. I can never remember the name though :-(

  45. Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner hour was the best. I also liked Battle of the Planets and Thundercats.

  48. I didn’t see anyone mention The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse. If you haven’t seen it watch it. It was fantastic and like another classic, Rocky and Bullwinkle, geared toward adults. It was taken off the air where I live when Mighty Mouse snorted a flower and was reported for it by some young Hitler Youth want-to-be for taking drugs. Of course the idiot nutbags were all over it, but it was a flower and that he snorted.

    Great stuff. Check it out.

  49. Original Looney Tunes, original Tom&Jerry (the Hanna-Barbera ones, not the later ones),…and JOHNNY QUEST and SPACE GHOST, because I was regular little Imperialist as a child.

  50. I was on the fence about linking this, but decided I’d go ahead and offer up a little story I wrote a few weeks back inspired by memories of ye olde Justice League cartoon, Just Physics. It’s just dialogue and only 200 words, but I saw all the characters as their cartoon iteration whilst typing :-)

  52. Saturday morning cartoons were the big thing when I was a kid. Problem is, they started at something like 7AM, and ended early for sports (Boo!). Even as a child, I could not understand why any right thinking person would purposely get out of bed early on a Saturday morning, even for something as pleasurable as watching cartoons. So I rarely saw them, except for the days they weren’t preempted by sports. I loved Super Chicken and Underdog. Most of all I loved Bullwinkle & Rocky, along with the rest of the gang: Peabody and his boy Sherman, Fractured Fairy Tales, Dudley Do-Right,etc., but I remember those as more of an after school thing, not Saturday morning.

  53. THE HERCULOIDS!! No question….from the best year ever for Saturday morning cartoons 1967 (and not just because I was five then). Seriously, who doesn’t want to see a $200 million dollar live-action summer tentpole movie based on this?!?—-

    https://youtu.be/Dstk7-Tzr7s

  54. Jay Ward cartoons – because nothing warps a young mind as surely as trying to figure out The Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam, Wossamatta U., and why you should never buy a home in the town of Escrow. They’re a gateway drug to Tom Lehrer songs, then to Leslie Fish songs, and then fandom owns their souls for-ev-ah! [insert evil overlord sound effect]

  55. Hard to choose, but out of the American cartoons shown when I was a nipper in the UK it would probably have to be the Loony Toons (Bugs and Daffy were my favourites), and Pink Panther.
    Out of the UK produced content it would probably be Willo the Wisp and Danger Mouse.

    A few years later and Tiny Toons, and Mysterious Cities of Gold would have to have been added (although I’m not 100% certain they were shown on Saturday, as by then we had CITV from ITV and CBBC from the BBC “broom closet” after school).

  56. John, I agree on the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but mostly because of the classic Warner Brothers Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies (Google one of my favorites, with the classic line “Where’s my Hassenpfeffer !?!”). Other winners are all the Jay Ward stuff – Bullwinkle, Fractured Fairy Tales, Mr. Peabody and Sherman – , and Wacky Races, but only because of Muttley, whom I quote on a regular basis to the day (“Razzenfrazzenrazzenrazzen” is so much more socially acceptable than a string of F-bombs)

  57. You haven’t lived unless you have watched:

    Battle of the Planets.

    One of my favorites.

  58. On Saturday mornings my brother and I were allowed only one hour of cartoons so we had to choose carefully. I usually opted for Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. They rated right up there with Wonder Woman in my book!

  60. @Robert

    Battle of the Planets sounded familiar, but I couldn’t remember it for sure. A quick googling brought back a flood of memories! My brother and I loved that show. Probably all the more because we didn’t get it at our parents house in Santa Cruz, CA, but could only watch it when we visited the grandparents in Anaheim, CA.

  61. I can easily remember when Saturday morning cartoons were the only ones on TV, but my household didn’t get a TV until I was 16, so I didn’t often watch them unless one of my young cousins was visiting. (Nobody in the town I lived in had a TV until I was 13, since there was no TV station near enough to be receivable in Hopkinsville, KY, until Nashville got a couple in 1951 or so.)

    But I remember every time I went to a movie it included a cartoon. I liked most of them, but as I recall my favorites were Heckle and Jeckle, the talking magpies (though they were solid black like crows).

  62. Overture! Curtain lights! Have to go with The Bugs Bunny Show too. Johnny Quest and Speed Racer were close followups though.

  63. DangerMouse, definitely. Oh, wait, I was a grownup for those, and they weren’t Saturday morning!

  64. … and this is where I prove the truth of my moniker. Because my very first favorite Saturday morning show was before there were very many cartoons on the TV (at least in my location). It was a half-hour marionette show (yes, friends, there were puppets!) and it was called “Fireball XL5.” Sci-fi marionettes! Even now, my mind’s eye can picture that spaceship “blasting off” with what had to be a sparkler (fireworks!) affixed to its nether end. I’m sure the show was filled with the kind of biases that one saw in Star Trek (TOS) and the Lensman books, but still … My bent toward SFF was evidently inborn. :-)

  65. I was not permitted to watch ‘Japanese junk’ by my parents, so unless I got home early before they did, Speed Racer, Ultraman and the rest were forbidden fruit in the afternoon. I used to wake up on Saturdays before 8 a.m. and close the doors to everyone’s bedrooms so I could watch cartoons before anyone else woke up.

    Favorites?
    Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote and the rest of the Warner Bros. stable
    Jonny Quest. Even at an early age, I could tell they had a much higher production value than most cartoons.
    Superman, the ones from the 60s. Ditto the Spiderman cartoons. I still remember the theme songs.
    Star Trek, the animated series

    I actually wrote my first hate mail to a local ABC affiliate about cartoons. Every fall, the main TV stations used to do a half hour preview of the new cartoons they were releasing for Saturday mornings. Around 1974, they decided it was going to be ‘all Sid & Marty Krofft, all the time’. I hated most of their shows with a passion, because they looked so cheesy, and swore off anything non-animated that year. Those were the first Saturdays I wasn’t in front of the TV most of the morning.

  66. The Pirates of Dark Water only ran for one season, but even as a kid I realized that an epic, serialized, and dark story was a rare and beautiful thing for Saturday morning. I was also a big fan of The Real Ghostbusters, X-Men, and of course Bugs Bunny (which was great because that one even my parents would watch with me).

  67. Loving the memories this thread brings back.

    Admittedly, Looney Tunes rules them all, but beyond that, I loved “Schoolhouse Rock” (conjunction junction, what’s your function?) and of course “Star Trek”. Crappy animation and all, it still was MOAR Trek after we’d seen all the TOS episodes over and over.

  69. I spent most of my Saturdaymornings bowling in a youth league, so missed a lot of late 60’s, early 70’s stuff.No VCRs back then. I do remember watching Rocky and Bullwinkle and Looney Tunes and things like Underdog, Space Ghost and such. I do remember watching American Bandstand and the Happening ’68 music show with Paul Revere and the Raiders.

  70. True ‘Saturday Morning’ Cartoons?
    The Super Friends, both iterations (Wonder Dog and then the Wonder Twins)
    Also, all of the Hanna Barbara shows (H.R. PufnStuf, Electro Woman and Dyno Girl, etc…)
    Loved most of them but those were my must-sees (along with jumping at the x:55 minute mark to see Schoolhouse Rock)

  72. Rocky and Bullwinkle, Cecil the Seasick Sea-serpent, Might Mouse (Heeere I come to save the Day!) But mainly Rocky and Bullwinkle. Anybody else remember Dudley Do-right?

  74. My favorite Saturday morning cartoon was always Road Runner. But unlike many of you whipper-snappers, I am old enough to remember Saturday late morning thru afternoon non-animated programming. Yes, boys and girls, there was a time when children’s programming actually had people in it. Those are the shows I remember most fondly. Sky King, Roy Rogers, Flash Gordon and the like. And then there was Mr. Wizard (which I think was on Sundays). He first got me interested in science.

  75. Total animation maven here, who grew up in L.A. in the ’60s when we had seven VHF tv stations and the 3 that were ‘network affiliates’ ran news in the late afternoon while the other 4 showed CARTOONS. So it was toon-head heaven for me. (I made a hobby of trying to make Episode Guides for all the individual cartoon segments – seeing later from EpGuide websites how poor a job I had done)

    Bugs Bunny and the rest of the originally-theatrical Looney Tunes were divided into 3 ‘packages’, one for the network Bugs Bunny Show (which ran 2 years in prime time before it went to Saturday Morning), and a ‘newer’ package that ran on one channel and an ‘older’ package on another.

    Jay Ward goes all the way back to Crusader Rabbit, credited as the first ever cartoon made specifically for TV in 1948, with 5-minute episodes monday-friday; he lost control of the show and retired from tooning until he was dragged back by Bill Scott, who became co-producer of everything AND the voice of Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right, Mr. Peabody, George of the Jungle and Superchicken (Scott was an under-acknowledged cartoon great). Bullwinkle started out airing at 6PM Sundays, then Saturday Mornings then Sunday Mornings.

    I remember and loved the earlier Hanna-Barbera toons: Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, for which the sponsor, Kellogg Cereals, didn’t go to Saturday Morning, they bought airtime for once-a-week weekday afternoon timeslots. But they were popular enough that the networks came to H-B for shows, starting with the Flintstones, Jetsons, Top Cat and Jonny Quest in prime time (all later re-running Saturday Mornings), then with Atom Ant & Secret Squirrel they started their way to Saturday Dominance.

    But for my all-time favorite Saturday Morning Toons of my childhood, I have to go with
    Star Trek, the Animated Series,
    Bullwinkle and George of the Jungle,
    the ORIGINAL Alvin Show, produced by Ross Bagdasarian who’d made the Chipmunks records it was based on (and with the secondary segment of Clyde Crashcup, Inventor)
    and Beany and Cecil, produced by ex-Looney Tunes maker Bob Clampett based on a PUPPET show from 1950s local TV (it turned out more Jay Ward-ish than most Jay Ward).

    Schoolhouse Rock didn’t come up until I was going away to college, but it was one of my guiltiest pleasures of emerging adulthood.

    Then, jumping to the 1990s when I was officially WAY too old to watch Saturday Morning
    Cartoons…
    TAZ-MANIA, which spun off Looney Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil with a bunch of excellent new side characters, including parodies of Bing Crosby, Woody Allen, and John Cleese (in Fawlty Towers),
    and THE TICK, the greatest superhero satire ever and home of one of my online aliases “The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight” (and I still resent that the later live-action version renamed “Die Fledermaus” as “Bat Manuel”)

    Now, when you go away from Saturday Morning to weekday afternoons, that’s where I saw the first imported anime series, Astroboy, Gigantor and the mostly forgotten Amazing Three… and then… isn’t there a limit on comment length here?

  77. Bill Cosby’s Fat Albert show (or whatever it was called) because of the moral messages snuck into each episode. This is from when I was a parent. When I was a little kid the Sat AM shows were on the radio.

  78. I guess I’m just too old. In 1948, when I was eight, we didn’t have a TV, and the cartoons I’d occasionally see on my Grandma Minnie’s set when I stayed over were ancient Farmer Alfalfa ones and the like. By the time I was twelve, when we finally got a set, I was too old for Saturday morning cartoons.

  79. My favorite Saturday morning cartoons were Thundarr the Barbarian and later The Real Ghostbusters. The Lovecraft jokes in the latter are hilarious in retrospect.

    I was also a fan of Battle of the Planets and had my little mind blown by Robotech (ongoing plots! characters dying!), but those were on weekday mornings and afternoons respectively.

  83. No hesitation: Scooby Doo, pre-Scrappy (although I was starting to age out of Saturday morning cartoons by the time he came along, thank goodness.)

    But the Looney Tunes were staples – I can still sing just about all of “What’s Opera, Doc” from memory, and if someone within my hearing says, “Duck season!” I have a semi- Pavlovian urge to yell, “Rabbit season!” I also have wonderful memories of the sheepdog and coyote (“Morning, Hal.” “Morning, Sam.”), of the coyote breaking the fourth wall to discuss why he was so intent on pursuing the roadrunner, and of Bugs making fun of Wyle E’s business card (“Are you in, genius? In, indescribable?”) To this day I quote that, and sometimes people even get it.

  84. Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends was my favorite, closely followed by Dungeons and Dragons.

  85. Thank you, John P., for posting that Herculoids shout-out! I thought I had imagined it. Along with Space Ghost and Johnny Quest it was one of my favorites way back when. My brother and I also really liked the Road Runner (before they chopped them up to remove the “violence”) and Foghorn Leghorn.

  86. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (Bugs Bunny, in other words) are the ones I remember forward and back from having seen them so often. But the ones which stick from my early childhood were “Birdman” (a thirty minute show – two “Birdman” slots, one “Herculoids” and one “Fantastic Four”), “Speed Buggy” (which was either an early precursor of “Scooby Doo”, or an attempt to cash in on the “Shaggy” character from same), “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids” (a sort of spy-kids thing featuring a popular singer of the time? It’s been a long while since I saw it, but I do remember the whole thing breaking for a musical number every episode); and “Josie and the Pussycats”.

  87. Rocky and Bullwinkle. Very funny and absurd. I remember a Mr.Peabody-and-Sherman episode in which Mr. Peabody, attempting to win an auto race, breaks the glass covering his car’s speedometer and pushes the needle up. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve attended engineering meetings where someone was proposing doing essentially the same thing.

  88. Rocky and Bullwinkle. Also, Looney Toons and Popeye, especially the old black and white Popeye ones with the ships doors opening and closing at the beginning – Goon Island was a good one (“hair today, goon tomorrow”). Those old ones had a bunch of puns in them.

  89. What these “cartoons” whereof you speak?

    We didn’t have a TV, but I’ve made up for my cartoon deficiency as an adult by being willing to walk through fire and ice for anything with Wallace and Gromit.

    No, I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. Why do you ask?

  90. I didn’t have TV until I was 13 or 14. And even then nothing was going to get me to wake up on Saturday morning.

  91. Definitely the classics everyone is mentioning, such as Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Scooby Doo, etc. I really liked the Jetsons and the live action Land of the Lost. :)

  92. I would watch almost anything as a kid, but nothing from Saturday mornings stuck except for D&D. I liked GI Joe and Transformers on weekday afternoons, but could never get a decent signal, so ended up renting them at the video store. In later years I found SWATKats, The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, and everything that Bruce Timm was involved in.

  93. Super Six. Space ghost. George of the Jungle though the true highlight of that show for me was Super Chicken. Jonny Quest though I first saw it as an evening program. Tintin.

    Much later in life, Kim Possible.

  94. I’ve always had a thing for Felix the Cat, still my fave.

    After that, Space Ghost and Johnny Quest.

  97. Star Trek, the animated series, and it’s not even close. Didn’t even know the original series existed until my mom told me about it. I waited years for the series to come to the local are as re-runs.

  98. As a young kid, I only got to watch TV at my grandparents place, when my parents left me there while they managed church camps. So I don’t recall if my first cartoons were Saturday mornings, or some other mornings. With that caveat:

    Since others have mentioned Thunderbirds (is it really a cartoon?) I’m going to place that at the top of the list. My grandparents were somewhat annoyed that I insisted on getting up at 6am to see it every time I visited. I can still hum the theme tune, and what an wonderful pompous rousing theme it was! And waiting to see what Thunderbird 2 would deliver this time! And the amazing, mostly positive future they portrayed!

    Since then, the only morning cartoon that enthralled me as much was 20 years later; Batman: The Animated Series is probably the truest depiction of the Caped Crusader ever to escape the confines of a comic book.

  99. I know it dates me but I was always a fan of the Sud and Marty Kroft stuff like HR Pufnstuff, Liddsville, the Bugaloos, Banana Splits, Sigmund & the Sea Monsters….

  100. Angry Beavers and Darkwing Duck (though I’m not sure if the latter was on Saturday mornings or nights). I guess I’m younger than most of the other commenters.

  101. Wow, that clip brings back memories. My Saturday morning memories start in the early 70s. Bugs Bunny Road Runner was a staple. I had many other favorite shows that came and went. The original Scooby Doo show, Superfriends, Space Ghost, Star Trek (the cartoon), and Planet of the Apes (the cartoon) were all shows I tried never to miss.

  102. Rocky and Bullwinkle and their compatriots, Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner. In later years I got the hairy eyeball from an opera fan boyfriend when I cracked up over the name of the opera Boris Godunov.

  103. The big three: Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner, Tom & Jerry and Rocky & Bullwinkle. I mostly enjoyed the slapstick and thwarting of predators in Roadrunner and Tom and Jerry. Bugs Bunny was more subtle, but was one of the main sources of meme-transmission in a pre-internet age. The animation in Rocky and Bullwinkle is almost horrid when I view it now, but the dialog still cracks me up.

    I also have a soft spot for Animaniacs, which reaches similar levels of comedy but dates to a period when I was in college, so it’s not a childhood memory. Also, it technically wasn’t a Saturday-morning cartoon, as it aired several days a week.

  104. Pre-scrappy Scooby Doo, Fat Albert, Rocky and Bullwinkel and the musical Looney Toons.

  105. Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner.
    Jonny Quest
    Space Ghost

    I didn’t get into Wacky Races and Rocky and Bullwinkle until I was a little older.

    Not animation, but did anyone else watch the live-action Shazam/Isis? I actually based the look (if not the powers) of one of my Champions characters on Isis.

  106. Felix The Cat. And his magical polka-dot bag.

    But your Jedi mind tricks do not fool me, young Scalzi! I bet the novel is only unfinished in a technical sense. You’re just waiting to type the last full stop and surprise us all after you’ve learned all our childhood secrets.

    Just finish the novel and reward yourself with pineapple pizza and that fake Coke you like.

  108. I watched almost anything and everything from around 1970 to 1995, and I gotta say, I’d be hard-pressed to name a favorite – and that’s restricting things to actual cartoons (as opposed to live-action shows like Electro-Woman and Dyna-Girl; live-puppet shows like the Kroft’s stuff, and straight puppet shows like Thunderbirds). The classic Warner Bros. was great and certainly is in my top 5, but ReBoot was incredible in it’s day (and holds up well now), I have nostalgic soft spots for oddball shows like Clue Club and Barbapappa, and a lot of things from the 90’s animation resurgence were fantastic – the DC Animated Universe stuff, Dexter’s Lab, the early Ren and Stimpy which more or less sparked that era).

    Why you ask the tough ones?!

  109. Yep Bugs Bunny is still number one in my book!

    They were all mentioned previously but my other favorites included:

    1.StarBlazers and Battle of the Planets (afternoons after school)
    2. Space Ghost, Johnny Quest and Herculoids (I remember watching them as some trifecta combo)
    3. Rocky & Bullwinkle, along with the other Jay Ward stuff.

    A bit unrelated, but I recieved my baptism to Godzilla and those other 50-60s sci-fi and monster movies on Saturday afternoons on WUAB 43 (Cleveland). SuperHost was awesome!

  110. Scooby-doo with H. R. Puffnstuff as a close second. I loved Underdog, but I remember that as an after school show and not Saturday morning.

  112. Ah! Seeing that clip has made me happier than you can know. Even down here in Australia, we had the Bugs Bunny show! Road Runner was always my favourite. And man, it still makes me laugh! My least favourite was Pepe Le Pew every time he came on I had this sense of wasted time. Why put this on when they could be making more Road Runner and Bugs Bunny cartoons?

  114. Live-action rather than cartoon, but ARK II is probably my all-time favorite. (Great introduction to post-apocalyptic SF – with the idea that we could fix even that big a break.)

  117. Max the Mouse “Hi I’m Max the Mouse. I’m 200 years old”

    and Roger Ramjet “Proton Energy Pills”

    and Spiderman and Rocket Robin Hood (which actually shared scenes).

  118. @Surfacing lurker:
    I’m with you. Freakazoid was the already awesomeness of Loony Toons dialed to eleven…

  119. It’s maybe worth noting that if you’d asked me this question when I was a little tyke, I’d have told you about SuperTed and Spotty (the latter fictional name of whom I’d have pronounced with the faux English accent of a pre-schooler.

    SuperTed…

  120. Looney Tunes. Only the pre-1970s stuff. And only if they include the theoretically offensive stuff like Speedy Gonzalez. (My friends in Mexico have no idea why it is supposed to be offensive.)

  122. Popeye (in black and white) and Ruff and Reddy (before Hanna and Barbera forgot what animation was.)

  123. The Bugs Bunny Show and Rocky and Bullwinkle are the only ones that come to mind that I’d still watch now without cringing. Thundarr the Barbarian was uneven, and I admit to a sneaking fondness for Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians.

  124. I’m too young to remember when cartoons were only shown on Saturday morning.

    I do, however, remember when there was a whole host of cartoons that were only shown on Saturday morning.

    “Tales from the Cryptkeepr” (yes, a cartoon adaptation of “Tales from the Crypt”), “Mighty Max”, “Muppet Babies” – I remember liking all of these, and I remember them only airing on Saturday mornings.

    But the big standout – the one I was absolutely crazy about:

  125. The finest Sat Morning cartoon I watched and the gem of the last season where I was regularly watching them. The gem in the crown of my cartoon watching experiences.
    “The alien world of Mer is being devoured by Dark Water…”

  126. Beanie and Cecil. I think SpongeBob stole “Bikini Bottom” from “No Bikini Atoll”

  127. in the early 1950s when was ~6 i got [ as brits would say -> ] Gobsmacked by a cartoon at the neighborhood matinee. i’m guessing i only saw it the once but arguably set my life’s course as a devoted tree hugger / environmentalist / preteen planned parenthood subscriber, yada yada.
    “as the twig is bent so is the tree inclined” — alexander pope.

    synops, possibly enriched thru the decades: a canadian mountie in full dress uniform leans back against his one true love, Sylvia. happens Sylvia is a gorgeous evergreen, or maybe a redwood. duty calls our hero away for a lil bit, but he returns soon after. DISASTER: SYLVIA HAS BEEN TAKEN! popcorn forgotten, the audience cheers a long and wild pursuit as he desperately calls out Sillllviiaaa!! beloved is seen entering the dreaded sawmill, horrendous cutting sounds turned up to 11. the chase lost he throws himself into the maw of the monster that swallowed her whole.. .. total silence. Flash jump cut to him emerging on other side “victorious”, embracing a blanky-wrapped toothpick, toothy bawling as babies will,, roll credits (if any).

    whatever years later i choose to believe Sylvia and her hero are all better now.

    many times i’ve googled for this vid.. with no luck. someday a friend, or maybe a friend of a friend (of a friend) may recognize it. Do You??

    oh yeah, and thanks so much Mr Scalzi for a longshot renewal of the hunt.

  128. I always like Schoolhouse Rock better than the actual shows. I still like Schoolhouse Rock. I have several cover CDs from various types of bands that I play while I’m cleaning house. Wacky fun at Casa de Lesbos.

  130. G-Force: Guardians of Space/Battle of the Planets, Puff’n Stuff, Looney Tunes.

    I fondly remember The Friendly Giant, which ran on CBC until 1985. Granted, it was live action and puppets, not animation. I still can hum the opening tune, which wikipedia tells me was Early One Morning.

  131. > For cupertino jay: The 1939 cartoon you saw was called “The Birth of a Toothpick.”

    Thanks bunches BranBoy, excellent pattern matching. None of the website’s screengrabs matched distant memories, but there’s no question you nailed it. cartoonsof1939 website comment says it was on tv in the early 50s; tv as a possibility i’d discounted after imagining color. maaan, 6yo me was a grrreat visualizer.

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Athena Scalzi, editor – AMS
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