Saturday Morning: 1968 - VIDEOS

The operative word to describe the 1968-69 Saturday morning schedule was 'change'. After two years of superhero and action/adventure cartoons the networks and the animation studios decided to shake things up a bit. When you take a look at the world-altering events that occurred forty years ago, moving away from action and into some more amusing and less dangerous fare was not a surprising move.

That doesn't mean that Saturday mornings were totally void of any type of heroic action in 1968. In addition to shows like Spider-Man, The Herculoids, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, all entering their second seasons, three of the seven new series premiered that featured a hard-action bent. The rest focused more on humor and slapstick then on flying beings who could shoot beams out of their hands. And, out of the seven, five of the shows were the cornerstones of trends that would continue well into the 1970s.

So, if you have your Thing Maker in front of you, let's journey back in time to 1968.

Gallery: Saturday morning: 1968

ABC only had two new shows on the schedule as The New Casper Cartoon Show, Spider-Man, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Fantastic Four, and George of the Jungle all returned. Both shows featured adventures through unknown territories. The first, Hanna-Barbera's The Adventures of Gulliver, was loosely based on the book Gulliver's Travels. For this cartoon it was Gary Gulliver and his dog Tagg who, while searching for his father, end up shipwrecked near the kingdom of Lilliput. After Gulliver and the Lilliputians resolve their differences he continues the search for his father and the treasure he had found. Along the way Gulliver encounters the evil Captain Leech -- a man who is after his father's treasure map.

The other cartoon to premiere on ABC was the Filmation-produced Fantastic Voyage. Based on the 1966 film of the same name, Voyage featured the adventures of the C.M.D.F -- Combined Miniature Defense Force -- a government team that would shrink down to microscopic size in order to battle against unseen and unsuspecting enemies. Sometimes this would be genetic, just like it was in the movies, sometimes the criminal would be human in nature. The voice of the C.M.D.F commander, Jonathan Kidd, was Ted Knight, a man who was the voice of many Prescott-Scheimer-Sutherland (the founders of Filmation) creations in the late 60s.

CBS, like the last two years, led the way in series premieres and trendsetters with a total of four new offerings. The first of these was Go-Go Gophers. Actually, Gophers wasn't that new -- it was one of the segments on the Underdog show during its first few seasons. The show featured an Indian tribe composed of two gophers whose goal was to keep their sacred land protected from the nearby Calvary post. While not the most exciting cartoon, Gophers was a trendsetter because it was the first time a network had scheduled original Saturday morning fare prior to 9:00 am. It also knocked long-time player Captain Kangaroo out of the weekend market for the first time since its premiere in the 1950s.

The only new Hanna-Barbera program on CBS was The Great Race-inspired cartoon Wacky Races. Featuring a group of 11 different cars in a series of road rallies across the globe, Races was one of the first series to feature a large group of regular characters (23, plus the unseen narrator) as well as focus the attention of the show on the villains rather than the heroes of the series. So much attention was given to the villains, Dick Dastardly and Mutley, that they received their own spin-off series in the 1969. In addition to all of this, Races began a trend of slapstick/chase cartoons that would really take off in the next year.

The other two cartoons that premiered on CBS in the 1968-69 season were the breakout hits for the fledgling Filmation animation studio. One of them would be a trendsetter that would set the stage for other cartoons for years to come, while the other featured two voice actors that would have a regular place on Saturday mornings for nearly 20 years. The first show, The Batman/Superman Hour, was an amalgam of the older New Adventures of Superman/Adventures of Superboy cartoons with the first animated adventures of Batman, Robin and Batgirl.

As the show was ordered during the peak of the live-action Batman series on ABC, and the licensing of the animated series unknowingly went to Filmation, the voices of Adam West and Burt Ward were not used in the cartoon. Instead, actor Olan Soule and Los Angeles Disc Jockey Casey Kasem became the voices of Batman and Robin. Both voice-actors would move over to the same roles when Hanna-Barbera took over the DC Comics license in the 70s and would remain the voices of HB's Batman and Robin well into the 80s.

The second show offered by Filmation was the one that really laid down the framework for Saturday morning programming for the next few years. The Archie Show was the first in a decade-long line of cartoons that featured characters from the Archie comic books. Starring Archie, Reggie, Jughead, and the rest of the gang from Riverdale High, The Archie Show was most famous for its musical element -- The Archies musical group. During each of the 17 episodes produced for 1968 there would be two Archie's songs performed by Archie Andrews and his friends Reggie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica.

The Archie Show was a trendsetter in many ways. First, like The Beatles cartoon before it, and the live-action Monkees that aired in prime time, Archie prominently featured music that was playing on the radio at the time. Second, it set the stage for some of the first animated music videos. Granted, The Beatles had their own share of musical romps on their show, but on The Archie Show the musical numbers were separate from the story itself.

Third, the show introduced canned laughter to Saturday morning programming. Now, before you start writing that correction comment, remember that cartoons like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, which had a laugh track, were originally on the network's nighttime schedules before they jumped over to Saturday mornings. The use of of the laugh track would pave the way for shows like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and Josie and the Pussycats to use canned laughter in later years.

Finally, The Archie Show gave itself and other animation studios the impetus to create other cartoons featuring groups of characters that just happened to have musical interests. In the case of Filmation, those bands, while performing, would look a lot like The Archies did when they performed. As an example, view the following musical number from an episode of The Brady Kids, which premiered in 1972.

There was only one new entry on the NBC schedule during the 1968-69 season: Hanna-Barbera's The Banana Splits Adventure Hour. One of the most expensive shows that Hanna-Barbera had produced up to that time The Banana Splits mixed live-action and animated segments into a one hour program. While many local stations broadcast shows featuring a live host introducing various cartoons, this was the first time since Ruff & Reddy that Hanna-Barbera had produced this type of programming for Saturday mornings. And, it was also a trendsetter as it marked the return of original live-action programming to the weekends.

The live action segments featured Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snork (or Snorky, if we are getting technical) -- a group of costumed characters (designed by Sid and Marty Kroftt, who would go on to bigger and more psychedelic things) who were also a band. The meetings of the "Banana Splits Club", many of them taking place at Six Flags Over Texas, would be wrap-arounds for three cartoons and one live-action show. The Splits would also perform musical numbers from time to time to fill the space.

During the first season the three cartoons were The Arabian Knights, The Three Musketeers and Micro Ventures. Knights was the story of a unique group of heroes with extraordinary powers who banded together to fight the corrupt ruler of Baghdad. Musketeers featured the animated adventures of the characters created by Alexandre Dumas. Micro Ventures was similar to the concept of ABC's Fantastic Voyage -- a professor and his children would shrink down in a dune buggy in order to view the world from an insects point of view.

The only live-action series to air on The Banana Splits was Danger Island. Directed by Richard Donner and featuring a young Jan-Michael Vincent, the show centered around a group of explorers who were looking for the lost city of Tubania on a chain of islands in the Pacific. Pursuing these explorers were an inept (of course) group of pirates led by Captain Mu-Tan. Each episode of Danger Island was 10 minutes long and would end in a cliffhanger.

As you see, 1968 was a year of transition for Saturday mornings. And, while there were fewer premieres that year, those shows that were new set the stage for the total transformation of the schedule from one full of superheroes to one full of pies in the face and pratfalls. We'll look at that transformation next time as we explore the year 1969, which featured a pink panther, a detective dog, and the first solo outing for Sid and Marty Kroftt.

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