Saturday morning

From TeeVeePedia, the Internet TV Encyclopedia.

Saturday morning was once a magical time on television, when the network schedules were filled with programs, mostly cartoons, designed to sell sugar-infused cereal and cheap imported toys to children (with an occasional 3-minute break for math, grammar and civics lessons).

Producing teams such as Sid and Marty Krofft, Hanna-Barbera, and The Wonder Twins ruled the airwaves, having developed mechanisms for delivering highly-targeted messages of consumerism directly into children's brains via the flickering images on the tv set.

But faced with competition from cable networks for children's pocketbooks, the networks have largely dropped this format, and instead focus on weekend editions of their morning shows (which contain even less actual content than their weekday counterparts, if that's possible) and reruns of programming from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel.

Programs from the Golden Age of Saturday Morning Television

• The Amazing Speidermann
• The Brady Ghouls
• Dungeons & Dragons
• Challenge of the Superfriends
• Electra Woman and Dyna Girl
• Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids
• Gabe Kaplan and His Amazing Friends
• Gilligan's Planet
• Jim Henson's Muppet Teens
• Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space
• The New Cthulhu/Nyarlathotep Adventures
• Schoolhouse Rock
• Scooby Doo, Where Are You?
• Sid and Marty Krofft's Bong-O-Lantern
• Sid and Marty Krofft's H.R. Pufnstuf
• Sid and Marty Krofft's Land of the Lost
• Sid and Marty Krofft's Magical Space Trip
• Sid and Marty Krofft's Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
• The Smurfs
• Super Globetrotters
• Thundarr the Barbarian