Weekend TV : Local, International Fare for Easter to Include Mass, Parades, Cartoons

TV prayers, parties and parades will help celebrate Easter Sunday.

Early risers can start off with a live broadcast of the 68th annual “Easter Sunrise Service” from the Hollywood Bowl at 5:15 a.m. on Channels 9 and 56. Anna Maria Alberghetti, the African Children’s Choir and the International Children’s Choir are scheduled to participate.

Easter Mass with Pope John Paul II from St. Peter’s Square in Rome will air at 7:30 a.m. on Channel 7 and in Spanish on Channel 34 at 9:30 a.m.

Then, Tim and Daphne Maxwell Reid of “Frank’s Place” host the “Fourth Annual Easter Parade” down New York’s Fifth Avenue on Channels 2 and 8 at 9 a.m. “Walt Disney World’s Happy Easter Parade” from Orlando, Fla., follows at 10 a.m. on Channel 7 with Alan Thicke and Joan Lunden describing the festivities.

Easter morning for children might include the animated special “A Chucklewood Easter” (10 a.m. Channel 2), which features two bear cubs, colored eggs and the Easter Bunny’s secret factory.

For the more culturally inclined, 3,000 residents of Lindsborg, Kan., will perform Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion” at 12:30 p.m. on Channel 24, 1 p.m. on Channel 28.

ABC will cap the holiday with its new documentary, “The Unruly Dragon: China’s Yellow River,” at 10 p.m. The program marks the first time the People’s Republic of China has allowed foreign cameras to film the lives of the many ethnic groups that populate the banks of the nation’s fabled river.