Saturday Cartoons: Taking the Good With the Bad

Remember Snagglepuss’ signature line, “Exit, stage left”? How about the theme song to “Josie and the Pussycats”? Have you ever asked yourself why the bad guys in “G.I. Joe” could not aim?

“Saturday Morning Fever: Growing Up With Cartoon Culture” (St. Martin’s Griffin) might be the book for you. The story begins with the rise of the Saturday morning cartoon ritual, as told by two guys who experienced it: Timothy Burke, 34, a cultural history professor at Swarthmore College, and his brother, Kevin, 29, a former editor of Film Threat and the Cartoon Kingdom magazines, who now works for Quentin Tarantino’s A Band Apart production company.

Saturday morning has not always been about cartoons. In the late 1950s, this time slot was home to mostly live-action programming, Kevin says. Cartoons, if they were shown at all on TV, appeared in the late afternoon or early evening, in front of a mixed audience of adults and children. Both “The Flintstones” and “Heckle and Jeckle” first appeared at night.

The introduction in 1965 of “The Beatles” cartoon on Saturday morning opened network execs’ eyes.

“The networks ordered more product, so there was more product,” he says. “Hanna-Barbera, Jay Ward Productions and Filmation began producing a host of new cartoons for television, advertisers realized it was a great way to reach children, and everything fell into place.”

By the time Saturday morning had become an institution in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a growing debate about its effects. The book devotes a good deal of space to framing arguments by critics, including politicians, pundits, the American Medical Assn. and others. Kidvid was blamed for violence, laziness--even obscure medical conditions such as “television malocclusion,” described as an abnormal arrangement of teeth caused by cradling the jaw in the hand while watching TV.

The Burke brothers don’t buy any of it.

“We believe that children have a much better ability to interpret material they are seeing than we give them credit for,” Kevin says. “If someone gets hit in the head with a frying pan on TV, children are not going to turn around and hit their friends with frying pans.”

An entire chapter is devoted to the shows themselves, from “Superfriends” to “Scooby Doo.” The authors also tackle tough questions, such as, “Was Scooby Doo a hidden drug user?” and “Can Plastic Man really stretch every part of his body?”

The book also acknowledges that much of Saturday morning programming was weak and taught consumerism. Remember “My Little Pony” and “Care Bears”?

“It’s the collective awareness of the bad and the good of children’s television that binds us together as a generation,” Kevin believes. “We look back and say, ‘That was crap.’ But at least it was our crap.”

Saturday morning fever was an institution until the mid-1980s, when “it was killed off by a combination of cable and ‘He-Man,’ and the rapid decline of [Saturday morning’s] commercial viability for the networks,” Kevin says.

In the 1990s, cartoons have come full circle. Shows like “South Park” and “The Simpsons” are filling evening time slots.

“The people who are creating cartoons now grew up watching Saturday morning [programs] in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Of course, their interest would lie in cartoons,” Kevin surmises. “The [sarcastic] tone of these shows is representative of our generation. Bugs Bunny was the king of the smartasses. It stands to reason that growing up on a steady diet of Bugs Bunny might turn you into a smartass too.”