Saturday Morning Cartoons

I was a fan growing up of Saturday morning cartoons. I don't mean the Japanese Anime or the type on tv today such as that carried by Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network. I mean the type like in the late 60s and early 70s and mostly on CBS. Back in those days TV stations weren't even on the air all night. They usually signed off by 1 am and there was static on the air until just before sign-on when you got to see something like this:

Now I didn't know what this was but I did know what was about to come on....the best entertainment for a Saturday morning! CBS seemed to have the best lineup of cartoons and this was before the days of news programming and special programs on a Saturday so it was definitely an all kids morning. During the summer we would eagerly await the CBS promos to see what would be the new lineup for Saturday. They even advertised it in the papers:

As you can see Saturday mornings were full of cartoons. Usually Saturday started off with Captain Kangaroo and later Mr Mayor (Bob Keeshan in another role). After that it might be Bugs Bunny and Road Runner, The Archies, Richie Rich, Superman, Wacky Races, Underdog, Scooby Doo, Fat Albert....every type of cartoon you could imagine at some time or another showed up on tv. There were even live-action programs like The Banana Splits, H.R. Pufnstuf, or Land of the Lost.

Some real live people were even turned into cartoons...The Beatles, WWF Wrestlers, Jackson Five, and the Brady Bunch for example.

As time went on the networks started dropping the Saturday morning cartoons and substituted news programming for the most part. There were some animal adventures that showed up such as "Wild Kingdom" but it wasn't the same. The best era of cartoons ended by the mid 70s.

For your enjoyment, a retrospective of 60s and 70s cartoons with some commercials of the time thrown in for good measure.