LXB | Saturday Morning Cartoons

This week's League of Extraordinary Bloggers assignment is extremely tough:

You’ve been hired to program the ultimate Saturday morning experience for kids across the nation. Create your own ideal Saturday morning cartoon schedule.

I have mixed feelings about the concept of Saturday morning cartoons. On the one hand, they were an enormous, fun part of my childhood. I'm not a morning person and had to be dragged out of bed every weekday to get to school, but come Saturday morning I was up by 6:00 am - without an alarm clock - to get my cereal with my brothers and sit in front of the TV to watch the test pattern until the first show came on. Then we'd camp out there until noon, which is about the time our folks started shooing us out of the house to play or help with chores.

Every fall we'd start looking in comics and newspapers for ads like the one above, figuring out our schedule for the coming season. Since there were three of us, that sometimes took some negotiation. Those are excellent memories and nostalgia for them makes me want to share that experience with my son. For a long time, I complained loudly about the death of the Saturday morning line-up and lamented the loss of the Good Old Days.

But like with most things, the Good Old Days of Saturday morning cartoons weren't as objectively Good as we remember. David and I are still able to share the fun of watching awesome cartoons, but we don't have to wait for a particular time slot on one day of the week to do it. What's more, we don't have to worry about scheduling conflicts if Super Friends is on at the same time as Scooby Doo. Or sit through lesser-of-evil shows because The Smurfs and Rubik's Cube are all that's on in that time slot. We have entire networks devoted to nothing but cartoons, and thanks to Netflix and TiVo, we can customize our experience. We can watch only the series and episodes that we want and we can marathon our favorites. My ten-year-old self would have shook with giddiness just imagining that something like that was possible. Frankly, as dear as I hold them in my memory, I don't want to go back to Saturday morning cartoons.

That said, if Cartoon Network gave me the job of coming up with a block of programming for Saturday mornings, I definitely have thoughts on how I'd fill that time. Based on my own memories of how those mornings went, I'd start my block around 6:00 am and finish up at noon. That's six hours of great cartoon watching.

There are a couple of ways to do this. I could fill that block with twelve of my favorite, half-hour shows, but there are some big disadvantages to that. First of all, I can only pick twelve shows, which is about impossible. Even worse, twelve shows don't fill 52 weeks of programming for the year unless I show a lot of reruns. I know that's what they used to do on Saturday mornings and - dang it - if it was good enough for us back then... but I think there's a better option.

I like the idea of six, hour-long, themed blocks of programming. That way you could work your way through a series (or a couple of half-hour shows in each block) and when you reached the last episode, start another series with a similar theme. Many of the shows I grew up with had shockingly short runs, but they felt like they were on longer because the networks re-ran them so many times. If you don't repeat them, you can get through a lot of great stuff over the course of a year. So here's how I'd split up the time and some of the shows I'd include in each block.

6:00 am: Comedy Hour

• Looney Tunes
• Tom and Jerry
• Pretty much all the Hanna Barbera comedy stuff (Flintstones, Yogi Bear, etc.)
• Early Popeye and Woody Woodpecker
• Tiny Toons Adventures
• Spongebob Squarepants

7:00 am: Teen Mystery Hour

• Scooby Doo, Where Are You?
• The New Scooby Doo Movies
• Mystery, Inc.
• Archie
• Josie and the Pussycats
• The Pebbles and Bam-Bam Show
• Goober and the Ghost Chasers
• Speed Buggy
• Funky Phantom
• Jabberjaw

8:00 am: Adventure Hour

• Jonny Quest
• Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle
• Filmation's Lone Ranger and Zorro series
• Hong Kong Phooey
• Valley of the Dinosaurs
• The Powerpuff Girls
• Samurai Jack
• Tutenstein
• Codename: Kids Next Door
• The Secret Saturdays

9:00 am: DC Superheroes Hour

• Fleischer Superman
• Adam West Batman
• Super Friends
• Live action Shazam!
• The Secrets of Isis
• Batman: The Animated Series
• Superman: The Animated Series
• Justice League Unlimited
• Static Shock
• Batman Beyond
• The Batman
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold
• Beware the Batman

10:00 am: Marvel Superheroes Hour

• '60s Spider-Man
• Spidey Super Stories (those shorts that used to run on The Electric Company)
• Live action Spider-Man show
• Bill Bixby's Incredible Hulk
• Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends
• '90s X-Men cartoon
• X-Men: Evolution
• The Spectacular Spider-Man
• Wolverine and the X-Men
• Marvel Super Hero Squad
• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes
• Ultimate Spider-Man

11:00 am: SciFi Hour

• Space Ghost
• The Herculoids
• Star Trek: The Animated Series
• The New Adventures of Flash Gordon
• Ark II
• Planet of the Apes TV show
• Land of the Lost
• Classic Battlestar Galactica
• Buck Rogers in the 25th Century 
• Ben 10
• The Future is Wild
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars
• Sym-Bionic Titan

And we're done at noon in time for lunch. I'm sure I missed some great ones in each category - especially more recent stuff - so please tell me what I should've included in the comments.

LXB | That little droid and I have been through a lot together

I'm steadily catching up to the rest of the League, but thanks to the wise council of our intrepid leader, Brian, starting next week I'm going to skip ahead a bit and go live with the group. I'll still play makeup on the assignments I've missed, but even though it'll hurt my pretend OCD to go out of order, it'll be more fun to get back in the game earlier. To finish up this week though, here's another catch-up assignment.

What is the one item in your collection you would save if your house was being swallowed by a sink hole, carried off in a tornado, and then swept away in a flood?

This took some thinking. Like I said earlier, I don't really collect much anymore. A lot of what I've collected in the past is in storage bins, but I do have a few things on bookshelves in my office. I figure that's a good indication that I value them more than - say - that old Six Million Dollar Man action figure with the threadbare uniform or even the re-issued Millenium Falcon playset I was so happy to finally get as an adult after not having it as a child. In the Falcon's case, not displaying it is more about size than it is the value I place on it, but still...if it was that important to me, I'd likely make room.

One of the reasons that it's not is that it's a re-issue. That means that it came with some cool features that the original Falcon playsets didn't, but it also means that I don't have as much emotional attachment to it. I took it out of the box and flew it around a little while, blowing up the cat with my pretend blasters, but I didn't spend hours making up stories about it the way I did with other toys when I was little. Like my Star Wars figures.

What I'd grab first from my collection is the small handful of original Star Wars figures I still have: R2-D2, Han Solo, and Chewbacca. I may have a lightsaber-less Luke Skywalker somewhere, but he's not on the shelf with those other three. I have no idea what happened to Darth Vader, Obi-Wan, Leia, C-3PO, the Tusken Raider, the stormtrooper, and the Death Star commander. Maybe my brothers have those. It doesn't really matter. It's not about the figures themselves.

Though Han and Chewie were always my favorites (that's why I coveted that Falcon playset so much) and I love the cool, clicking noise R2 makes when you turn his head, those toys are special because they represent a huge part of my childhood: both emotionally and in terms of time spent playing with them with my brothers. Nothing else on any of those shelves comes close.

The rest of the League also has stuff they wouldn't want to lose and, like me, a couple of them are particular childhood toys. Life With Fandom is attached to one from another series, while Branded in the '80s has a different Star Wars toy that he can't give up. There are also some awesome items in other people's collection. I especially love Brian's King Kong model and Lair of the Dork Horde's Mego Conan. But my favorite post of all is the one by Flashlights Are Something to Eat that not only explains his blog title and URL, but includes clips from the cassette tapes he and his brother made as kids. Such awesome memories. That's what collecting is really about for me.