Once upon a time, Saturday mornings meant something.
Starting in the mid to late 60s, programming started to pick up in focus and quality for kids all concentrated on Saturday morning.
By about 1970 they had it down and in my opinion had a great ten year run. So many shows did so well with merchandising by 1980 or so the cartoons were no longer created for kids, but the merchandise/toys cart was put ahead of the actual cartoon horse.
Ten more years of mucking with cartoons "for the good of the children" went even further down the hole. Then, there was just so much other entertainment all the time the "holiness" of the Saturday morning cartoons is long gone.
Ah, but if you were a pre-school/grade school kid from about 1970 to 1980, it was magic. No recording, no streaming, no internet, no video games. You had a few special hours just for you on the TV every Saturday morning. You saw it then, or got lucky with a repeat, or never saw it again.
I have a few memories of Scooby Doo, SuperFriends, Valley of the Dinosaurs, SpeedBuggy, etc. from that era. There were even Star Trek and Planet of the Apes cartoons to mirror live action shows. And one special niche on Saturday morning was what I call "live action cartoons." ISIS, Shazamm!, and, Land of the Lost.
I was five years old and just started first grade when I woke up Saturday morning. I climbed on the counter, got down a bowl of Cheerios, went to the table, got into the parent's coffee sugar bowl, dumped half a dozen heaping spoons of sugar on there, poured on the milk, and headed for the TV.
Thirteen inches of black and white with NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS on VHF and two more channels on UHF. And I was rewarded with a show with dinosaurs and the kids got their own knives! Too cool. Not even counting the monkey cave man friend, power crystals, and lizard/insect scary people that hissed and had the coolest sling-shot crossbow things ever.
I loved this show. Heck, there was a blond named Holly in my class that thanks to this show I still have a crush on to this day in addition to the actual Holly from the show.
Now, for the record, unless you have child hood memories of this show, you are not going to like it. Groovy crystals, a typical 70s twenty something year old actor playing a teenager and rocking the wide open shirt, corny dialog, kumbaya themes delivered by a so much more enlightened and hipper than anyone generation a decade before they red lined the greed and consumption meter, etc.
But where else in the world in the middle of the 70s was a kid going to get to watch an Allosaurus throw down face to face with a T. Rex?
IF you experienced this show as part of your childhood, and IF you have a few grade school aged kids left, buy the set and enjoy.
Some of the episodes have some pretty cool concepts by good writers, it's very nostalgic, and it is just plain fun.
Starting in the mid to late 60s, programming started to pick up in focus and quality for kids all concentrated on Saturday morning.
By about 1970 they had it down and in my opinion had a great ten year run. So many shows did so well with merchandising by 1980 or so the cartoons were no longer created for kids, but the merchandise/toys cart was put ahead of the actual cartoon horse.
Ten more years of mucking with cartoons "for the good of the children" went even further down the hole. Then, there was just so much other entertainment all the time the "holiness" of the Saturday morning cartoons is long gone.
Ah, but if you were a pre-school/grade school kid from about 1970 to 1980, it was magic. No recording, no streaming, no internet, no video games. You had a few special hours just for you on the TV every Saturday morning. You saw it then, or got lucky with a repeat, or never saw it again.
I have a few memories of Scooby Doo, SuperFriends, Valley of the Dinosaurs, SpeedBuggy, etc. from that era. There were even Star Trek and Planet of the Apes cartoons to mirror live action shows. And one special niche on Saturday morning was what I call "live action cartoons." ISIS, Shazamm!, and, Land of the Lost.
I was five years old and just started first grade when I woke up Saturday morning. I climbed on the counter, got down a bowl of Cheerios, went to the table, got into the parent's coffee sugar bowl, dumped half a dozen heaping spoons of sugar on there, poured on the milk, and headed for the TV.
Thirteen inches of black and white with NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS on VHF and two more channels on UHF. And I was rewarded with a show with dinosaurs and the kids got their own knives! Too cool. Not even counting the monkey cave man friend, power crystals, and lizard/insect scary people that hissed and had the coolest sling-shot crossbow things ever.
I loved this show. Heck, there was a blond named Holly in my class that thanks to this show I still have a crush on to this day in addition to the actual Holly from the show.
Now, for the record, unless you have child hood memories of this show, you are not going to like it. Groovy crystals, a typical 70s twenty something year old actor playing a teenager and rocking the wide open shirt, corny dialog, kumbaya themes delivered by a so much more enlightened and hipper than anyone generation a decade before they red lined the greed and consumption meter, etc.
But where else in the world in the middle of the 70s was a kid going to get to watch an Allosaurus throw down face to face with a T. Rex?
IF you experienced this show as part of your childhood, and IF you have a few grade school aged kids left, buy the set and enjoy.
Some of the episodes have some pretty cool concepts by good writers, it's very nostalgic, and it is just plain fun.