Grieving for the likes of Camp Candy...

Sometimes I feel the need to take a moment for reflection… a moment where I can acknowledge the things that are slowly fading into the gentle tapestry of my collective consciousness, and now exist only as a memory of what they once were. I reflect upon important things… significant things… things that have had a profound effect on my life in one way or another…

Currently, I’m lamenting the loss of Saturday morning cartoons.

Have you taken a look at the major networks on a Saturday morning recently? It’s a travesty! Sure, there’s no Bugs or Tweety… no Donald or Goofy… I accept that, with the advent of cable, and Corporate America being what it is and all… but tell me, where’s today’s version of the Smurfs? Or their lesser-appreciated red-headed stepchild of a cousin, the Snorks? And what’s going to fill the void left by the departure of Shirt Tales? Where am I supposed to get my fix of animals in cotton T’s doing good, overcoming complex emotional issues, and living in a hollowed out tree? Oh, and can you give me ANY good reason why Alvin & the Chipmunks aren’t partaking in some madcap adventure that forces them to sing an adorable rendition of 50 Cent’s “In da Club” while running away from an angry sous chef who just had his entire first course trampled on?

On second thought, that last question kinda answers itself… there’s just something inherently wrong with the chipmunks (even Alvin) singing cheerfully about Bitches and Hos.

OK, so maybe it’s no longer possible to have exactly the same type of cartoons that I had, but that still leaves the door open to one of the most endearing types of Saturday morning entertainment…

“Grab your pixie sticks kids, it’s time for a crudely drawn, overly hyped, quick cash-in on popular culture!”

You’d think that’d be a natural in today’s business environment…

oh come on, you know what I’m talking about.

In my day, I had Pac-Man and Friends… I had Punky Brewster… I had Dragon’s Lair… I had Mr. T… Apparantly (though I can’t say I ever recall seeing it), I even had Rubik, the Amazing Cube!

Every year we’d get a new onslaught of cartoons, engineered to take advantage of whatever trend, fad, or tv show had been popular the year before. That’s how we got Alf, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters and The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley. It’s also why we sat through Donkey Kong, Q*Bert, Frogger, Pitfall and Pole Position (80s cartoons were very big on video games) The California Raisins were even on the air, and they were the spinoff of a friggin’ commercial!

For a child with a short attention span, growing up during this time was sheer bliss. A Saturday morning spent with a bowl of fruit loops and the cable box on my lap… yes, I said a cable “box” …it was bulky, had pushbuttons for the channels, and was attached to another box on the tv via a 30 ft length of wire (that often served double-duty as a defensive weapon during the controller wars of ’84)… anyway, it was a beautiful thing…

So what happened to it all?

One word… Screech.

In the fall of 1989, NBC unleashed Saved by the Bell on an unsuspecting public as part of its new TNBC Saturday mornings. The rest, as they say, is contrived poorly written history. Teen shows took off, and proceeded to infest the majority of the Saturday morning schedule (they were so popular in fact, that no one seemed to bat an eye when the entire class at Bayside repeated their Senior year). The traditional Saturday morning cartoon began to fade into nothing more than a memory.

And that, is truly sad.

Nowadays, it’s a bit more varied… Yeah, there’s still a host of teen shows raining acne on my morning airwaves, but there’s also news and sports for kids and a couple poor attempts at computer animation. Adding insult to injury, in another alarming trend, the weekday morning shows (Like Today and Good Morning America) have also apparently decided that they’re just SOOOOOO important, they need top be on seven days a week now (whatever happened to waking up, turning on the TV, and not be able to immediately being able to recognize the fact that it’s the weekend?). I guess the closest thing we have now to the good old-fashioned pop culture rip off would be the kids’ reality shows… which from what I can tell are a knock off of survivor, and for some reason, a kids version of trading spaces (oh wow, next week I get to make an armoire out of duct tape and a refrigerator box!).

It’s all ok I guess… things change after all, it’s the natural order of the universe… but all things considered, I’d much rather be watching the new adventures of Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines.

And that’s, “one to grow on…”




(or if you younger kids would prefer… “The more you know”)