Saturday-Morning Television

SATURDAY-MORNING TELEVISION

Animation Rules

Saturday-morning television had been devoted to children's programming almost since the introduction of the medium, but the nature of the programming changed gradually over the decades. By the 1970s Saturday-morning television was virtually dominated by animated shows, many of them revivals of older features such as the Warner Bros, cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and other characters. One of the most popular new characters, the Pink Panther (premiered 1969), was created by Blake Edwards and featured music by Henry Mancini.

Cartoon Relevance

PBS's Sesame Street proved that education and entertainment were compatible in children's television. On the commercial networks some producers attempted to follow suit with socially conscious cartoons. In 1973, for instance, ABC introduced School-house Rock, a series of animated shorts on grammar, mathematics, and history. One of the most successful efforts was CBS's Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, introduced in 1972 and featuring Bill Cosby as a host who reinforced the moral at the end of each story. It set an industry trend in seeking input from educators and psychologists on each show's content. In general, children's programming during the 1970s became more sensitive to the social concerns of the decade. One area that resisted this trend was television violence, which increased in children's television during the decade just as it did in adult television, causing children's advocates to worry about the medium's potential for harm.

Live-Action's Last Stand

Live-action series, which constituted the bulk of Saturday-morning programming in earlier decades, held only a small percentage of the programs available. Superheroes appeared in the flesh, for instance, in shows such as Shazam!, The Secrets of Isis, and Electro Woman and Dyna Girl. One of the most popular of the live-action shows was Sid and Marty Krofft's Land of the Lost, about a family that finds itself in a strange prehistoric land after a rafting mishap.

The Limits of Marketing

Saturday-morning television for children was also noteworthy during the 1970s for the reforms that were made in how products were pitched to young audiences. Advertisers had capitalized on children's programming since the early days of television, but they became especially aggressive in the 1960s. Responding to pressure from advertisers, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) set aside sixteen minutes of every hour for advertising on Saturdays, as opposed to the nine and a half minutes per hour found in prime time. Consumer groups such as Action for Children's Television (ACT) forced the NAB to drop this figure to twelve minutes in 1973 and to nine and a half minutes in 1976. Reformers also succeeded in banning television hosts or characters from selling products to kids. Furthermore, a 1974 statement issued by the FCC declared that television stations must include children's programming, part of which must be educational. Television deregulation under the Reagan administration lessened the impact of these reforms during the next decade, but the Children's Television Act of 1990 once again limited commercial time on children's shows and mandated that shows contain some amount of educational and informational material.

Sources:

Les Brown, Les Brown's Encyclopedia of Television, third edition (Detroit & London: Gale, 1992);

Gary H. Grossman, Saturday Morning TV (New York: Dell, 1981).