In 1968, CBS began broadcasting their Saturday morning kid fare at an earlier hour, 8:00am, thanks to a growing baby boomer audience looking for cheap thrills. And these were some cheaply produced shows but they had a charm, being the first of their genres.
The other networks started in at 8:00am not long after the fall ratings came in and they realized CBS was clobbering the competition..
Superheroes had been hot on Saturdays for a few years,
Superman scored a huge audience share for CBS in 1967, this year The Man of Steel was tag teamed with the animated adventures of
Batman. ABC's
Batman live-action primetime series was still running, so Batman had two shows on two networks.
Hanna-Barbera and a few other smaller animation studios pumped out an amazing array of comic book inspired mind candy for 1968-69, some of it actually good.
Although Hanna-Barbera produced shows dominated the morning on all three networks,
The Archies made Filmation a force to be reckoned with for the next twenty years.
Here are shows based on fantasy concepts or comic book characters in 1968:
Super 6 / NBC
Year two, ran for three years - well-liked adventures of six super-powered do-gooders available for hire from Super
Service, Inc.
Adventures of Gulliver / ABC
Ginny Tyler also provided the voice Flirtacia in this cartoon based on the Jonathan Swift novel. 17 episodes ran for two years.
Spiderman / ABC
A rare second season of new episodes, leading
off with the 'Origin of Spiderman'. Stories for 1968-69 were
now 30 minutes in length, last season there were two 15 minute
episodes per show.
A third season was produced
for syndication - the series had the same theme song, but the
show took on a darker look and attitude with surrealistic watercolor
backgrounds (by DC artist Gray Morrow) and a new guy playing
Spidey's voice. Ralph Bakshi ('Fritz the Cat') produced the third season.
Note the jazzy music and use of still drawings to suggest movement.
Super President / NBC
You think Obama's powerful, this guy had real super-powers... almost as great as Obama's ability to listen to all of our calls and read all our emails. Huh?!?
Super President's second term was cut short - he was impeached mid-season because of low ratings. The producers of this cartoon had mega-success with 'The Pink Panther' on Saturday mornings.
WE ONLY SCRATCHED THE SURFACE -
EXPERIENCE THE ENTIRE 1968 SATURDAY MORNING LINE-UP!
When
did this all start? Perhaps at the very beginning of recorded history - the nifty fifties. Cowboys like Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger were the hottest properties on television, after watching these programs all afternoon kids naturally wanted to play shoot-em-up at home.
When western wranglers and pistol-waving cops started to lose favor in the early-'60s,
toy gun lines lost their key salespersons and innovative products had
to be created from scratch.
