Build Date: Sat Feb 22 05:50:25 2025 UTC
It's the fucking Web. Don't expect documentation.
-- Mr. Bad
It's Saturday Morning. Watch Some Half-Century Old Cartoons
2021-10-23 15:51:57
"Grandpa, tell us what TV was like half a century ago?"
"Well, sometimes things got really weird...."
It has stars! And a synthesizer! And 49 years later you can still watch it on YouTube! Of course I'm talking about the opening credits for the "Saturday Superstar Movie" -- one of the strangest programs ever broadcast over America's airwaves.
Grandpa Destino: "See, back in my day, you couldn't watch cartoons 24/7, 'cuz there weren't no such thing as the Cartoon Network. Nope, they only showed cartoons on one day. Saturday! Oh, how we kids loved Saturday mornin'... One glorious morning, on one day a week, all the networks would pile up all their cartoons like a big mess o' toys, and compete to see who could dazzle us children the most..."
So in 1972 ABC concocted an extravagant series of one-off cartoons they'd broadcast as hour-long "movies" starring a different character each week. And they'd billed the whole messy melange as "The Saturday Superstar Movies." Yes, that is Willie Mays. In a cartoon. The week before, it was Popeye.
In "Willie Mays and the Say-Hey Kid" -- which, again, is an hour-long cartoon -- a guardian angel agrees to help center fielder Willie Mays win the National League Pennant, but only if he agrees to be the godfather of an orphaned girl named Veronica.
And the season ended with animated adventures of Marlo Thomas's That Girl. "The Brady Kids on Mysterious Island" explained how Marcia and Greg met that inexplicable magic talking bird. There's a movie where Yogi Bear and his eco-terrorist pals flee a declining civilization in a flying ark. And, for some reason: Oliver Twist. (Because you know how much children love Dickensenian tales about impoverished orphans living in 19th-century pre-industrial England...)
But each week tried to offer its own answer to the question: who exactly qualifies as a "Saturday Superstar"? (The Banana Splits! Daffy Duck! Gidget! Lassie....) There was even an animated version of Lost in Space. And they must've known something, because more than one of these hour-long "movies" spawned an entire TV series.
But what's even weirder is someone's created a web page for the entire series on Wikipedia, so you can marvel at all the gratuitous cartoon-y goodness.
Grandpa Destino: Yep. They don't make 'em like that any more...
A cartoon version of Willie Mays. Yep....
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
It was the night of the Leonid meteor showers -- the perfect opportunity to break out the evil opaline liquor, get madder than hatters, and test wireless ethernet hardware... Would the plunging meteorites interfere with the 2.4GHz band? What about our delicate brain waves? (More...)
A Day in the Life of a Beverotologist
It was starting to look like a very boring Saturday, trapped as I was in the suburban wastelands of the outer Bay Area, so I called my Able Assistant (AA) and proposed that we perform some Spocktail field tests. For some time I've been working on creating the quintessential cinematic beverage and even tho' SMRL does most of its testing during nocturnal hours, this seemed an opportune time to roll up the sleeves of our labcoats and get some science done. While the beverotology creation tested this day (The Neurotoxin) must be deemed a success, this article focuses more the journey of the experimenters, rather then the science of beverotology. (More...)
40 Acres, a Mule, and a Crummy 90-Second Spot on Weekend Update
Consider the plight of the Black Man. The Black Man on "Saturday Night Live," I mean. Has there ever been a more pathetic thing than a token unredeemed for 28 years? Where is the NAACP when you really need them? (More...)
Songs Of Love And Special Things
Well, dear reader, there's no denying it: Spring has sprung. The air is pungent with the fertile aroma of Romance. And you know what goes with Romance, don't you? That's right, Lover, porn. And not just any porn, but the kind you can sing along to. (More...)
The Deep Dark Underbelly of the Star Wars Myth, or Ramayana Remembered
It's a fact: Star Wars is a blatant plagiarism of an ancient Asian legend, and the long lines of devout Star Wars freaks are really unscrupulous Asian copyright busters. From Indonesia to Thailand to Nepal, videos are available for sale or rent before they're even released in the US and UK due to this nerdy camcorder-clutching bunch. (More...)
