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Title: Saturday Morning TV by Gary H. Grossman ISBN: 0-440-58361-6 Publisher: Dell Pub. Date: January, 1982 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $12.95

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Average Customer Rating: 2.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 1
Summary: Grossman Book is no happy trip back to kids tv!
Comment: In this first book to recall Saturday Morning TV.Mr.Grossman(The Author of "Superman:Serial To Cerial!")tries to point out:"What's Wrong With Kids TV Today!".He tries to show us all that Kids Tv went down the drain due to the networks using too many cartoons that ultilize extrem violence and a lack of real imagination to entertain and inspire children.And the constant use of cartoons has also taken away the talented and creative human beings that kids looked up to ,learned from and were entertained by during the early days of kids tv.While his book tries to explain the downfall of kids tv.His efforts are hampered by his angry tone and his misuse of information.While it's true that the networks and local stations have replaced the kids tv hosts/performers with film programs(Both live and animated).Mr.Grossman does not realize that there were other factors that percipitated the decline of kids tv.One being the complaints from parents,tv critics and educators about certain kids tv entertainers.Whose approach to comedy was made more for adults and to certain extent children, were unjustly deemed inappropriate by tv station execs and by the tv censor groups.Hence the station execs and censor groups forced these talented,creative and caring people off the air.Another factor(and Mr.Grossman only speaks of this in the book to a degree)is the constant promotions of junk food and junk toys by the hosts/performers on their shows.Which brought about the creation of Mrs.Peggy Charren's ACT(Action For Children's Television).Who forced The NAB and other tv programmers to pull live kids tv mc's off the air and to impose more appropriate educational kids tv shows.Created and supervised to the ACT's liking.Mr.Grossman's doesnot go into the flaws that are within the formats and characters of PBS TV's and the networks educational kids tv shows.Nor does he point out that The ACT's criticisims of the kids tv hosts/performers'promotions of their products and the profiting from these questionable promotions is not proven.( With the exception of""Buffalo Bob"Smith.Who owned the merchaindizing rights to "Howdy Doody"and he did for a time make monies off of "Howdy's"name and likeness. Many of these hosts/performers made little or no monies from selling their sponsors.The advertisers and the station/network execs made the money).And there is alot of facts that are wrong in this book."Officer Joe"Bolton was never the host of WPIX TV Ch.11 NYC's:"Popeye Show"."Captains:"Allen"Swift,Ray Heatherton and Jack McCarthy mc'd the show,"Buffalo Bob"Smith's "Howdy Doody"was not slated to be a regularily schedualed kids tv show,"Mr.Wizard"was sponsored for a time by a cerial co.as a limited kids educational series.That eventually became a hit show etc.Even the title of one chapter:"Uncle Hosts & Other Video Relations"is inappropriate and misleading."Uncle Hosts"usually refers to broadcasters forced to host cartoon shows at the insistence of station execs.Who wanted the hosts to introduce the films and promote sponsors.This chapter has has people like the late Paul Tripp"Mr.I.Magination!","Captain Kangaroo"(Bob Keeshan),The Late Mr.Rogers,"Officer Joe"Bolton,Sonny Fox,Soupy Sales,Pinkie Lee,Shari Lewis,"Big Brother Bob"Emory,"Capt.Bob"Cottle etc.occupying this chapeter and allowing the reader to believe that these talented and caring people did littl than promote products and provide information to their viewers and studio audiences("Provided the viewers with information that went from the useful to the mundane").A Phrase is both untrue and cruel at the same time.The information that these hosts/performers presented to their viewers and studio audiences were meaningful and allowed the kids to accept these people as their friends.Mr.Tripp,Mr.Keeshan and Mr.Rogers do not belong in this catagory.Since they were educators.Not Cartoon Show hosts.Soupy,Pinkie,Chuck McCann,Mr.Emory,Ms.Lewis were performers and Mr.Bolton,Mr.Cottle and Mr.Fox were wraparound hosts/performers.Who entertained and informed their viewers inbetween the films and the commcerials on their shows.This plus the fact that the book is filled with unnessicary and annoying trivia items(A convention that was placed in the manuscript by the book's original publisher:Dell Press) and the imcomplete and equally inaccurate listing of kids tv shows in the book's appendix.Makes it hard for anyone to accept this book as a genuine history or editorial of kids tv.With the exception of The photos of kids tv's past(most of them are very rare pieces of kids tv history from private collections)."Saturday Morning TV"is neither a happy or a meaningfull look into kids tv's past or present.Kevin S.Butler.

Rating: 4
Summary: The next best thing to a time machine
Comment: This book has been out of print for some time (my own copy dated from the early eighties) but those willing to undertake the search for this classic book on classic TV will not be disappointed.

Saturday morning, says Grossman, was not always the kids' progamming ghetto that it is today. In fact, in 1950 one would have been hard-pressed to find anything other than a test pattern. Programmers soon learned, however, that Saturday morning proved to be both a valid "proving ground" for new show ideas--and a dumping ground for those that had outlived their usefulness. Saturday morning had something for everyone in those days--kids would be drawn by old Republic Hopalong Cassidy serials, while their parents could watch such pioneering action shows as "Highway Patrol." Teens were treated to such forgotten (and forgettable) fare as "A Date With Judy" or "Paul Whiteman's TV Teen Club" (a sort of paleolithic "American Bandstand") as well as, yes, "American Bandstand."

And the puppet shows--at one time, television on Saturday morning was bursting with characters on and off strings, from "Judy Splinters" (a local L.A. phenomenon in the late forties and early fifties) to Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop (did you know Shari hosted her first show at SEVENTEEN)? As one might expect, all shows were live in those harrowing, primitive pre-tape days--Buffalo Bob Smith of "Howdy Doody" fame repeats the oft-told story of one Halloween broadcast when a young member of the "Peanut Gallery" urgently needed to go to the bathroom. The impatient Smith gestured toward a technician, but the kid thought he was pointing toward a large pumpkin, lit by a candle, placed just out of camera range. Let's just say the kid put out the candle, while Smith laughed hysterically on-camera in front of a bewildered home audience. To explain to viewers who wrote in asking what happened, Smith later composed a cute poem recounting the incident, which is printed in the book.

The book also covers the other two staples of early Saturday morning kid programming, namely the western and the "space opera." Grossman interviews an unmasked Clayton Moore, TV's Lone Ranger (at the time of the book's publication, Moore was involved in a legal dispute with the producers of a new Lone Ranger movie--with the result that he could no longer wear his famous mask in promotional appearances. He got around the problem by wearing wraparound sunglasses. The movie bombed--poetic justice of a type the Lone Ranger could appreciate).

The book's only flaw is its sweeping condemnation of the then-current Saturday-morning product--namely, animated cartoons. Make no mistake, "Scooby Doo" was far from quality programming, but Bugs Bunny ruled Saturday morning as well (with classic cartoons sadly shorn of so-called "violence.") Grossman seems to side with such self-appointed guardians of "pro-social"(ugh!) behavior as Peggy Charren, head of Action for Children's Television. He objects to cartoons on the ridiculous grounds that they gave kids nothing to aspire to--one cannot, after all, become an animated superhero or a talking dog. Well, Mr. Grossman, they gave this reviewer something to aspire to--I became a cartoonist. And in an age of such shows such as "South Park" and "The Oblongs", ol' Scoob is starting to look like a pretty good role model.