Welcome to another installment of Saturday Morning Superstars!
In the 1990s, one of the original television networks, NBC, killed the tradition of airing cartoons on Saturday mornings for good. CBS, another of the OGs, also briefly dropped cartoons, but brought them back by the end of the decade. But while that’s sad, children from this era hardly suffered. In fact, they enjoyed perhaps the greatest age of this type of programming as TWO new networks emerged to fill the void NBC left behind, giving kids an even larger assortment to choose from. So large, in fact, that I’ll be devoting two columns to this decade.
In all fairness, NBC did continue to offer what could be considered “kids'” programming, although it wasn’t animated, and it was aimed at an older audience. In fact, its Saturday morning block was referred to as TNBC, with the T standing for “teen.” Leading the charge was Saved By The Bell, which had debuted in 1989.
It was a MASSIVE success. In its heyday, it was drawing primetime-sized ratings which was extremely rare for a Saturday morning show. The reason why is that kids didn’t outgrow it the way they did cartoons. Usually, around the age of 10, kids begin to outgrow “childish” things and become interested in more “mature” stuff, but this live-action sitcom held their attention into their teens.
In the summer of 1992, NBC mostly scrubbed its kid lineup, replacing the bulk of it with Saturday Today, an extension of The Today Show. But that was followed by Saved By The Bell, and in the fall, that was joined by California Dreams, another live-action teen sitcom, this one about a garage band. Also part of the lineup was the reality show Name Your Adventure (co-hosted by SBTB‘s Mario Lopez), two game shows, Double Up and Brains and Brawn, and NBA Inside Stuff. I hate to even mention that last one, as sports programming always signaled the end of Saturday mornings for me, but this one was technically for kids/teens and it ran for years. (Keep in mind just how massive basketball was in the ’90s.)
After Saved By The Bell ended its run, it was replaced by Saved By The Bell: The New Class, which actually went on to run for seven seasons, which is longer than the original. Other teen sitcoms to air alongside it through the ’90s were Running the Halls, Hang Time, City Guys, and One World. Prior to NBC’s overhaul, in 1990, it had also experimented with The Guys Next Door, which was essentially an update of The Monkees. If The Monkees was a fictionalized, comedic version of The Beatles, The Guys Next Door was the same of New Kids on the Block. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a hit and was gone after that one season.
CBS followed NBC’s example and replaced two hours of its Saturday morning lineup with CBS News Saturday Morning, beginning in 1997. That same year, CBS also ditched all of its cartoons, with its lineup consisting of Beakman’s World, Fudge, The New Ghostwriter Mysteries, Wheel 2000 (a kids version of Wheel of Fortune), The Sports Illustrated for Kids Show (ugh, more sports), and The Weird Al Show. (Some of these were new that year, but some were holdovers.) However, the following season, CBS brought back cartoons, which preceded and followed CBS News Saturday Morning.
Speaking of animation, after a slump of a few years, Disney’s animation underwent a massive resurgence in the late ’80s. On the big screen, 1989’s The Little Mermaid became the studio’s best-performing (and just plain BEST) movie in years and opened the door for the killer string of back-to-back hits: Beauty and The Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King.
Two years prior to The Little Mermaid‘s release, Disney’s TV division was also reinvigorated with the release of Duck Tales in syndication. That series was so successful, creatively and in terms of popularity, that Disney soon followed it with Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers and even more after that. (Prior to this, Disney had already had some TV success with Adventures of the Gummi Bears and The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, the latter of which, aired through the entire ’90s.)
In 1991, Darkwing Duck became one of the few cartoons, like The Real Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that aired simultaneously on Saturday mornings and on weekday afternoons in syndication. That was followed by Goof Troop, Marsupilami, The Mighty Ducks, Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles, Jungle Cubs, Mickey Mouse Works, and TV continuations of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Lion King (technically, The Lion King’s Timon & Pumbaa), 101 Dalmatians, and Hercules.
The Disney cartoons were split between ABC and CBS, but in 1995, Disney bought ABC, so its cartoons went there exclusively. In 1997, ABC debuted an anthology series called Disney’s One Saturday Morning that featured some of the most beloved ‘toons of the era — Doug (or rather, “Disney’s Doug”), Recess, and Pepper Ann, the latter of which was later replaced by The Weekenders.
But the biggest change in the Saturday morning landscape came with the arrival of two entirely new networks. FOX launched in 1986 initially as a “mini-network” only airing primetime shows on Sunday nights. But after finding success, it gradually expanded over time and, in 1990, it launched its Saturday morning lineup.
Its first offerings were, Zazoo U, Bobby’s World, Tom and Jerry Kids, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Piggsburg Pigs, the live-action game show Fox’s Fun House, and perhaps most bizarrely, an animated series based on the DC Comics’ adult-skewing Swamp Thing.
This is a wonky initial lineup, but as the decade progressed, FOX would be home to some of the best and most popular Saturday morning cartoons of the era.
Like FOX, when The WB launched in January 1995, it was rather small, programming on just one night a week. But that fall, it rolled out a full Saturday lineup made up almost entirely of Warner Brothers’ properties. (No surprise there.) In addition to reruns of Animaniacs, which had previously been syndicated, Kids’ WB’s first season included the spinoff Pinky and the Brain, The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries, Freakazoid!, and Earthworm Jim.
In the following years, Kids’ WB added more shows from the WB roster with The Daffy Duck Show, Superman: The Animated Series, The New Batman/Superman Adventures, Batman Beyond, Pinky, Elmyra & The Brain, and The Big Cartoonie Show (featuring the Looney Tunes).
But it was FOX that delivered some of the most popular, fondly-remembered, and influential Saturday morning shows of the ’90s, but I will get to that next week.
First, just to throw back to the first few Saturday Morning Superstars columns, a quick look at some continuing trends from the past.
The WB’s Tom and Jerry Kids and NBC’s Yo Yogi! continued the trend of taking existing adult characters and recasting them as kids.
It remained popular to turn live-action TV shows and movies into cartoons — The Wizard of Oz, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures (featuring the voices of Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in its first season), Back to the Future (actually based on BttF III and featuring in Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown in live-action framing sequences), Little Shop (as in “of Horror“), The Addams Family, Free Willy, Beethoven, The Mask: The Series, Dumb & Dumber, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Men in Black: The Series, Godzilla: The Series, and Sabrina: The Animated Series.
Cartoons based on real live celebrities included New Kids on the Block (pictured at the top), Kid ‘N Play, Hammerman (starring MC Hammer), Pro Stars (Wayne Gretzky, Bo Jackson, and Michael Jordan as superheroes), Wish Kid (Macauley Culkin), and Super Dave: Daredevil for Hire. Howie Mandel created the wonderful Bobby’s World, which aired on FOX for several years. It wasn’t actually about him, but he was closely associated with it and provided the title character’s high-pitched baby voice with no digital trickery.
Meanwhile, Rosanne Barr unleashed Lil Rosie, which aired on ABC, the same network that aired her hit sitcom. Later, Louie Anderson starred in Life with Louie. Both were plus-sized comedians, and both their shows were about them as kids. Nowadays, both have been the centers of controversies, so it’s unlikely either would be allowed anywhere near a project for kids.
I’m not sure why, but one major fad of the ’90s was scary stuff. It seems kids couldn’t get enough of peeing their pants. In 1993, ABC made the bold decision to adapt HBO’s adults-only anthology Tales From the Crypt into the animated series Tales from the Cryptkeeper, with John Kassir reprising the voice of the title ghoul. This series is also interesting in that it included the Vault-Keeper and the Old Witch, two other hosts from the old EC Comics horror line, which also originated Tales From the Crypt. The series was later reinvented on CBS as Secrets of the Cryptkeeper’s Haunted House.
Other offerings included the claymation Bump in the Night, Skeleton Warriors, and Nightmare Ned.
But the biggest spooky hit of the era was no-doubt FOX’s live-action Goosebumps, based on the books by R.L. Stine. Both the books and the show retain a cult following today and new versions have continued to be produced over the year, most recently with the big-budget theatrical movies starring Jack Black as a fictionalized version of Stine.
The same year that Goosebumps debuted on FOX, ABC aired Bone Chillers, based on the books by Betsy Haynes. Like Goosebumps, this was an anthology with each episode adapting a different book.
In addition, FOX aired reruns of the former primetime show Eerie, Indiana, which seemed to find a bigger audience on Saturday mornings, leading to the production of new episodes, known as Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension.
While there have always been live-action shows on Saturday mornings, things really exploded in the ’90s. And while Goosebumps and Saved by the Bell were massive hits, they were dwarfed by a true phenomenon. (Or is that… “morphinomenon?”) But that’s a tale for next week!
Check back for the next installment of Saturday Morning Superstars in one week!
