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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Jerry and we are practically perfect in every way here on Stuff You Should Know.
That's right.
I'm just a bill.
Only a bill.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
Have you ever been to Capitol Hill?
Oh, I'm just sitting here on Capitol Hill.
Do you remember we did a whole episode on Schoolhouse Rock once, and you had Bob Nastanovich on?
Yeah.
Yeah, of Pavement, who, by the way, I finally met him in real life.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I was at a hard quartet show the new super group with Matt Sweeney and Stephen Malkmus and Emmett Kelly and Jim White, and in Atlanta.
And I turned around in the Variety Playhouse lobby and Stanovich comes strolling in.
And I was like, hey, man, I was like, and I'm sure he gets hey manned a lot.
So he had his, you know, his guard up.
Actually, he didn't.
He was nice.
But I was like, hey, it's Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.
It's good to finally meet you in person.
And he's like, oh, hey, man.
And we chatted for a minute.
And it was great.
Oh, that's cool.
He remembered you, huh?
Yeah, yeah.
We've emailed and texted here and there.
Oh, gotcha.
Wow, that's great, Chuck.
So that's my Bob Nastanovich story.
That's a great one.
That's about as good as a Bob Nastanovich story gets.
Yeah.
I mean, I got to meet a pavement guy.
So that was like bucket list complete.
So...
I guess I can't think of a segue from Bucket List.
I mean, I guess it would be an uncrossed off thing on my bucket list to build a time machine and go back to 1983 and watch Saturday morning cartoons again.
How's that?
Yeah.
I mean, what was your routine in your house?
Oh, baby.
Yeah.
Let's hear it.
I don't ever recall having to worry about my sisters trying to change the channel.
Like when it was Saturday morning cartoons, it was all me.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
That whole morning.
Yeah.
It was great.
So they weren't watching.
No, Amanda's five years older than me.
Karen was 13 years older than me.
Oh, yeah.
So she was out.
Neither one of them had much interest in Saturday morning cartoons when I did.
The interest didn't overlap.
Yeah, we were close enough.
Scott's three years older, Michelle's six, so we overlapped a bit.
And our routine was there was, you know, Saturday morning cartoons, but it was always a race to the big yellow chair to see who could claim that first.
Did you sit in a chair?
I sat like three feet from the TV on the ground, cross-legged in front of it.
Yeah, you were one of those guys.
Yeah, for sure.
Because you weren't blocking anybody.
No, it was totally cool.
It was just me.
I love it.
Yeah, with my ET cereal.
Yeah, parents sleeping in.
Yep, for sure.
Actually I can't say what anyone else in the house was doing during 8 am to 12 pm every Saturday morning.
Yeah, I don't remember watching them like the whole block, but maybe I did.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did, except I know we've talked about it before.
I don't remember what episode, but Thundar the Barbarian.
I would miss it.
I would get to watch like the first seven, eight minutes and then my mom would be like it's time to leave for swimming lessons.
And it was such a bummer.
And I know I've talked about it before on the show because a listener was so kind that they bought the complete series of Thundar the Barbarian and mailed it to me so that I could see it.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
Beep, beep, beep.
I'm going to insert the person's name, but I have to get to Atlanta to find it.
Okay.
Beep, beep, beep.
Was it VHS?
No, DVD, man.
They've styled me out, so thank you.
That's amazing.
So, all right, let's get into this, because I'm sure we're going to pepper our own like favorite cartoons that we watched throughout this right.
I might mention a cartoon or two.
You never know.
Okay.
I mean, you were into this, right?
Like for years and years, you spent Saturday mornings watching cartoons, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, as you've reminded me over and over through our lives, I'm a bit older than you.
So there will be some overlap, but also, you know, as evidenced by like your love of like the G.I.
Joe stuff.
That was a little bit after when I was into that kind of thing.
So there'll be some misses here and there, too.
I'm sorry you left out the adjective superior G.I.
Joe stuff.
Yeah.
This is a fun trip down memory lane, though.
And big thanks to Julia for this.
Yeah, for sure.
So for those of you who were born after the mid-90s or even the early 90s, I guess because it took a few years to come to realize that there was such a thing as Saturday morning cartoons and then get into them you might not really get what we're talking about.
Maybe you've heard of Saturday morning cartoons like Gen Xers love to talk about it all the time.
But it was a very special thing, like a point in time every week where essentially every child in America and I've read also Australia had their own.
The UK had their own, to an extent Canada, other countries in Asia had, like Saturday morning cartoons.
And you came and you sat down and you watched four straight hours of cartoons.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Peppered with ads directed to you, a five, six, seven, eight, nine year old and loved life.
And that was like your time in the week because, like you said, parents tended to sleep in during that time.
They were totally happy with their kids amusing themselves for the first four hours of the morning, watching TV and eating sugary cereal.
Yeah.
And like it's there was a real loss when it went away.
Like I was well out of watching Saturday morning cartoons by the time it went away.
Same.
But I remember feeling like a real, like sense of, like younger kids and like subsequent generations, like really missing out on something that we were, in retrospect, really lucky to have.
Yeah.
And you know, I'm sure the counter to that could be like yeah bro, but we can watch anything we want whenever we want, all the time, including Saturday morning.
But and not to say like, oh, things are better then.
But there was something special about a block when you didn't have choice like that.
Yeah.
Dedicated to you.
Aim squarely at you for a certain amount of time, saying we see you kids and we want to sell you things.
Yeah.
It's true.
Like when I read about, you know, just how shamefully bad the commercialism was in the 80s.
I still am like, I don't I don't care.
Like I loved all I loved every minute of it.
Yeah.
And the commercials, as we'll see, were not that much different than the content.
And I saw this in action when, when Ruby was younger and she would watch commercials with the same fervor.
And I'll be like, yeah, I guess I did the same thing, you know.
I remember when we first started podcasting with ads, the whole idea was yeah, just all of a sudden start talking about the product, so no one gets that you're giving an ad.
And we were both like, we're not doing that at all.
And that's where the idea for the fan-submitted jingles came about was to make sure everybody knew an ad is coming.
We're not just suddenly going to start talking about how great our Casper mattress is.
Right, because I love cartoons and I love printer ink now that you mention it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I do too.
And you know, I've got one of those Epson printers and they have like a tankless or a bottomless tank where you just refill the cartridges.
You don't even have to go buy new cartridges.
Do they?
Yeah, Epson.
I wonder if people are going to suspect that's real and not a bit.
No, it's a bit, everybody.
They should send you some dough, though, you know.
Yeah.
But what we're talking about is a span of time of a few decades, about 65 to 2000 ish.
Although there you will see there was some some one straggler, at least beyond 2000.
And cartoons had been around, but they had mainly been in movie theaters like they would play them before.
Like you go to like a fancy movie theater and there'll be like an organ player and you would see a cartoon and maybe a newsreel.
The first sort of regular running TV cartoon was something called Crusader Rabbit in 1950.
Yeah.
Just ran for a couple of years, but the first big breakout was the Mighty Mouse Playhouse.
Mighty Mouse had been around since 1942, but it made its big Saturday morning television debut in 1955 on CBS.
Yeah, and that changed everything, because prior to this there was Saturday morning programming, apparently all the way back to the days of radio.
If you were a kid, you would tune in either after school or on Saturday mornings to hear your favorite program.
So they were well aware that this is when kids listened and then eventually watched.
But if you were a kid on Saturday morning you were probably watching like some clubhouse style show where some local dude, who might or might not be dressed as a sad clown, is interacting with puppets.
And the studio audience is nothing but kids.
There's a single camera.
It's produced by your local TV station.
And like that's what you watch because they were so dirt cheap to make.
And then when Mighty Mouse came along, it basically showed these things are maybe a little more expensive than that clubhouse style show, but they're way cheaper than like the Lone Ranger or our gang or some of the other stuff we're showing on Saturday mornings.
And there's something else that's really, really important to remember.
We talked about it, I think, in our political cartoons episode.
Cartoons are a super stimuli.
They hit our brains differently than watching Alfalfa or the Lone Ranger or that sad clown.
Who are live action, real life people.
They hit us differently.
They capture our attention differently.
And so Mighty Mouse essentially showed like, hey...
You want to get into a kid's brain and sell them stuff?
Yeah.
This is the way to do it.
Cartoons are the wave of the future.
Yeah.
Wait till you get a load of Droopy.
Droopy was great, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Although I don't remember stuff like that Saturday morning.
I remember stuff like Droopy more of like afternoon, after school kind of hours.
But cartoons became a big deal shortly after they hit the small screen.
And in 1960...
And this is one of those little weird factoids that I think some people might not realize is that Flintstones is actually a primetime show.
A lot of people do know that, but a lot of people don't.
So was the Bugs Bunny show at first, the Jetsons, and the New Adventures of Johnny Quest.
They were all primetime, you know, major network, which is to say either ABC, CBS, or NBC.
This was pre-Fox even.
There were only three.
Right.
And not too long after 1967 was when they said you know what we got to consolidate all this stuff to Saturday morning.
And that was it.
It was it was a new thing.
And, like you said, it was pretty cheap to make especially, I mean some of the cartoons were better than others.
There were some that were really cheap and kind of poorly made, were like just the mouths moved and stuff like that.
Yeah.
And it was the same person voicing every character, like kind of clearly different.
And they were like, hey, what we can do here is we've got these kids.
We've got this captive audience tons and tons of kids named Josh Clark sitting three feet in front of their TV, crisscross applesauce.
And that means we can sell them toys and sugar.
Yes.
And they were already doing this.
I mean those clubhouse style TVs.
The guy would do like what the original podcast ads were supposed to.
He'd just suddenly be talking about a brand new toy that he loves.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
So they've been doing this before.
But again, cartoons, they just were operating on a different plane.
And I think 1966 was a pivotal year according to.
I found a pretty good article about this by a guy named Paul FP.
Pogue.
It's a great name on Encyclopedia.com.
And he basically says 1966 was the.
It was the year because that was the first year where all three networks showed cartoon blocks on Saturday mornings.
And from that moment on until, I would argue, the late 90s, really was a golden age for cartoons on Saturday mornings.
Yeah, for sure.
And you didn't have DVRs or TiVo or anything like that to record stuff, obviously.
You didn't really even have VCRs to record things.
You probably just had the one TV, at least until kind of mid to late 70s is when multiple TVs really started showing up a little bit more, unless you were like the rich kid.
Yeah.
And so you had to figure out and debate with your siblings, if they were around, what to watch by reading.
Most you know, a lot of people got TV Guide but we did not pay for that because we didn't pay for extra things in our family.
Sure.
But, you know, we had the local paper, which had the TV listings.
And so you pour through.
Some made arguments that you know it had kids reading on Saturday morning.
And you would, you know, sometimes there were real Sophie's choices to be made on what to watch.
Right and the reason why and this is what's hard to understand if you're like Gen Z or even like a late millennial there was no choice in what you were watching.
When you sat down on Saturday mornings, the networks that you were watching were showing you the shows that they decided they wanted to run.
So a show you watched was on a specific time on a specific network, on a specific day, in this case, Saturday morning.
So you just sat down, and I think there was something about not having that choice that made it even more enjoyable, so long as the stuff was good.
Yeah.
I mean, they were serving us exactly what we wanted.
I never had any complaints.
Did you?
No.
The only complaint I had is that I didn't have three TVs, that I could watch them all at the same time or, even better, sequentially.
Yeah, for sure.
And while this is all you know kind of fun and games are not all fun and games, mostly fun and games.
There are people out there, you know kind of smarty pants people who have made arguments for things like hey, it introduced a new generation to the Beatles, because I certainly remember watching that Beatles cartoon when I was a kid.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it came out in 65.
But by, you know, it was still running somewhere because I watched it.
And that's where I kind of got my love of the Beatles.
It introduced kids to, you know, concepts like what might happen in the future with the Jetsons.
There's a historian named Joel Rhodes who said that the cartoons perform what the scholars call the bardic function.
Yeah.
As in like medieval bards and people would sit around and listen to the stories and it would give kids on the playground like they knew the same jokes.
They had the same reference points.
It bonded a generation.
Because they were all watching the same thing on the same day at the same time.
So, yes, that was the culture for kids.
That's where you got your culture, largely.
I mean, not entirely.
There was Mad Magazine, after all.
But, like, that was because there wasn't choice.
Because you couldn't be like, hey, have you seen Black Dub?
No, I haven't seen that.
But have you seen Time Crimes?
It's a great movie.
Right.
Those conversations didn't happen.
It was some kid yelled out, like, exit stage left.
And every kid on the playground just cracked up because they knew exactly what they were talking about.
And if you don't know what I'm talking about, just look up cartoon exit stage left.
Yeah, that's right.
Was that Snagglepuss?
Yes.
Okay.
I get some of those confused sometimes.
No, you nailed it, buddy.
You nailed Snagglepuss.
We also hammered this home in the Schoolhouse Rock episode, but we do have to mention that how pivotal Schoolhouse Rock was in literally teaching kids things about history and about politics and civics and government and math and English, like you name it.
It was all there and like real learning, like legitimate, awesome learning, awesome stuff.
Yeah, that was a good episode.
I remember I cracked myself up and we almost like had to take a longer break.
Yeah, if I remember correctly.
Do you remember the joke?
I think I did some weird impression of Chuck Jones, the Looney Tunes guy.
Oh, man.
I've got to listen to this one now.
Yeah.
Maybe we should put Schoolhouse Rock as our select on Saturday.
Oh, that's a great idea.
When this one comes out.
Good idea.
Yeah.
That's a wonderful idea, Chuck.
Jerry, make a note of that.
And then now I'm doing the Flintstones hammering something into a stone tablet.
Oh, man.
I looked up the Great Gazoo because anytime I hear Flintstones, I think Great Gazoo.
Yeah.
And did you know he was an alien who was banished from his planet for creating a doomsday device?
I don't remember that part.
I didn't either.
I remember him floating around, but yeah, that's about it.
Right, and being extremely condescending.
Yeah, for sure.
He was a real jerk.
The dum-dum.
Shall we take a break?
Yeah, let's take a break.
All right.
Whenever you call me a dum-dum, that means I have to go reset.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
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Chuck, there's one other thing, that one other place you could find out what was running at what time on what network.
Oh, yeah.
Saturday morning cartoons.
Yes.
Huh.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Well, I was going to say go look them up because they're very nostalgic, but they're just awesome.
They're just so great.
And they would tell you what time it was on.
And then it was all starting in two short weeks and you just couldn't wait.
Well, and how sweet that you could publish a one-time thing and that was the lineup.
Right, exactly.
It's like it's not changing.
No, for sure.
Although apparently they would change lineups in spring for shows that weren't working.
But more often than not, you were seeing largely the same shows.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I remember that when things would change sort of mid-season.
That was always disconcerting.
Yeah, and one other thing I just barely touched on, there was a subtext to it.
All this started right after summer ended.
So you had all of summer to have a great time.
Summer stops, school starts, and then Saturday morning cartoon kicks off a new season.
Oh, man.
I love it, the fall TV season.
So we mentioned advertising.
This is gonna be a big part of this episode because it really goes in lockstep with Saturday morning cartoons and all children's programming of all time.
But at one point, like I mentioned, they realized they had a captive audience.
They could sell them toys and sugar.
But the lines started to blur in the 1970s between content and advertising in such a way.
It was sort of like the beginning of.
In fact, I'm curious when people started using words like IP intellectual property because now we would just call it IP.
Back then, it was like, hey, we got the Jackson 5.
They're a successful musical group.
Let's give them a cartoon.
We got the Osmonds.
Kids love the Brady Bunch.
Let's do the Brady Bunch kids.
We got the Flintstones.
Hey, let's give them a cereal.
And things started just kind of crossing streams such where, yeah, like we would just call that IP today.
It's like let's take a thing and exploit it in as many different ways and sell it in as many different ways as we can.
Right.
Yes, exactly.
It was they were cartoons starting, like you said, in the 70s became marketing tools.
And at first it was to basically extend the advertising power of an existing TV show, like all the ones you listed.
Right.
And more.
Yeah.
But then they started saying like, hey, we have this line of greeting cards.
The Care Bears started out as a greeting cards line.
So did shirt tails, as a matter of fact.
Yeah.
And they would say like people are going crazy for these mugs with these adorable characters on them.
Because Care Bears did have the loveliest animation potentially of all time, of all Saturday morning cartoons.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
And then they said, OK, mugs are not enough.
Greeting cards are not enough.
Let's like really blow out this, this IP if they were calling it that and turn it into a kid's show and then start selling like dolls and figures of these cartoons to the kids watching these shows.
And you could take something like the Care Bears as a greeting card line and turn them into a hot property.
Yeah, I mean, we'll read through a few of these.
There was a Pac-Man TV show, of course.
That was good.
Which was an arcade game, of course.
There was a Dungeons & Dragons cartoon.
That was pretty good.
Role-playing game.
I don't think I ever saw that.
There was, let me see here.
Obviously, the Transformers.
Yeah.
Long before they were not-so-great Michael Bay movies.
They were toys, and then...
A cartoon and, as you'll see, some of these things kind of it's hard to remember which one came before the other, or if they were like developing toys just to sell a cartoon or developing a cartoon just to sell toys.
It kind of, except for, you know, Rambo and Chuck Norris, which were actual shows in 1986.
Rambo, The Force of Freedom and Chuck Norris Karate Commandos double K.
I think the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the one that started out as a show, just to sell the toys right.
Yeah.
They were basically co-developed at the same time as part of a grand scheme.
I know Jim and the Holograms was a cartoon before the toys, about a year before the toys.
Okay.
There were Smurfs.
When the Smurfs came out, that was a big deal.
Yeah.
Because there was like, was it 100 or 101 Smurfs with Papa Smurf?
Yeah.
And they made little like really collectible size action well, not action figures, because they weren't action at all, but just little figures of the Smurfs.
You remember those?
Yeah, you could Smurf them all.
Yes, exactly.
I'm pretty sure they had like a hundred different ones that you could collect.
And people went bonkers on those things because they were just so cute.
And you could put them on your desk or you could play with them or do whatever.
The Smurfs came first.
And I think that they really kind of helped kick off that idea, That genuine, like we can really market the heck out of these cartoons if we make figures based on these.
Yeah, see, that's a slight divide.
I was a little bit old for Smurfs.
A little bit old for Smurfs.
Full stop.
Smurfs is still pretty good.
Hey, they're still making those movies, man.
That was one out last year, wasn't there?
I have not seen the, you mean like the CGI movies?
Yeah, yeah.
I've not seen them, but yeah, I think they've got several out.
Yeah, I think it's the same thing.
They're still smurfing at the box office.
That's great.
And then there were other ones like Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony.
Like you said, the lines between, did the cartoon come first?
Did the toys come first?
It really doesn't matter because they were all part of the same package by this point.
We're well into the 80s, which not coincidentally was the deregulation-minded Reagan era.
And cartoons at this point had evolved into half hour essentially commercials for the actual toy.
And in the most pronounced cases, the actual commercials were for the toys in the cartoon that the toys were based on.
Yeah, I've got some stats here, because in the late 70s the FTC and we're going to talk about the FCC and the FTC quite a bit because parents and the government started to get a little upset basically.
They saw the writing on the wall.
And in the late 70s they released numbers by the FTC that highlighted What they called it like a real health problem for this programming.
Companies every year and this was back then in the 70s spent 500 to 600 million on ads targeted to children.
Of all the foods being advertised to kids, two-thirds I'm surprised it wasn't more than this, honestly were highly sugared products.
It was.
By my Josh math calculations, it was over 95%.
Okay.
That feels about right.
Yeah, for real.
Because of all the foods.
But even of all the ads, Chuck, most of them were for sugared foods.
There was that study or that trade commission study.
Looked at some data that looked at nine months of 1975, not even the whole year.
Looked at 7515 ads.
7,182 of those ads were for sugary foods.
95.7%.
Was there anything for good food?
Yes, actually.
There were four ads over nine months, four different ads for meats, vegetables, milk, or cheese.
And milk, cheese, and I think meats maybe had zero.
So vegetables somehow was basically carrying that.
And I would guess all four of those were different V8 ads or fruit juice ads.
Who was the guy?
It was like the...
The dairy council or something?
The guy that danced around and sang about cheese?
I think it was Time for Timer.
Was he like a big circle with real long skinny legs and a cowboy?
That was Timer.
Okay, yeah.
What was that?
Was that the dairy council?
No, he was actually a response to the government actually doing something in the late 70s which we'll talk about, which was PSAs, to kind of counteract this stuff.
Yeah, it was a good thing.
Okay.
He talked about eating proteins and stuff rather than sugar.
God, what a very weird.
He looks like Twinkie the Kid a little bit.
Yeah.
I couldn't put my finger on it, Chuck.
You're absolutely right.
That's who it was.
All right.
So the writing's on the wall.
These studies are coming out and people are saying like, really?
Four ads for good food and 7000 plus for sugary stuff.
And so people started getting upset, not just about the ads, though, but about the content.
Cartoon violence is a real thing.
Every time there was an adult in a cartoon, they were buffoons and morons.
Or they had like an evil plot that the kids had to foil.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
Like they were bad people.
Like Scooby-Doo kids, they were always foiling the adult's evil plan.
Exactly.
They were never going against fellow whatever.
I mean, how old were they even?
They were late teens, maybe even post high school.
Yeah.
I think they were bumming around before college.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it was right before college.
Okay.
Consumerism, of course, was very much glorified in the cartoons and the ads.
And by the late 60s, you know, jumping back a bit, there were groups that were forming.
The Action for Children's Television got together.
They were lobbying the FCC.
Obviously, they regulate the media on not cable, as we'll see, but just regular TV.
And they were saying like hey, this is this stuff.
Is we got to pull this back?
Some like we're getting out of hand with what we're feeding children four hours at a time every Saturday.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This was like you said, the late 60s.
It started to really kind of pick up in the 70s, because the reason why is more and more research was funded studying what effect television had on kids.
And Saturday morning cartoons were a deep focus of those studies, too.
There was a 1975 study from the National Science Foundation.
It was a meta analysis.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They said Saturday morning cartoons are creating conflict within families.
Because kids are going to their parents saying, I want this.
The parents say no.
And the kid gets upset and starts arguing.
And that's internal family conflict, familial conflict.
And this same one of the surveys found that kids I think a third of kids reported arguing sometimes when their parents said no.
A sixth of them argued, quote, a lot.
So the reason why Saturday morning cartoons in particular were causing this conflict is because there were so many ads for so many kids' products that kids saw every Saturday that it increased the frequency of kids asking for stuff, which increased the frequency of being told no, which increased the frequency of arguing and conflict.
Yeah, for sure.
Parents didn't like that, of course.
They also didn't like that they learned that and they did, you know, studies on this too.
And they found that young kids or kids in general basically couldn't tell the difference between cartoons and ads, because sometimes it was the literal characters from the cartoon telling you something.
Sometimes it was kids playing with toys and showing you the action of the toys, and kids just love watching that.
Right.
And the younger you were, you really couldn't tell the difference.
Once you got a little bit older, you could tell the difference just by the length and be like well, those are the short cartoons.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Because these ads were all like there would be a mini cartoon within the ad.
You know, like Frankenberry would almost fall into a pit, or something like that.
And Count Chocula would have to come turn into a bat and rescue him or something like that.
And then they both end up eating their cereal.
That like, if you're a little kid, you're like this is great.
This is some weird short that they just put in the middle of the show.
But it's not an ad.
And I'm hungry all of a sudden for that cereal.
Mom, I want some Count Chocula.
That was actually captured really well in a Simpsons, just as almost an aside where Itchy and Scratchy are up for a cartoon award.
And one of the other cartoons in the running for best writing in a cartoon series was Action Figure Man, the How to Buy Action Figure Man episode, where it just shows a little kid and goes Mommy, I want it.
Oh, wow.
He's pointing to the action figure.
Like, not even an ad.
That was the episode.
That's really funny.
Yeah, they nailed it on that.
They nailed it like snagglepuss.
They always do.
So the long and short of all of this past few minutes is that kids didn't know that they were being sold things.
And parents didn't like that.
I think the authors of the paper were fairly kind when they said certainly most advertisers do not deliberately set out to confuse or mislead children, nor to promote unsafe, unhealthy or socially undesirable behavior, which is very naive, I think.
But maybe they were just trying to soft sell it.
Right.
So you put all this together that, again, started in the 60s as kind of agitation.
And also this is where this is the climate that Sesame Street grew out of and probably made Saturday morning cartoons look even worse, because it showed you could make kids shows that didn't poison their minds.
And then it picked up in the 70s.
And by 1978, the Federal Trade Commission said, hey, we need to do something about this.
We're not going to do anything about it.
But we're going to make some recommendations through their staff report on television advertising to children.
They said we should ban all television advertising for any product whatsoever that's directed at very young children.
That's a big one.
Right.
So you can kiss my buddy goodbye, right?
Yeah.
Ban advertising directed to older children for sugared products, which makes sense.
But the thing they predicated this concern on just cracks me up, because those things can pose serious dental health risks.
Like that was the extent of the concern with sugary products back then.
You could rot your teeth.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what you heard.
That'll rot your teeth.
Not like just eating tons of sugar is not good for you.
Right.
I remember having like a.
We did a module that included a play and some other stuff in third grade that was sponsored by Crest.
There's a big Crest like cut out stand up.
And like we just in class, we just did this whole thing about brushing your teeth with Crest brand toothpaste.
It was like that pervasive.
We make holes in teeth.
Do you remember that?
Yeah, I do, but I can't place it.
It was, oh, man.
I mean, I think it was Crest, but it was again a cartoon that Crest was running and it was the cavity, something that they had to fight.
And that was what they would chant, we make holes in teeth.
Yeah, that might have been one of the things that kicked this off.
Yeah, probably so.
And then the final requirement was advertisements directed to older kids for other sugared products that they could, you know put on TV would be balanced by ads for other nutritional products or health disclosures at the end of the sugared product ad.
That's where Timer came from.
Yeah, okay.
I gotcha.
That's also where Bod Squad came from, Don't Drown Your Food.
Remember that one?
Oh, yeah.
The cool thing about Schoolhouse Rock is they'd already been doing this for half a decade by the time other networks started to do something about it by running these cute little cartoon PSAs.
So essentially they were 10 15, maybe up to 30 second commercials that the networks had to run.
That were cartoons too.
So they appealed to kids, but they, rather than telling kids to buy Fruity Pebbles, they were telling kids to brush your teeth or to exercise your chompers with things like carrots and apples, that kind of stuff.
Right.
Should we take a break?
Let's talk about the rest of these.
There's some other stuff that you just kind of take for granted.
I didn't realize came out of an actual deal between the networks and the FTC.
Yeah, there was also and all this stuff I didn't remember necessarily in the moment.
But once I started reading about it and studying it and obviously watching on YouTube it like washed over me.
NBC had one to grow on from 83 to 89.
And that was just usually some famous person sort of giving some life lesson advice.
And they'd be like, well, that's one to grow on.
What else?
Well, Nancy Reagan, of course, and just say no to drugs.
You can forget that.
Yeah, Betty White taught you who to call in an emergency.
Yeah, call Betty White.
Right, exactly.
Because Betty White could handle basically anything.
She was just that kind of person.
There was also The More You Know with the star that went over your head.
That was the 90s on NBC and all of the NBC stars at the time.
Because remember, NBC ruled the airwaves with must-see TV Thursdays.
They had their stars basically doing 30-second spots, which are PSAs, about how to maybe get into teaching, maybe stay in school.
Just little life lessons like that.
There were a bunch actually about abusive parents and how not cool it was for a dad to beat up on a mom.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah real, like kind of rugged and raw stuff here or there, but presented in these vignettes that kind of got through to kids, although you can tell they were geared towards slightly older kids.
Yeah, for sure.
And then, of course, your beloved G.I.
Joe talked about stranger danger and always finished with the famous line now you know, and knowing is half the battle.
Mm-hmm.
And you've seen those parody videos of that before, right?
I don't think so.
Oh, there's about 30 or so, maybe more, parody videos that are just totally off the wall but hilarious, where they just take out the sound and put in their own sound and vocals and edit the stuff up, kind of mix it up, so that they're just it's just amazing.
Look up G.I.
Joe PSA parody videos and you'll thank me later.
Or just watch probably any episode of The Family Guy.
Yeah, probably.
He did a lot of this stuff.
Yeah, he did.
Shall we take a break?
Yeah.
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All right, we'll be right back with more on Saturday Morning Cartoons.
By the way, I remembered it was the Cavity Creeps.
Oh, great memory.
Yeah, it just popped back.
So before we left, we talked about, you know, some of these things they were doing to offset the effect of cartoons.
It's called pro-social programming, and it came about because of an actual deal that was made.
Right.
There was an FTC hearing in 1978 where Kenneth Mason of Quaker Oats was up there, because you know they were like hey, Captain Crunch is rotting our kids' teeth out and you make it.
And he actually, like, he didn't think they were the problem.
He thought the content was the problem, but he did come out and had a statement basically where, like he said, you know, I think we do need to change what's going on in our cartoons and change the way our society is using this medium to communicate with kids.
So it took a lot of nerve, I think, for that guy to say that.
But he didn't blame the ads, like I said.
So they struck a deal basically hey, you can keep these ads if you add this other programming that we were talking about before.
Yeah, and apparently the way that I took it, it was a very crafty thing to do by blaming the content, because it took the onus off the sugary product advertisers and everybody started looking at the cartoons themselves.
And the cartoons were probably like hey hey, we're not nearly as bad as Fruity Pebbles, but okay, we'll start doing something about it.
And I guess cartoons themselves started to get a little more pro-social.
Like this is where Fat Albert came from, I believe.
Yeah.
But then also those PSAs that we were talking about.
Right.
That was the advent of them.
Yeah, for sure.
But this is late 70s.
I think that was 77, 78.
Ronald Reagan would come along in the 1980s and sort of just deregulate the United States as a whole and said FCC, stand down and don't worry about this stuff.
They didn't officially I mean, there were recommendations anyways and not laws.
So a recommendation is only good if you sort of follow up on that.
The FCC started not to in the 80s.
They kind of didn't try in some cases.
I think between 1980 and 1990 they actually saw a rise in the number of violent acts per hour.
On Saturday morning cartoons from 186 to 264 per hour.
Which is pretty nuts.
But it gets even more nuts when you compare it to what was on primetime, what the adults were watching.
Oh, yeah.
Between 1980 and 1990 it pretty much held steady at just five to six acts of violence per hour, as opposed to the 26 per hour on cartoons.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's cartoon violence, but it's still it's not all Roadrunner falling off a cliff.
Like a lot of it was, you know, depiction.
Like you know, there was a Rambo cartoon, like I mentioned.
Right.
Yeah, but there is research and I'm not taking a position on either way, because people have said like violent video games cause violence.
Right.
This is like the predecessor to all that stuff.
Violent cartoons cause violent kids.
One of the, I guess, arguments of that is that even if it was cartoon violence, like Roadrunner, it still desensitized kids to the consequences of violent acts.
Right.
Because there was accompanied with humor.
Yeah, for sure.
So the 80s are kind of the most unchecked time, it seems like.
Yeah.
And the 90s come along and finally they were like, all right, we got to do something.
Congress steps back in and the Children's Television Act of 1990 required the FCC to enforce those original FTC's recommendations in 1978.
And said you've got to reinstate restrictions on advertising during children's television and enforce the obligations of broadcasters to meet the educational and informational needs of the child audience.
And a couple of years later, NBC was like, all right, I'm done.
It's not even worth it anymore.
Forget this.
Yeah.
Although one good thing that came out of this is this was the origin of Saved by the Bell, because NBC went all in on slightly older kids teen programming on Saturday mornings and the flagship of it was Saved by the Bell.
So much they showed two episodes of it at morning, new ones.
Yeah.
And I mean, this is also where you got things like the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
And of course, Pee Wee's Playhouse was a little bit before this.
Or was it in the 90s?
Was that the German pronunciation?
What'd I say?
Pee-wee's playhouse.
Did I?
Pee-wee's playhouse.
Perfect.
Yeah, I think that was like 85 or something like that.
Okay.
I never watched Pee Wee's Playhouse.
I know we've talked about this, but I guess I was 14 by then.
Not that you, I mean I could watch it today and probably really love it, because Pee Wee defies age groups.
But it was just one of those things that maybe at the time I didn't know about it and didn't think it was for me or something.
I don't know.
I have no excuse.
Yeah.
I wasn't into him either, for sure.
But I did get to see his live version of the Pee Wee's Playhouse.
Oh, you went to that?
Yeah.
Amazing.
Amazing.
So there were a few other consequences of this, but the big one, the upshot, was that the government Congress, essentially nanny-stated Saturday morning cartoons out of existence.
Because of these rules, they just weren't profitable anymore.
There were certain restrictions on advertising.
You could only show so many ads during kids' programming.
There was just a lot that took away the profit drive that made Saturday morning cartoons so attractive, right.
There were a lot of other factors too, that put the writing on the wall, not the least of which was the rise of cable TV which, you mentioned, was outside of the purview of the FCC for a long time.
And, from what I can tell, even today, networks are required to show three hours of TV educational programming geared toward, geared to kids.
So if you ever are up on a Saturday or a Sunday and you were watching say, by the bell reruns, like I don't know some people do, um they.
It would say uh, it would flash like a logo that says E, I and it would say this program has been labeled educational and informative.
That's because of a government mandate that they have to run three hours of shows.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Maybe a week, because I only remember seeing it on certain times of certain days.
But there were mandates that said you have to show educational programming and that's why you see that today.
But cable, that didn't apply to.
And so not only did cable not have to show and take up valuable real estate with educational programming that nobody wanted to watch unless it was saved by the bell, but There were also cable networks that were geared exclusively to kids.
That wasn't just on Saturday mornings.
These were 24-hour-a-day children's programmings like Nickelodeon and the beginning, the first iteration of the Disney Channel.
Yeah, and stuff like the WB and CW2, those weren't exclusively kids, but I feel like most of that was and like through teen years basically.
You also had the rise of like.
Even though I love my Atari and stuff like that, it wasn't anything like what was to come with at-home gaming.
That certainly put a dent in things, because now kids could just get up on Saturday morning and play.
Whatever you know new system was out.
Right.
DBRs came along, and then...
You know, so you didn't have to crowd around the TV at a certain time together.
They all just started getting out of it.
I think I mentioned NBC got out in 92.
CBS got out in 97.
And ABC, wow.
ABC hung on to Saturday morning cartoons till 2010.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
Not bad.
No, I think WB and Fox had only stopped just a couple of years before.
But again, it seems like the whole thing peaked and ended by the late 90s, very early 2000s.
And from what I saw, the last Saturday morning cartoon block shown in the United States happened on September 27th 2014 on the CW.
And the last cartoon show that was shown in the history of Saturday morning cartoons was Yu-Gi-Oh!
Zexal, which is nothing I was ever into, but I know there are a lot of kids who just like, drooled with nostalgia.
And that was the last Saturday morning cartoon ever shown.
There's a little piece of trivia for you.
Wow.
Did they have a lone bugler play taps afterward?
They should have for sure.
Man, what an end of an era for sure.
Yeah.
But it also I mean when I look back and or look at all of this info and I'm like I was smack dab in the most manipulative stretch of Saturday morning cartoons.
Yeah.
And it makes me wonder, like what had I been watching in the early seventies?
Or had I been watching in the nineties, or two thousands after?
Like all of these restrictions, how different would would I be?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like I can recite a specific Fruity Pebbles ad that they used to show around Christmas.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
Can you now?
Yes.
So I think Fred No Barney was pretending to be Santa because he wanted to slide down the chimney and get Fred's Fruity Pebbles.
And he said, ho, ho, ho, I'm hungry.
And then he slid down and he found Santa was already there.
And he goes, Santa, my pebbles.
And Fred goes, your pebbles, Barney.
And...
This would like get in my head as an earworm.
And it does still sometimes today where like for days, it'll just be going on a loop in my head.
That's so funny.
And I can even top that, Chuck.
Okay.
As I was thinking about it today, I was highlighting my notes for today, and I started drooling.
So that's the Pavlovian response that was trained in me for Fruity Pebbles thanks to Saturday morning cartoons in the 80s.
Oh, I love Fruity Pebbles.
Not as good as Captain Crunch peanut butter to me.
That's my all-time favorite.
But boy, I love some Fruity Pebbles.
Did you ever have that AT cereal that I mentioned earlier?
I don't think I ever had that.
It was so good.
We didn't get a lot of that stuff.
If you could afford Cabin Crunch peanut butter, you could afford E.T.
Yeah but, Captain Crunch, peanut butter was a rarity and oftentimes it was the generic brands of all that stuff.
So instead of Fruity Pebbles, it was like Fruit Stones or whatever.
Fruit Tonsil Stones.
Yeah, exactly.
Gross.
Yeah.
As far as peanut butter cereals, Go E.T. was the best, I think.
Oh, it was peanut butter.
Yes.
And it was not peanut butter and chocolate.
It was just peanut butter.
Because remember, Reese's Pieces were E.T.'
's favorite candy.
And it had like a glossy coating to it, too, that somehow made it even more sweet peanut butter.
It was so good.
Was it E.T.'
's head or something?
No, I don't remember what it was, but it was, I don't think it was.
It may have been E's and T's, I'm not sure.
I was just about to ask if it was E's and T's.
It may have been, but on the box it was obviously just a big picture of E.T.
I bet you they could bring that back and people would like it.
I would buy all of it.
I think it, I'm looking now, buddy.
I think it's E's and T's.
It's so good, Chuck.
It was so good.
That and remember the lemon-lime bubble yum where it was like a lemon center wrapped in lime outside.
Yeah.
Those two things are like, that was the pinnacle of my childhood as far as eating stuff goes.
Yeah, I was a grape Hubba Bubba guy generally.
I found that they had the best tensile strength or the biggest bubbles.
For sure.
But I would also do Hubba Bubba or Bubblicious and Bubble Yum too.
Yeah, Bubble Yum probably had the least bubble blowing ability.
Hubba Bubba definitely had everybody else beat.
Yeah.
One last question.
Did you have a license plate that you got out of a honeycomb box that you put on your bike?
Oh, you bet your sweet bippy I did.
Me too, buddy.
Yeah.
I don't remember what it said, but I'll bet it was bitchin' and pro-America.
Yeah, I didn't even like honeycomb cereal.
So that they got you to buy stuff just because you wanted the prize.
That's awesome.
And I'm sure you learned all about the license plate being in the box of honeycombs on Saturday morning cartoons.
Yeah.
And man, the nostalgia is coming hard now.
But if you weren't sitting down for Saturday morning cartoons, you would just have your bowl in front of you.
Of course, if you're at the kitchen table eating cereal, what were you doing?
Reading the back of the cereal box.
You got it.
So good, which is probably another ad for something else too.
Yeah, or like a puzzle or a word finder or something.
Yeah, if you're lucky.
Yeah.
We should probably stop because I'm getting dizzy.
I'm about to faint.
I'm drooling now.
If you want to know more about Saturday morning cartoons, I have a great little piece of advice for you.
Some saintly humans have put entire three, four hour blocks of Saturday morning cartoons complete with ads, the original broadcasts on YouTube and all sorts of other video playing sites.
And if you want to just lose yourself, go watch some of it.
You will love it.
Amazing.
Chuck said amazing, which means it's time for listener mail.
I'm going to call this grossest cockroach story ever.
Hey guys, not to be a one-upper, but I believe I might have the worst cockroach story on earth.
Yikes.
A few years ago I let my little three-legged best friend, Trip.
He's got a little tripod dog.
I love those out on the front porch because he loves laying on the porch at night to listen to the bugs.
He's the best dog one could dream for, but on this night he let me down for the first time ever for not protecting me.
As I opened the door to let him out, as I turned around to walk back inside, I felt something hit my head and start crawling.
Oh my goodness.
Yes, all the way into my mouth.
I quickly spit it out and tried my best to smash this thing into oblivion, but saliva only made him stronger, I guess, as he evaded me with ease and flew off into the warm summer night sky.
I think about this far too often and wouldn't doubt if it only added to my ongoing anxiety.
He had mentioned at the beginning that we help with anxiety for Buck and that his wife appreciates that.
So part of the reason for Buck's anxiety might be recounting this roach story.
For real.
Again, thank you guys for the years of joy, knowledge, and laughs.
May your mouths be free of Paraplaneta Americana for forever and longer.
Nice.
Thanks, Buck.
That was a good email.
Yeah, good writer.
I can imagine that there are some people out there listening that are like what does he mean?
A flying cockroach?
Yes, indeed, there are flying cockroaches.
We call them palmetto bugs, and they're giant, and they're flying, and they're cockroaches.
And apparently, if you're a buck and you got your mouth open, a Milano-sized cookie cockroach is going to find its way right into that gaping hole.
Horrific.
I think I already said thanks again, Buck, but that was such a good email, it's worth saying again.
So thanks again, Buck.
And if you want to be like Buck and send us an email, send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradiocom.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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