Saturday Morning

Many, many years ago, children, there was a wonderful event that took place every Saturday morning. In that world of long ago, a television (if you were so lucky as to have one) did not play video cassettes, or DVDs or connect to any kind of streaming service. All you could do was turn it on and watch whatever happened to be playing. For children such as yourself, it wasn’t much fun. There wasn’t even any PBS! No Sesame Street! No Mr. Rogers!

 

Ah, but Saturday morning would arrive! It was a day where children would rejoice and plunk themselves down on the floor as close to the TV as possible and take part in the wonderful world of children’s programing. At least until your mom or dad (in my case, it was my grandma) would say, “You’ve been watching that junk for two hours! Go outside!”

 

My kids are old enough that there was still some of that programing when they were small. Now there are entire channels dedicated to children. And it’s not limited to Saturday morning. Thanks to the Internet kids, you can also access your parent’s favorite shows from the dim past. Since anyone can do this, I will only speak of the sainted programs from my own childhood that made my heart leap with joy on those Saturdays from long ago…

 

Captain Kangaroo. My first love. The songs, Dancing Bear, Mr. Moose and the ping pong balls, Mr. Green Jeans and his cute little animals. And my favorite of all: Bunny Rabbit. (I had a small bunny that had to be with me every night when I went to bed)

There was also Tom Terrific and his mighty dog Manfred.

 

I watched Mighty Mouse, but got a little tired of the cat always being the bad guy and getting beat up all the time. Since MM was so strong, why didn’t he just hold the cat down and talk to him and try to reason with him?? Same with Tom and Jerry, Sylvester and Tweety, Pixie & Dixie and Mr. Jinks.

 

There were more, I know, but I will move on to the non-cartoons.

Sky King. He would catch bad guys using an airplane. I thought that was kinda neat. A Western with no horses! He was joined by his niece Penny and nephew Clipper.

 

Roy Rogers. ‘Nuff said; King of the Cowboys. Same with Lone Ranger and Tonto. The bad guys ALWAYS lost to the power of good.

 

Marvin watched Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. This Canadian Mountie and his dog Yukon King brought the bad guys to justice in the wild gold rush days. I’ve seen the reruns of it on TV and knew this would have been one of my favorites as well. We even forced Lia to watch one episode with us. She tolerated it very well because she is a polite granddaughter…

 

I was a bit older when Thunderbirds was on in 1960. The sci-fi show was set 100 years in the future and featured marionettes. I knew it was cheesy, but I secretly loved it. Once in a great while you could see a glimpse of the wires controlling them, but this was pretty high tech stuff for the day.

 

So that’s the kind of thing that kept us entertained in our younger years, kids. You may have better tech in your shows now. A lot more shows with real people in them. All the games you could ever imagine on your electronic devices.

 

But I still think my generation had it pretty good.

 

Now put your phone down! Shut off your devices! Go outside and play!

 

(And stay off my lawn!)