Saturday Morning Cartoons and Other Joys
Back in the days before cable and satellite television, before the Internet and before VHS and DVD players, programming for children was sparse. Kids don't have jobs and disposable income and advertising to them wasn't a winning bet most of the time so most of what broadcast TV played was targeted at adults except for a few very special times. The most special of those times in the early and mid 70s was Saturday morning. Although getting up for school or church was a drag on the other six days of the week, getting up for Saturday morning cartoons wasn't so hard. Even with the introduction of live actions shows like Shazam, Isis and Land of the Lost, the shows were still for us little people. I'd get up as early as I could with my brother and sister. As the oldest, I probably threw my weight around to watch what I wanted more than I should have, but I don't remember it being contentious, so maybe I was good about it. I hope so.
As far as quality goes, the shows were not Disney or Pixar quality or anything close to it. There were cartoons featuring the Jackson 5 and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. We had Scooby Doo and Josie and the Pussycats. There were also classics like the Jetsons and the Flintstones. We would watch all morning until American Bandstand and Soul Train came on, signaling another week of waiting until our little film festival would repeat itself.
One of the other things that made the 70s bearable were the toys that came in cereal boxes. Usually, the cereal was the sweetened kind that was both expensive and nor particularly good for you, so it wasn't a constant in our house. My mother was so mean that she would make us eat eggs and grits or homemade waffles and pancakes instead of all the Captain Crunch we wanted but every once in a while, one of the three of us would get to have the magnifying glass or spinning top or book of temporary tattoos from a box of cereal. That was always a good day.
To make up for her culinary cruelty in depriving of us of all you can eat Frosted Flakes, my Mom was always pretty good at stopping by a store on our frequent trips to visit our grandparents. We were allowed a drink and a candy bar. That came to about forty cents a kid in mid-70s dollars. The drinks came in glass bottles, and you had to pay a deposit on them. One of my chief hustles in the later years of elementary school was selling bottles back to convenience stores. Once, when we lived in the western part of the state, we were out shopping and Mama got asked to do a taste test on a new soft drink and to give her opinion on a suitable name. The drink was Mello Yello and the alternative name for it was Golden Harvest. We can all thank her that we have a soda without that godawful name today.
The 70s were a good time to come of age. It was in the days before expensive athletic shoes, so everyone wore the same basic kind of what we called tennis shoes back then. The cool thing was to have knee high white athletic socks when you wore shorts. Being from basketball crazy North Carolina, that's what we saw our favorite players doing and we emulated it. Even though evening TV wasn't strictly aimed at kids, we still got plenty of show we could get into, like Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. Even though we didn't have a lot of dough, we still got treated to things like three for a dollar hot dogs on a night out. I also got to see every movie Clint Eastwood made during the decade at the drive-in movie theaters we went to regularly. Like I said. It was a good time.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇