One of my favorite things to do on a Saturday as a kid was to get up early enough to catch Superman and get ready for the cinema serials that would come on later that morning.  I would have my jiffy pop ready along with the Mars candy bar, two original Oscar Mayer hot dogs, back when they actually tasted like a hot dog and, last but not least, a large sour dill pickle. 

I always thought that the reason that they got their name of serials was the fact that the cereal companies would sponsor tickets for children who had collected enough box tops from their cereal to obtain a ticket to the Saturday morning movie theater serials.

I can’t remember but I believe it was on channel 13, WHBQ, and there was A show called Adventure Time with Captain Bill Killebrew who hosted the show and you could see such serials as Zorro’s Fighting Legion, Flash Gordon, Tim Tyler’s Luck, Junior G-Men of the Air, and many others.

Most of them were about fighting the NAZI saboteurs that plagued the United States in the thirties and forties serials.  I don’t think I could’ve been much more than 10 or 12 at the time. I’ve tried looking online to find something about this series that ran for quite a while on Saturday mornings.  Back in those days Saturday mornings were exclusively for us kids and most of the programs were cartoons and live action shows similar to the Mickey Mouse Club, the Banana Split Show, HR Puff’n’Stuff and others.  I personally liked the mystery shows and the story style cartoons but I never did get into the puppet style shows like the Sheri Lewis Show or others like it. It was heaven on Saturday morning to us kids who had worked hard all week long on our school assignments to actually have something special for us.

Today there are at least six different channels running 24 hours a day that have children’s programming with some of the worst animation you’ll never see.  I personally thought that Hanna Barbera had set the bar as low as it could go until such great animation and yes, I’m being facetious, Ren and Stimpy, Two Stupid Dogs, and the absolute worst Adventure Time. I know I’m an old man and I don’t see the value in making the worst art work ever put before our children.  When I look back at the cartoon shows that we had, admittedly some of them were rehashed cartoon shorts from the cinema of the thirties, forties and fifties, but at least a straight line was a straight line.  You can call this stylistic art if you wish but the problem that I have with that is it still doesn’t look like quality work, it looks like something someone threw together quickly to get it over and done with for the next day’s shooting.  Some of the watercolor backgrounds that were used in the Saturday morning cartoons of our day were used over and over for various cartoons but they were great works of art. Some of them deserve to be hung in the best art galleries out there. 

I wish I had some kind of pull with the Cartoon Network to make them realize that this stylistic and poorly done art is destroying our children’s Saturday morning, so to speak. 

I still love to sit down and watch a good cartoon when I can find one. Luckily I have a lot of the Disney shorts on DVD and a reasonable number of the cliffhanger serials also on DVD.  They bring back so many memories of our old neighborhoods, running around the old apple orchard pretending to be FBI agents chasing the gangsters that would destroy our way of life.  Those days were so, so short and there will never be a time for any of our children like that.  I remember my dad saying to me that he used to take 25¢ and go to the movie theater and watch Donald Duck marathons all day Saturday that would give him entrance and enough money for a coke and popcorn.  Wow, even in my day it was a $1.25. Admittedly, I had a large coke, large buttered popcorn and a couple of those large sour dill pickles.

Even today the media that we have still intrigues me, most of which reminds me of my childhood,

such as Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Star Wars and Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, today’s ticket prices for a family of four make it almost impossible to make it the ritual that we did, and taking a date to a movie isn’t what it used to be because of the prices. By the time you pay for the ticket, popcorn and drink and candy for each of you, you’re lucky if you haven’t spent $50.00. I feel sorry for the young couples trying to find a way to get to know each other without spending so much money and not getting in trouble. I’ve thought so much about the way movies were presented in South America in the 50’s and 60’s. Villages would get together and project the movies on a blanket from village to village. Maybe we should start that trend here all over again. What do you think?