CBS Storybreak: The Saturday Morning Cartoon That Read Books

The man who had spent thirty years telling children stories on television lost his network timeslot, then months later got a Saturday morning show whose entire premise was telling children stories on television, just animated this time. CBS Storybreak was a cartoon strand built by a network cashing in on the one host it already knew could sell a book to a kid.

CBS Storybreak was a Saturday morning anthology that aired on CBS from March 30, 1985, to January 28, 1989, animating children's novels and short stories into half-hour episodes, hosted by Bob Keeshan of Captain Kangaroo. It ran 26 episodes across 3 seasons, was CBS's first in-house cartoon series since Terrytoons, and closed every episode with a real book recommendation from the Library of Congress.

Built from a segment on another show

The series did not start from nothing. It grew directly out of a recurring feature on Keeshan's own Captain Kangaroo, in which he read books to children on camera while the show's cameras held on the illustrations. When CBS finally let Captain Kangaroo go, that reading segment became the seed of its own program.

The timing tells the story. Keeshan had watched CBS shrink his flagship show for years, cutting it from an hour to thirty minutes in 1981, moving it earlier and earlier, until, tired of the constant reductions, he left when his contract expired in December 1984, nine months short of the show's thirtieth anniversary. CBS Storybreak premiered March 30, 1985, with Keeshan hosting, appearing in framing sequences around each animated adaptation, showcasing the book it came from and pointing viewers toward similar titles. The network had spent thirty years learning that this specific host could make a child want to read a book, and rebuilt a Saturday morning show around exactly that skill within four months of losing him.

What actually aired

Twenty-six episodes ran across three seasons: ten in the spring of 1985, six more that fall, and a final batch of ten spread across the fall 1987, fall 1988, and January 1989 broadcast years. Each half-hour adapted a real children's book into animation, produced by Southern Star and Hanna-Barbera Australia for CBS Entertainment Productions, an international co-production arrangement unusual for an American Saturday-morning cartoon.

Adapted titles across the run included Chocolate Fever, How to Eat Fried Worms, Hank the Cowdog, Dragon's Blood, and Ratha's Creature, real published novels rather than stories written for television. The strand was CBS's first in-house cartoon production since Terrytoons, the studio behind the network's earlier animated output, and it earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Animated Program in its first season, 1985-1986.

The Library of Congress picked the books

The show's most institutionally distinctive feature ran at the end of every episode, not during it. CBS Storybreak carried regular selections from Read More About It, a public service campaign that CBS and the Library of Congress had run jointly since 1980, in which a program would close with a suggestion of further reading connected to what had just aired. CBS Storybreak was the only series built to carry those Library of Congress picks on a regular basis, with the suggested titles tied directly to the plot of that week's animated adaptation, read out by Keeshan and, later, by Malcolm-Jamal Warner.

The series also did something no other American television program had done before: during its 1993 reairing, it used open captions from the National Captioning Institute, printed directly on the picture rather than switched on through a decoder, a format normally reserved for hearing-impaired audiences. The effect doubled as a reading tool for every viewer, letting any kid follow the story's words on screen while the animation played.

The books-on-TV lane was not CBS's alone: Reading Rainbow worked the same ground from the PBS side, and its full story is on this site.

After Keeshan

CBS ran the original 26 episodes in reruns until 1991, then returned them to the schedule for the 1993-94 through 1997-98 seasons as re-hosted reruns, with Malcolm-Jamal Warner replacing Keeshan as host. Select episodes reached home video in 1992 under the title Video Storybreak. The show also traveled internationally, airing on Network Ten in Australia, Channel 5 in Singapore, RTE in Ireland, and TVNZ in New Zealand, reach unusual for a strand this small on the American schedule.

The honest bottom line

CBS Storybreak was a network recycling a proven asset, an aging children's host who could sell a book better than anyone else on the air, into a new format after cancelling his old show out from under him. It never became a cultural landmark on the scale of its ABC cousins, and its page-one search results today are a fan shrine, an archive upload, and a DVD shop rather than institutional coverage, which is itself a fact worth stating plainly. What it did do, consistently, for four seasons across two different hosts, was put a real book's title in front of a Saturday-morning cartoon audience and back it with an actual federal library's recommendation, which is more institutional weight than most cartoons built to sell a toy line ever carried.

Sources

• CBS Storybreak, Wikipedia, infobox and full episode list, read via raw wikitext this session.
• Read More About It, Wikipedia, read via raw wikitext this session.
• Bob Keeshan, Wikipedia, read via raw wikitext this session, citing Tom Shales, "'Storybreak'," Washington Post, March 30, 1985 (not independently accessible this session; archival cite only).

Part of the 80s kids TV collection on watch culture. See also the shelf's other anthology institutions: the ABC Afterschool Special and the ABC Weekend Special.

Keeshan read a generation into the habit and the habit stuck, a book gets read aloud in the room.

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