Saturday Morning Fall 1981: The Full ABC, CBS, and NBC Cartoon Lineup

Fall 1981 is the morning a small blue village took over the living room. A kid flipping through the three networks that September found the usual superheroes and talking animals in most slots, and then, on NBC, a full hour of something brand new that would quietly reorganize the entire Saturday map for years.

On Saturday morning in fall 1981, NBC launched The Smurfs as a one-hour block and turned it into the biggest hit on the schedule. ABC bundled its shows into named hours built around Super Friends and the Fonz, while CBS ran Bugs Bunny, Popeye, and a new sword-and-sorcery show called Blackstar. NBC also debuted the Kid Super Power Hour with Shazam!, Space Stars, and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends the same morning. The Smurfs was the story of the season and, for the rest of the decade, the show everyone else had to schedule against.

NBC · fall 1981

NBC took the aggressive morning in 1981. It started earliest, at 7:30, and stacked four brand-new shows in a row. The Smurfs, adapted from the Belgian comics by Hanna-Barbera, ran a full hour and held its 8:30 anchor slot straight through the season. Around it NBC placed Space Stars, a Hanna-Barbera superhero package, the Kid Super Power Hour with Shazam!, and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, which paired Spidey with Iceman and Firestar. It was the most new animation any network put up that fall.

ABC · fall 1981

ABC's 1981 trick was the packaged hour: two shows sold under one umbrella title. Super Friends shared its hour with Heathcliff and Marmaduke, the Fonz cartoon paired with a new Laverne and Shirley in the Army cartoon, and Thundarr split its final hour with the new Goldie Gold and Action Jack. It let ABC keep familiar names up front while folding new shows in behind them.

CBS · fall 1981

CBS opened with two brand-new Hanna-Barbera comedies, the Kwicky Koala Show, which was one of Tex Avery's last projects, and Trollkins. Its center held steady on the ninety-minute Bugs Bunny and Road Runner block. The action entry was Blackstar, a sword-and-sorcery show from Filmation that ran as a lead-in to the same kind of territory He-Man would own a year later. The morning still closed on the news magazine 30 Minutes.

What changed from 1980

The clearest shift was NBC's, which cleared its bench and rebuilt almost entirely around new shows, with the Smurfs as the centerpiece. ABC repackaged its holdovers into named hours and added Goldie Gold and Action Jack and the Laverne and Shirley cartoon. CBS retired parts of its old lineup for the Kwicky Koala Show, Trollkins, and Blackstar. The interstitials held: CBS ran In the News ten times across the morning, and NBC tagged Ask NBC News onto most of its shows.

The honest bottom line

Fall 1981 was still mostly a business of moving familiar characters around a board, and several of the new shows, Goldie Gold, Trollkins, Kwicky Koala, lasted a single season and vanished. Much of the morning was the same recycled library it had been in 1980. What makes the season matter is the one show that broke out. The Smurfs proved a gentle, low-stakes cartoon could dominate Saturday morning, and it pulled the whole medium toward softer, merchandise-friendly worlds for years. The throwaway shows were forgotten by summer. The blue ones were not.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "1981-82 United States network television schedule (daytime)", Saturday section. The half-hour grid on this page is parsed directly from that article's wikitext, by colspan and rowspan, for exact slotting; the wikitext was saved verbatim at gate time. Wikipedia's own cited underlying archive for the network daytime pages is curtalliaume.com, via Internet Archive captures.
• Method note: only the three broadcast networks' Saturday morning grids are reproduced here. No independent, UHF or cable lineup is claimed for this season.

Part of the Saturday morning 80s time-capsule series. Previous year: Saturday Morning Fall 1980.

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