Saturday Morning Fall 1985: The Full ABC, CBS, and NBC Cartoon Lineup

Fall 1985 is the season the big names showed up all at once. On a single September Saturday a kid could find Disney's first cartoons, two Star Wars shows, and Hulk Hogan running an animated wrestling federation. After years of toy tie-ins and arcade cash-ins, the morning suddenly had real franchises fighting for the couch.

On Saturday morning in fall 1985, Disney entered television animation with Adventures of the Gummi Bears on NBC and Wuzzles on CBS, both premiering September 14. ABC ran the Ewoks and Droids Adventure Hour, bringing Star Wars to the morning, while CBS launched Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling and the Berenstain Bears. The Smurfs still anchored NBC. It was the strongest single-year wave of new franchises the decade produced.

CBS · fall 1985

CBS had two of the year's headline shows. Wuzzles was one of Disney's first two cartoons, a set of two-animals-in-one creatures, and Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling turned the WWF's biggest stars into a cartoon at the peak of the wrestling boom. Muppet Babies expanded to a full hour that fall under the longer title Muppets, Babies and Monsters, and the Berenstain Bears brought the storybook family to the screen. It was a dense, franchise-heavy morning.

ABC · fall 1985

ABC's big play was Star Wars. The Ewoks and Droids Adventure Hour paired two cartoons set in the Star Wars universe, one following the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi, the other R2-D2 and C-3PO. The network also ran the final incarnation of the Super Friends, now called the Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians, and doubled down on Scooby-Doo with two shows the same morning. As in 1984, fall Saturdays gave way to college football in the afternoon.

NBC · fall 1985

NBC carried Disney's other debut. Adventures of the Gummi Bears premiered September 14, the same day as Wuzzles, and the two shows together marked Disney's first move into television animation, the seed of the Disney Afternoon empire to come. NBC also animated its own sitcom star with Punky Brewster, in which the girl and her dog gained a magical creature named Glomer. The Smurfs, now in its fifth season, still held ninety minutes in the middle of the morning.

What changed from 1984

Two giants arrived. Disney launched its television animation studio with Gummi Bears and Wuzzles on the same September morning, and Star Wars came to ABC through the Ewoks and Droids hour. CBS added the wrestling craze with Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling and the storybook Berenstain Bears, while NBC animated Punky Brewster. The Smurfs stayed the fixed point it had been for years. The interstitials held, with In the News on CBS and One to Grow On after most NBC shows.

The honest bottom line

Even the prestige of 1985 was built to sell things: Wuzzles and Gummi Bears had toy lines waiting, the Star Wars shows extended a movie franchise, and Hulk Hogan's cartoon rode a wrestling boom straight to the merchandise aisle. Almost nothing on the morning existed purely for its own sake. But the craft had climbed. Disney's arrival raised the floor for what a Saturday cartoon could look like, and a kid in 1985 was watching better-made television than a kid in 1981 was. The morning was still a marketplace. It had just started hiring better artists to run the stall.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "1985-86 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 1984. Next year: Saturday Morning Fall 1986.

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