Saturday Morning Fall 1985: 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 Jim Henson's Muppets, Babies & Monsters, and the Berenstain Bears brought the storybook family to the screen. CBS Storybreak, the network's read-along literary anthology, was already six months old by this fall, having premiered as a mid-season replacement the previous March, not as part of this season's new-show wave. 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.

Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling, explained

Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling premiered on CBS September 14, 1985, produced by DIC Animation City, and ran two seasons and 26 episodes. It arrived at the exact moment WWF wrestling was breaking into the mainstream, the same year as the first WrestleMania, and it animated real WWF stars, Hulk Hogan and his allies against a villain roster led by "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, into wacky good-versus-evil plots where wrestling itself was mostly a backdrop rather than the point. The wrestlers appeared in live-action interview segments woven into each episode but did not voice their own cartoon characters, since their travel schedules made regular studio work impractical; professional voice actors handled the animated dialogue instead. Because animation took longer to produce than the WWF's live storylines took to turn over, the show's face-and-heel alignments drifted out of sync with real WWF programming: Roddy Piper turned into a good guy on actual WWF television in late 1986 while remaining the cartoon's lead villain for the rest of its run, and Andre the Giant made the same reverse trip a year later. The character roster also outlasted its real-world counterparts in another way: Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka and Wendi Richter both left the WWF in late 1985, not long after this season began, yet stayed on as regular cartoon characters for the rest of the show's run, the animated version of the roster effectively frozen at its September 1985 snapshot. It is a small, specific artifact of what happens when a fast-moving live product gets adapted into a slower medium. One recurring live-action segment featured a music video for a cover of "Land of a Thousand Dances," recorded by several WWF wrestlers for the tie-in album The Wrestling Album, blending the cartoon's Saturday morning audience with the WWF's push into mainstream pop culture that same year.

Correcting the Storybreak date

CBS Storybreak sits in this season's grid because it was still airing that fall, but it was not new. The show premiered March 30, 1985, as a mid-season replacement, six months before this September lineup, and this page does not count it among the season's debuts.

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 same season's other dayparts are covered separately: the fall 1985 after-school strip, where G.I. Joe and She-Ra went daily, and the USA Cartoon Express in 1985, the cable block running on USA Network.

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, timed to the same year WWF wrestling broke into the mainstream with the first WrestleMania. 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.
• Wikipedia, "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_of_the_Gummi_Bears" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Adventures of the Gummi Bears</a>", confirming the September 14, 1985 premiere and Walt Disney Television Animation production credit.
• Wikipedia, "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBS_Storybreak" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CBS Storybreak</a>", confirming the March 30, 1985 mid-season premiere date and Bob Keeshan host credit.
• Wikipedia, "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk_Hogan%27s_Rock_%27n%27_Wrestling" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling</a>", premiere date, season and episode counts, DIC production, the live-action-segments-but-no-self-voicing detail, the face/heel drift versus real WWF storylines, and the Snuka/Richter roster-freeze detail.
• Wikipedia, "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_I" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WrestleMania I</a>", confirming the event took place March 31, 1985, the same calendar year as this show's premiere.
• 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.

This grid built a generation of early risers, the couch remembers.

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