Saturday Morning Fall 1986: The Full ABC, CBS, and NBC Cartoon Lineup

Fall 1986 is the morning a lot of people picture when they picture Saturday cartoons at all. It opened with the Real Ghostbusters, a talking playhouse run by a man in a gray suit, and a lineup so stacked with movie and toy names that the whole thing felt like the peak of the form. For many kids this September is the high point, the fullest the morning ever got.

On Saturday morning in fall 1986, ABC debuted The Real Ghostbusters, based on the hit movie, alongside Pound Puppies and the Care Bears Family. CBS launched Pee-wee's Playhouse, the season's most acclaimed show, plus Teen Wolf. NBC added Kissyfur and Foofur while the Smurfs, now in its sixth year, still anchored the morning. Pee-wee's Playhouse and the Real Ghostbusters are the two shows everyone remembers from that fall.

ABC · fall 1986

ABC had the season's biggest cartoon in the Real Ghostbusters, which adapted the blockbuster movie and became a signature of late-80s Saturday mornings. Around it the network ran two toy-driven shows, Pound Puppies and the Care Bears Family, and a younger-skewing Flintstone Kids. The Star Wars presence had shrunk to a single show, the All-New Ewoks, with the droids gone. In the fall, college football again took the afternoon.

CBS · fall 1986

CBS made the boldest bet of the year on Pee-wee's Playhouse, a live-action show built around Paul Reubens' Pee-wee Herman character that looked and felt like nothing else on the schedule. It won a stack of Emmy Awards and is still held up as one of the best children's programs ever made. The rest of the morning kept mining hits: Teen Wolf came from the Michael J. Fox movie, and Muppet Babies held its anchor hour.

NBC · fall 1986

NBC ran the softest, most character-driven morning of the three, stacked with gentle animal shows: Kissyfur about a bear cub in a swamp, Foofur about a blue dog, the second season of Disney's Gummi Bears, and the ever-present Smurfs, now in its sixth season and still holding ninety minutes. Lazer Tag Academy tied into the popular toy, and the music-driven Kidd Video hung on in reruns at the end of the block.

What changed from 1985

The movie tie-in took over. The Real Ghostbusters and Teen Wolf both came straight from theaters, and toy lines drove Pound Puppies, the Care Bears Family, and Lazer Tag Academy. The single biggest swing was Pee-wee's Playhouse, a show with no toy and no movie behind it that still became the season's standout. Star Wars faded to one show, and the Smurfs reached its sixth year unmoved. Nineteen eighty-six is widely remembered as the fullest, most iconic the morning ever got.

The honest bottom line

Almost everything new in fall 1986 was borrowed from somewhere with a cash register: a movie, a toy, a wrestling promotion. The system that had turned Saturday morning into a store in 1983 was running at full speed. And yet this is the season people miss most, because the borrowing had gotten good. The Real Ghostbusters was a genuinely strong adaptation, and Pee-wee's Playhouse proved a network would still gamble on something strange and original in the middle of all the merchandising. The morning was a marketplace at its most crowded. It was also, briefly, at its best.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "1986-87 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 1985. Fall 1986 was also when one of the decade's syndicated teen dance shows premiered, a story told in the dance show archive.

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