Saturday Morning Fall 1987: ABC, CBS and NBC Cartoon Lineup

Fall 1987 is the morning right after the peak, and it shows. The blockbuster names from the year before are still there, but the new arrivals are stranger: a wildly stylized Mighty Mouse from a grown-up animator, a cartoon spun off a puppet alien sitcom, and a toy monster in a kid's closet. This is the season the borrowing started reaching in odd directions.

On Saturday morning in fall 1987, ABC led with My Pet Monster and a returning Real Ghostbusters, CBS paired the returning Pee-wee's Playhouse with Ralph Bakshi's new Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures and Popeye and Son, and NBC spun the hit sitcom ALF into a cartoon while the Smurfs held its ninety-minute anchor for a seventh year. Garbage Pail Kids, pulled before the season, left its CBS slot to an expanded Muppet Babies.

ABC · fall 1987

ABC spread its morning across a wide field of new toy and property names. My Pet Monster, which premiered September 12, 1987, came straight from the plush toy by the greeting-card company American Greetings; Nelvana produced the thirteen-episode run. Little Wizards and Little Clowns of Happytown were fresh fantasy entries, and the returning Real Ghostbusters slid to a mid-morning slot after anchoring the season before. The Care Bears Family and All New Pound Puppies kept the toy pipeline running, and the block closed with the live-action game Animal Crack-Ups and the long-running ABC Weekend Special. College football again took the afternoon in the fall.

CBS · fall 1987

CBS made the season's most talked-about swing with Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, which premiered September 19, 1987. The revival was handed to animator Ralph Bakshi through his Bakshi-Hyde Ventures partnership, with John Kricfalusi supervising the first season and directing several of its segments before leaving for another show. It looked and moved like nothing else on the schedule and drew adult attention it never asked for; one first-season episode, "The Littlest Tramp," aired October 31, 1987, and its crushed-flower gag became the center of a separate dispute the following year, covered on the fall 1988 page. Pee-wee's Playhouse returned after its acclaimed debut. Popeye and Son, a Hanna-Barbera and King Features production that premiered September 19, 1987, gave the sailor a spinach-hating son named Junior and ran thirteen episodes; with Jack Mercer gone since 1984, Maurice LaMarche took over the Popeye voice, and Nancy Cartwright voiced Woody. Hello Kitty's Furry Tale Theater was the other fresh face. The most quietly telling change was at the center of the morning: Muppet Babies expanded to a full ninety minutes to fill the hole left by Garbage Pail Kids, the toy-card cartoon CBS pulled shortly before the season began. Kidd Video hung on at the very end in reruns.

NBC · fall 1987

NBC ran the season's most Henson-heavy and sitcom-fed morning. The Smurfs still held ninety minutes in its seventh year, flanked by Disney's Gummi Bears and an animated Fraggle Rock that brought the HBO puppet series to network cartoons; the Marvel Productions cartoon premiered September 12, 1987, ran thirteen episodes, and was gone by December. The prime-time hit ALF arrived as a Saturday cartoon on September 26, 1987, set on the planet Melmac before the events of the live-action show, with Paul Fusco again voicing the alien. The New Archies, a DIC production, rebooted the Riverdale gang as pre-teens in junior high across another thirteen-episode order, and the block ended with the sibling-rivalry game I'm Telling! Foofur the blue dog and Alvin and the Chipmunks filled out the middle.

Why Garbage Pail Kids never aired

CBS produced the Garbage Pail Kids cartoon directly, ordered a full season of thirteen episodes, and promoted it heavily through the summer of 1987. It was based on the Topps trading-card line, produced and directed by Bob Hathcock and developed by Flint Dille. Then, a few days before its scheduled debut, CBS pulled it from the schedule. The network cited protests from Action for Children's Television, the National Coalition on Television Violence, and the Christian Leaders for Responsible Television, an arm of the American Family Association, which argued the show ridiculed the disabled, glorified violence, and amounted to a program-length commercial for the cards. Advertisers including Nabisco, McDonald's, and Crayola backed away, and several CBS affiliates had already told the network weeks ahead that they would not carry it. The thirteen finished episodes aired in Europe, Australia, and elsewhere but never ran on American television. Its Saturday slot went to the expanded ninety-minute Muppet Babies. The full story of the Garbage Pail Kids cartoon covers the fight in detail.

The class of 1987: thirteen weeks and out

The network Saturday morning newcomer of the late 1980s was a short-order show. Where a first-run syndicated cartoon needed sixty-five episodes to strip five days a week, a network series that ran once a week needed only about thirteen to fill a fall quarter. Almost every new title that fall was built to that number. My Pet Monster, Popeye and Son, the animated Fraggle Rock, and The New Archies each ran thirteen episodes and finished in December. Most never came back for a second season. The New Archies sent Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead back to junior high. Only a few of the fall 1987 arrivals had a future: Mighty Mouse returned for a second season in 1988, and ALF spun off a companion series. The rest were designed to occupy a slot for a single autumn and then make room for the next batch.

What changed from 1986

The morning got weirder without getting bigger. The two 1986 standouts, the Real Ghostbusters and Pee-wee's Playhouse, both returned but gave up their anchor slots to newer names. The single loudest story was Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, an old character revived in a strange, personal style that made grown-ups pay attention to a Saturday cartoon. ALF proved a prime-time sitcom could seed a morning cartoon, and Garbage Pail Kids proved the outrage machine could still kill one before it aired. The Smurfs, unmoved, kept its ninety minutes for a seventh straight year.

The honest bottom line

Fall 1987 was the merchandising machine of 1983 still running at full speed, only now the products were odder: a plush monster, a card-gum gross-out, a sitcom alien. Most of what was new came from a toy aisle or a prime-time slot, not from anyone's imagination, and most of it was built to last exactly thirteen weeks. And yet the season is remembered warmly anyway, partly because a few of the borrowings were genuinely strange and good. Bakshi's Mighty Mouse smuggled real animation onto a Saturday, and Pee-wee's Playhouse was still there proving a network would keep something original on the air. The store was crowded and cynical. It also still had a couple of things worth stopping for.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "1987-88 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, "Garbage Pail Kids (TV series)", for the CBS production, the pre-premiere pull, the protesting groups, the advertiser and affiliate withdrawals, and the overseas broadcast of the thirteen finished episodes.
• Wikipedia, "Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures", for the September 19, 1987 premiere, the Bakshi-Hyde Ventures and Kricfalusi credits, the two-season run, and the October 31, 1987 air date of "The Littlest Tramp."
• Wikipedia, "ALF: The Animated Series", for the September 26, 1987 premiere, the Melmac prequel setting, and Paul Fusco's voice role.
• Wikipedia, "My Pet Monster", for the September 12, 1987 ABC premiere, the Nelvana production, the thirteen-episode run, and the plush-toy origin.
• Wikipedia, "Fraggle Rock: The Animated Series", for the September 12, 1987 NBC premiere, the Marvel Productions credit, and the thirteen-episode single-season run.
• Wikipedia, "Popeye and Son", for the September 19, 1987 CBS premiere, the Hanna-Barbera and King Features production, and the thirteen-episode run.
• Wikipedia, "The New Archies", for the September 12, 1987 NBC premiere, the DIC production, and the pre-teen Riverdale premise.
• 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 1986. Next year: Saturday Morning Fall 1988. The weekday afternoon that same season: After School in Fall 1987.

The best seat for a 1987 morning is this one right here.

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