Saturday Morning Fall 1987: The Full 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 came straight from the plush toy, 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, a revival handed to Ralph Bakshi that looked and moved like nothing else on the schedule and drew adult attention it never asked for. Pee-wee's Playhouse returned after its acclaimed debut, and Popeye and Son and Hello Kitty's Furry Tale Theater were the other fresh faces. 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 after protests from groups including Action for Children's Television and the American Family Association. 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 prime-time hit ALF arrived as a Saturday cartoon, The New Archies rebooted the Riverdale gang as kids, 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.

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 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.
• 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.

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