Saturday Morning Fall 1988: The Full ABC, CBS, and NBC Cartoon Lineup

Fall 1988 is the morning where a few of the decade's biggest institutions started to shift. Garfield finally showed up. The Real Ghostbusters became a Slimer hour. And the Smurfs, the ninety-minute giant that had held the center of the morning for years, quietly gave back half an hour. The lineup was still deep, but the ground was moving.

On Saturday morning in fall 1988, CBS launched Garfield and Friends, ABC expanded the Real Ghostbusters into Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters and added A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, and NBC ran an ALF cartoon hour while the Smurfs, now in its eighth year, shrank from ninety minutes to sixty. Pee-wee's Playhouse, Muppet Babies, and Superman filled out a still-crowded morning.

ABC · fall 1988

ABC rebuilt its morning around two hour-long blocks and a fresh take on an old dog. The Real Ghostbusters grew into Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters, a full hour with the green ghost promoted to co-star, and the New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh gave Disney an hour of its own. A Pup Named Scooby-Doo reinvented the Mystery Machine gang as children, one of the more fondly remembered Scooby revamps, and the New Adventures of Beany and Cecil opened the morning. College football took the afternoon in the fall.

CBS · fall 1988

CBS landed the season's signature new show in Garfield and Friends, the long-awaited animated version of the comic-strip cat that would run for years. The network also revived Superman as a Ruby-Spears cartoon, kept Pee-wee's Playhouse and a now sixty-minute Muppet Babies in the heart of the morning, and gave the commercial character Ernest P. Worrell his own show in Hey Vern, It's Ernest! Bakshi's Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, in its second season, had been pushed to the tail end of the block.

NBC · fall 1988

NBC leaned hardest into its two hits. The ALF sitcom now powered a full hour, pairing the original ALF cartoon with the fairy-tale spinoff ALF Tales, and Martin Short's Saturday Night Live character got his own show in the Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley. The biggest change sat right in the middle: the Smurfs, in its eighth season, had finally been trimmed from ninety minutes to sixty, the first real crack in the anchor that had defined NBC's morning all decade. Kissyfur, the Gummi Bears, and the Chipmunks rounded out the block.

What changed from 1987

Two long waits ended and one long reign started to slip. Garfield and Friends, one of the most anticipated cartoons of the era, finally reached CBS, and Superman came back as a Saturday cartoon. ABC turned its two strongest properties, the Ghostbusters and Winnie the Pooh, into hour-long blocks. On NBC, the ALF sitcom expanded into a full hour of cartoons. But the season's quiet headline was subtraction: the Smurfs, untouchable at ninety minutes for years, dropped to sixty for the first time, and Bakshi's Mighty Mouse was fading toward the end of its run.

The honest bottom line

By fall 1988 the Saturday morning formula was showing its age. The new hits were a comic-strip cat and a revived comic-book icon, the spinoffs came from prime time and Saturday Night Live, and the toy-and-property engine that had run since 1983 was still doing most of the work. The Smurfs shrinking is the tell: the giants were no longer growing. And yet the morning was still genuinely full, with Garfield arriving, Pee-wee holding on, and A Pup Named Scooby-Doo doing something clever with an old name. The peak had passed. The pleasure had not, not yet.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "1988-89 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 1987. Next year: Saturday Morning Fall 1989.

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