Saturday Morning Fall 1988: 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 was retitled Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters at the start of its fourth season and ran a full hour, with the green ghost promoted to his own half-hour of shorts; the show had actually stretched to an hour earlier that year, on January 30, 1988, under its original name. 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, 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, which premiered September 17, 1988. The network had announced it back in April, alongside The Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Andy and a revived Superman, and it arrived as the number one Saturday morning cartoon that fall; a year later CBS expanded it from a half hour to a full hour. The new Superman was a Ruby-Spears production tied to the character's fiftieth anniversary, with veteran comics writer Marv Wolfman as head story editor and artist Gil Kane on character designs; every episode closed with a short "Superman Family Album" segment, an idea from CBS Kids chief Judy Price. CBS 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, which had premiered that September; the two ran back to back as the ALF & ALF Tales Hour through the season. Ed Grimley, the twitchy character Martin Short had played on SCTV and then Saturday Night Live, got his own Hanna-Barbera show, The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, which ran thirteen episodes from September 10 to December 3, 1988; it was the only Saturday morning cartoon built on both an SCTV and a Saturday Night Live character. 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.

The Mighty Mouse controversy, on the record

Bakshi's Mighty Mouse revival was in its second season on CBS in fall 1988, and it arrived under a cloud. During production of the first-season episode "The Littlest Tramp," which aired October 31, 1987, editor Tom Klein flagged a sequence in which Mighty Mouse sniffed the crushed remains of a flower, worried it looked like cocaine use. Bakshi thought the concern was overblown, cut the scene, then restored it after supervising director John Kricfalusi objected; CBS Standards and Practices had approved it. The episode aired without incident. Then, on June 6, 1988, Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association, publicly alleged that the scene depicted cocaine use and that CBS had knowingly hired an animator with an adult-film past to slip it past children. Bakshi rejected the reading, said he despised drugs, and explained that Mighty Mouse was simply remembering the girl who had sold him the flower. On CBS's order, Klein removed the three-and-a-half-second sequence from the episode's master. Wildmon called the edit a de facto admission that the scene had shown drug use. On July 25, 1988, CBS issued a public statement backing Bakshi, and the show went ahead with its second season. Kricfalusi did not return for it; he left to work on The New Adventures of Beany and Cecil for ABC. The full story of Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures traces the whole production.

Scooby-Doo goes back to school

A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, which premiered on ABC on September 10, 1988, was the eighth version of the franchise and the first to show the gang as children. Developed by Tom Ruegger, it moved Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Velma, and Daphne to a Scooby-Doo Detective Agency in the town of Coolsville and kept the original formula, a monster of the week who always turns out to be a person in a mask, while playing it broadly for laughs with wild Tex Avery style takes. It was part of a wider ABC push that fall to revive characters that parents already knew, along with The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and The New Adventures of Beany and Cecil, a response to the people-meter ratings system introduced in 1987. Ruegger and much of the Hanna-Barbera staff left after the first season to build Tiny Toon Adventures for Warner Bros., and the show is still remembered as one of the more inventive revamps of the name.

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 under the weight of a controversy that had erupted that summer. Cable had its own block that fall: the USA Cartoon Express in 1988 covers what USA Network ran for kids that year.

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.
• Wikipedia, "Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures", for the "Littlest Tramp" production and October 31, 1987 air date, the June 6, 1988 Wildmon allegation, Bakshi's response, the removed sequence, and the July 25, 1988 CBS statement.
• Wikipedia, "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo", for the September 10, 1988 ABC premiere, Tom Ruegger's development, the eighth-incarnation and first-as-kids framing, Coolsville, and the ABC recognizable-characters initiative.
• Wikipedia, "Garfield and Friends", for the September 17, 1988 CBS premiere, the April 1988 announcement alongside Raggedy Ann and Andy and Superman, the number one Saturday morning ranking, and the second-season expansion to an hour.
• Wikipedia, "Superman (TV series)" (the 1988 Ruby-Spears series), for the September 17, 1988 CBS run, the fiftieth-anniversary tie, Marv Wolfman as head story editor, Gil Kane's designs, and the "Superman Family Album" segments.
• Wikipedia, "The Real Ghostbusters", for the fourth-season Slimer! retitle and the January 30, 1988 move to an hour.
• Wikipedia, "The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley", for the NBC run of thirteen episodes from September 10 to December 3, 1988, the Hanna-Barbera production, and the SCTV and Saturday Night Live origin of the character.
• Wikipedia, "ALF: The Animated Series", for the ALF Tales spinoff premiering September 1988 and the two running together as the ALF & ALF Tales Hour in the 1988-89 season.
• 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. The weekday afternoon that same season: After School in Fall 1988.

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