Saturday Morning Fall 1989: ABC, CBS and NBC Cartoon Lineup

Fall 1989 is the morning where the decade quietly ends and the next one starts to show through. A live-action teen sitcom landed in the middle of NBC's cartoons, a Nintendo character got his own show, and the Smurfs, the giant that had anchored the morning since 1981, was shoved out of its longtime slot. The cartoon store was still open, but the shelves were being rearranged.

On Saturday morning in fall 1989, NBC turned toward live action and video games with Saved by the Bell, Captain N: The Game Master, Camp Candy, and the Karate Kid, ABC added Beetlejuice from the hit Tim Burton film, and CBS ran the California Raisin Show alongside Garfield and Friends and Pee-wee's Playhouse. The Smurfs, in its ninth year, had been pushed out of its anchor slot to mid-morning.

ABC · fall 1989

ABC kept its hour-block structure and added the season's splashiest new cartoon. Beetlejuice, which premiered September 9, 1989, turned Tim Burton's 1988 ghoulish comedy into a kid-friendly animated series. Burton, who had directed the film, developed the cartoon and served as an executive producer, and Danny Elfman arranged his movie theme for the show. The series recast the movie's odd couple, gothic preteen Lydia Deetz and the crude ghost Beetlejuice, as friends bouncing between the mortal world and the afterlife's Neitherworld, and it became a signature late-80s and early-90s show, running on ABC into 1991 and then moving to Fox. Disney paired the Gummi Bears and Winnie the Pooh into a shared hour, Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters kept its hour, and A Pup Named Scooby-Doo opened the morning. College football again claimed the afternoon in the fall.

CBS · fall 1989

CBS bet on brand crossovers. The California Raisin Show, which premiered September 16, 1989, brought the singing raisins from their famous commercials to Saturday morning, riding a merchandising wave. The raisins were a claymation act in the ads and the earlier CBS special Meet the Raisins!, but the weekly series was standard cel animation, produced by Fred Wolf Films with Will Vinton kept on as creative director; the songs were recorded by Motown artists. Garfield and Friends held its hour and Pee-wee's Playhouse continued in what would be its final stretch. Rude Dog and the Dweebs came from the Sun Sportswear mascot, and Dink, the Little Dinosaur opened a morning that leaned on reruns at the back end.

NBC · fall 1989

NBC made the boldest structural move of the decade's last season. Saved by the Bell, a live-action teen sitcom, ran inside the Saturday morning cartoon block and became a defining hit. Captain N: The Game Master, which premiered that September, turned the Nintendo craze into a cartoon; the character had first appeared in Nintendo Power magazine as Captain Nintendo, and the name was trimmed for broadcast. Camp Candy built a show around John Candy, who voiced an animated version of himself running a summer camp; the DIC production ran twenty-six episodes across the 1989 and 1990 seasons, with a theme song Harry Nilsson sang with Candy. The Karate Kid adapted the movie franchise. The most telling detail sat at 10:00: the Smurfs, in its ninth year, had been pushed out of the anchor position it had held for most of the decade, with the front of the morning handed to new personalities and video-game tie-ins instead.

The pivot away from pure cartoons

For most of the decade, the network Saturday morning newcomer was an animated toy or property show. Fall 1989's new NBC lineup barely fit that description. Saved by the Bell was a reworking of the Disney Channel series Good Morning, Miss Bliss; when that show underperformed, NBC president Brandon Tartikoff decided to drop the teacher, keep the teenagers, and try the concept as a live-action comedy on Saturday morning, which the network treated as a new idea. NBC had been losing the older end of its cartoon audience, kids roughly ten to twelve, and a laugh-track sitcom was the bet to hold them. Around it, Captain N was built to sell a game console and the Karate Kid was lifted from a movie. ABC's biggest new name, Beetlejuice, came from a live-action film too. The direction was set: within a year NBC would cancel the Smurfs and other cartoons outright to clear room for a full block of live-action shows.

The Smurfs, moved off the anchor

By fall 1989 the Smurfs was in its ninth season and had aired around two hundred episodes, an extreme rarity in an era when most cartoons were gone after two seasons. NBC tried to keep it fresh by changing the premise, taking the Smurfs out of the forest and dropping the village for a lost-in-time format, arriving in different eras from one week to the next, while NBC also ran the prime-time time-travel hit Quantum Leap. It did not save the slot. The last new Smurfs episode aired December 2, 1989, and the following spring, on April 9, 1990, NBC canceled the show, along with other Saturday morning cartoons, to make way for a live-action block. Reruns hung on into that summer, then stopped. The anchor that had held NBC's morning since 1981 was gone, and the network that had built the ninety-minute cartoon block was the one that dismantled it.

What changed from 1988

The morning turned toward live people and video games. Saved by the Bell put a laugh-track sitcom in the cartoon block, Captain N and the Karate Kid mined a movie and a game console, and Camp Candy built a show around a movie star. ABC's big new name, Beetlejuice, came from a live-action movie too. And the Smurfs losing its anchor slot after eight years there was the clearest sign of all: the shows that had defined 80s Saturday morning were being cleared out to make room for what came next.

The honest bottom line

Fall 1989 is the sound of the 80s Saturday morning machine winding down. Nearly everything new pointed somewhere else: a sitcom that belonged in prime time, a cartoon built to sell a game console, an act adapted from a claymation commercial. The toy-and-movie engine that had run all decade was still turning, but the freshest energy was in live action, and Saved by the Bell would help pull the whole institution in that direction. And yet Pee-wee was still there in his last laps, Garfield still held an hour, and Beetlejuice was genuinely fun. The decade did not end with a bang on Saturday morning. It ended with the furniture getting moved.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "1989-90 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, "Saved by the Bell", for the August 20, 1989 debut, the retool of Good Morning, Miss Bliss, Brandon Tartikoff's push to focus on the teenagers, and NBC's move into live-action Saturday morning comedy.
• Wikipedia, "Captain N: The Game Master", for the September 1989 NBC premiere, the Nintendo Power origin, and the Captain Nintendo name change.
• Wikipedia, "Beetlejuice (TV series)", for the September 9, 1989 ABC premiere, Tim Burton as developer and executive producer, and Danny Elfman arranging his film theme.
• Wikipedia, "The California Raisin Show", for the September 16, 1989 CBS premiere, the cel animation by Fred Wolf Films, Will Vinton as creative director, the Meet the Raisins! claymation predecessor, and the Motown vocal performances.
• Wikipedia, "The Smurfs (1981 TV series)", for the ninth season, the roughly two hundred episodes, the lost-in-time format change, the December 2, 1989 final new episode, and the April 1990 cancellation for a live-action block.
• Wikipedia, "Camp Candy", for the NBC run beginning September 9, 1989, and John Candy voicing an animated version of himself.
• 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 1988. The decade started here: Saturday Morning Fall 1980.

The decade signs off, the room never does.

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