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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 5, 2019 15:48:41 GMT -5
The NBC lineup was pretty weak, in this year, with The CB Bears, Space Sentinels, New Archie & Sabrina Hour, I Am The Greatest (Muhammad Ali cartoon), Thunder, Search & rescue: Alpha Team, Baggy Pants & Nitwits, The Red Hand Gang. By contrast, ABC (who ruled much of the 1970s Saturday Morning ratings) had The All New Super Friends Hour, Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics, and the Krofft Super Show, followed by the ABC Weekend Special and American Bandstand. CBS had Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour, What's new Mr Magoo, Skatebirds, Space Academy, Batman/Tarzan Adventure Hour, Wacko, Fat Albert, Isis, and the CBS Saturday Film Festival. NBC struggled through the decade, with some years better than others; but, with more singularly popular cartoons than blocks of programming. CBS did a little better, though they also tended to be more haphazard in programming. Fred Silverman, in the early 70s, at ABC, wanted Saturday Morning to be programmed like prime time, with concentrated blocks of programming, to keep viewers tuned in. That resulted in some strong line-ups, across the decade. ABC also blew NBC and CBS away with their government-mandated educational shorts on Saturday morning. While CBS had the snoozefest "In the News" with one of their adult newscasters droning about something boring, and NBC did a little better with kid reporters, ABC was rocking the house with season after season of Schoolhouse Rock, producing dozens of three minute ditties about how to use an exclamation point and how to count by five on your fingers and why things fall down. Schoolhouse Rock was pure gold. Educational and entertaining. My youngest son and I were just talking the other night and he mentioned that he used S.R. in English classes when learning the parts of a sentence. |
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Post by beccabear67 on Feb 5, 2019 15:55:02 GMT -5
Didn't Mark Evanier write some of those Schoolhouse Rocks lyrics? That alone would put him in my hall of fame!  "Conjunction junction, what's my function"? |
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Post by rberman on Feb 5, 2019 16:02:26 GMT -5
Didn't Mark Evanier write some of those Schoolhouse Rocks lyrics? That alone would put him in my hall of fame! "Conjunction junction, what's my function"?I don't believe so. Most of them, especially the best ones, were by either Bob Dorough or Lynn Ahrens for both words and music. They're actually pretty sophisticated little pop ditties with some very interesting chord progressions. "Figure Eight" for instance is a spooky piece built around a Neapolitan chord progression (i-IIb-V-i). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Schoolhouse_Rock!_episodes Here's Elliott Smith's cover of "Figure Eight," which was oddly left off of his album with that title. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Feb 5, 2019 16:08:55 GMT -5
Didn't Mark Evanier write some of those Schoolhouse Rocks lyrics? That alone would put him in my hall of fame! "Conjunction junction, what's my function"?Nope. The majority were by Bob Dorough. Lynn Ahrens, George R. Newall, and Dave Frishberg wrote most of the rest. With a smattering by others. I don't see any signs that Evanier was involved at all. He has written about them a few times on his blog though. And I owe rberman a carbonated beverage. |
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Post by beccabear67 on Feb 5, 2019 16:10:30 GMT -5
Didn't Mark Evanier write some of those Schoolhouse Rocks lyrics? That alone would put him in my hall of fame! I don't believe so. Most of them, especially the best ones, were by either Bob Dorough or Lynn Ahrens for both words and music. Ah, I must've gotten a wire crossed, thinking of those poems/lyrics in Groo maybe, though I know he did something connected to ABC animated shows; Afterschool Specials or Weekend Specials... Time For Timer... Hanker For A Hunk O'Cheese?  |
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Post by zaku on Feb 5, 2019 17:21:14 GMT -5
Just for fun (and with a little help from Wikipedia) I tried to list every 70's American superhero animated tv show MARVELDCOTHERSI'm quite surprised that Marvel had only three animated tv shows in the 70s! |
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Post by Phil Maurice on Feb 5, 2019 17:26:28 GMT -5
Schoolhouse Rock was pure gold. Educational and entertaining. My youngest son and I were just talking the other night and he mentioned that he used S.R. in English classes when learning the parts of a sentence. Yes! I bought the VHS tapes 20+ years ago to show my daughters who were then in 2nd grade. Instant hit! They still know many of the songs as adults today with babies of their own. I'm just a few years away from doing it all again with my grandsons (no grand-daughters yet). |
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Post by tarkintino on Feb 5, 2019 18:06:30 GMT -5
Just for fun (and with a little help from Wikipedia) I tried to list every 70's American superhero animated tv show MARVELDCOTHERSI'm quite surprised that Marvel had only three animated tv shows in the 70s! Although Marvel's 3 cartoons in the 1970s curiously matched its cartoon adaptation output in the previous decade with The Marvel Superheroes, The Fantastic Four & Spider-Man (with the 60s cartoons being far closer to the source material than anything on that 70s list), one could say hey made up for the short animated list with their live-action adaptations, since that decade also had The Amazing Spider-Man & The Incredible Hulk TV series, along with the Dr. Strange & two Captain America TV movies. |
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Post by EdoBosnar on Feb 5, 2019 18:54:56 GMT -5
Schoolhouse Rock was pure gold. (...) Yep. And the goldest of all was:
It even has a superhero!
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Post by dbutler69 on Feb 5, 2019 18:59:12 GMT -5
We didn't get Spider-Woman in our area, and for many years I thought that it was never actually made (and that promotional ads had gone out prematurely.) But I loved all the cartoons we did get, even (I think) that horrible Thing cartoon. They're all pretty embarrassing now, with the exception of the Japanese shows, Battle of the Planets (Gatchaman) and Star Blazers (Space Cruiser Yamato.) Even though both shows were kiddified for U.S. audiences, I think even then I could tell that the Japanese were far ahead of Americans in animation. I LOVED Star Blazers! It was my favorite cartoon back in the day, and having seen season 1 again a few years ago, it holds up pretty well. |
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Post by codystarbuck on Feb 6, 2019 0:39:30 GMT -5
Marvel was still a lower media profile, which is why fewer adaptations and also why they bought into DePatie Freleng. Even after that, they didn't exactly flood the world with Marvel cartoons. Marvel also cut some very bad deals in the 70s, when it came to media adaptations. They had little control over the live action shows and pilots, as well as the animated fare.
Filmation had a long relationship with DC and did a ton of licensed cartoons; but the economics of animation, with US production, was wearing on them and they looked more to properties they could own (hence Space Sentinels and Isis and things like Space Academy and Jason of Star Command). Almost all of the other studios had cut costs by shipping production overseas (H-B bought into an Australian studio and sent Toth there to teach them to do US animation and work from their models). Filmation was the last holdout, only switching overseas in the He-Man era.
H-B had worked with Marvel on the 60s Fantastic Four; but, were in tight with DC, with the Super friends. Ironically, by 77/78, their comic book licenses were at Marvel, while Marvel was running their own studio.
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Post by codystarbuck on Feb 6, 2019 1:22:14 GMT -5
Mark Evanier didn't work in animation, until later. Most of his television work of the 70s was for James Komack's company, and mostly doing variety shows (Komack produced things like Welcome Back Kotter, of which Evanier wrote at least one issue). Evanier's animation credits start cropping up around 78/79, with things like Scooby & Scrappy Doo, Richie Rich, Thundarr, Dungeons & Dragons; and, eventually, Garfield. Schoolhouse Rock was created by David McCall, one of the partners of the advertising firm McCaffrey and McCall. His son Davey was having trouble with math, in school; but, knew the lyrics to every Rolling Stones song. He brought in the idea of setting the multiplication tables to music. Tom Yohe and George Newell worked on the storyboards, and Bob Dorough, a jingle writer, came up with the first song, "Three Is A Magic Number." One of the execs, Radford Stone, knew that ABC was looking for socially conscious programming to fulfill the FCC mandate and arranged a meeting with Vice President Michael Eisner. Chuck Jones sat in on the meeting, as they thought Multiplication Rock might work as a segment of Jones' Curiosity Shop series. They presented the storyboards and song and Jones told Eisner to buy it. Bob Dorough wrote and sang many of the early songs, with Jack Sheldon doing many others (such as "I'm Just A Bill"). Lynne Ahern was a secretary in the copy department, who played music on the side and used to bring in her guitar, to play during her lunch hour. She was encouraged to try her hand at it and composed "A Noun Is A Person, Place or Thing." Blossom Dearie was the wistful singer of "Figure Four," and "Unpack Your Adjectives." Back in the 90s, Tom Yohe and George Newell wrote Schoolhouse Rock, The Official Guide, with background info for the songs and their creation, trivia, the lyrics, and other tidbits.  Around this time, their was a live stage production of some Schoolhouse Rock songs and there was an album of indie bands doing covers of some of the songs. The book tells anecdotes, such as the US Congress asking for copies of "The 3 Ring Circus," which explains the workings of the 3 branches of government, and "I'm Just A Bill," to use with Congressional staffers, as a reference tool. Teachers reported humming during US Constitution tests, as kids were humming the Preamble song (you just had to remember that it was We the People, of the United States, as the latter part was left out of the lyric). For fans of 1970s Saturday Morning programming, this book is a good reference, for the history...  It has a bit of editorializing, when it comes to some shows; but, it has a good, solid history of the evolution of Saturday Morning TV. This is a great one for the Krofft shows...  Lou Scheimer's book about Filmation....  and Michael Swanigan and Darrell McNeil's...  There are several about Hanna-Barbera, from art books to histories. |
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Post by codystarbuck on Feb 6, 2019 1:26:13 GMT -5
ps McNeil worked for H-B and Filmation and was mentored by Alex Toth. He also had a cartoon fanzine, in the 90s, which had some good background material (believe it was Toon magazine). he also wrote a book about Hanna-Barbera's adventure cartoons. He passed away last summer. He was also involved in the book, Toth, By Design, which featured Alex Toth's animation model sheets.
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Post by beccabear67 on Feb 6, 2019 1:50:46 GMT -5
This is a great one for the Krofft shows... I've read that Krofft one, it is great! My BF would probably really love the Schoolhouse Rocks book... maybe a future pressie from me idea there.  |
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Post by zaku on Feb 6, 2019 1:56:35 GMT -5
I LOVED Star Blazers! It was my favorite cartoon back in the day, and having seen season 1 again a few years ago, it holds up pretty well. You should try to watch Star Blazers 2199. It's absolutely one of the BEST remakes out there! |
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