This week in TV Guide: July 8, 1967

J. Edgar Hoover likes The F.B.I.  I mean, he really likes The F.B.I.  The longtime FBI director has been a staunch supporter of the ABC series since its debut in 1965.  Testifying before a House subcommittee, Hoover says that "I have received hundreds of letters from people saying that the inspector on the FBI series portrayed what they thought an FBI agent should portray."  He added, "I want our agents to live up to that image."

The inspector in question is Lewis Erskine, portrayed by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., formerly of 77 Sunset Strip.  Hoover is also a big fan of Zimbalist; he says that the actor "has captured the esprit de corps of the FBI and what it is like to be an FBI agent. . . He has helped to deptict the dedication of law enforcement officers to duty, integrity, and law and order."

Zimbalist is in Washington. D.C. to film some background shots for the upcoming season of The F.B.I., and he receives a hero's welcome from the Bureau's agents, three of whom provide Zimbalist with an escort as he and a camera crew drive past the city's landmarks, establishing the proper atmosphere for the series.  Following filming, Zimbalist will be ushered in to a brief private meeting with Hoover, as he has several times during the run of the series.  Hoover calls Zimbalist "one of the team."

I've often spoken of my fondness for The F.B.I., particularly the opening credits from the series' first few seasons.  Besides the memorable theme music, the opening provides a montage of Washington's most revered symbols: the Capitol building, the Washington Monument, the Supreme Court, and the Department of Justice building, the original home of the FBI.  I swear, it makes you want to run out there and sign up. 

The F.B.I. was more than a propaganda piece, though it portrayed the Bureau in an exceptional light.  At the time the FBI was indeed a highly respected department, with agents that were thought by the public to be incorruptible.  (That may not have reflected the reality then, and almost certainly doesn't now, but that was in fact the image, and we all know what wins out when perception clashes with reality.)  But the series succeeded on its own merits, portraying hard-working law enforcement agents who rarely had the improbable flashes of brilliance and technological miracles of today's police procedural.  Instead, they depended on the science of the day, combined with good, exhaustive investigative work.  In place of quirky, stereotypical characters, the emphasis was on plot and detection, and the unquenchable thirst for justice.

My favorite story about The F.B.I., which I don't think I've mentioned before, concerns a couple of columns written by the political satirist Art Buchwald, who I wrote about here.  One mentions an FBI agent named Efrem Zumgard; the other tells the story of the first wiretap, when Hoover bugged the first phone call made by Alexander Graham Bell, ("When he said, 'Mr. Watson, come here - I want to see you,' the Bureau had the tape in 30 minutes.") registering in the hotel under the name of Zimbalist.  Still makes me smile.

***

For the first time, baseball's All-Star Game is being shown in prime-time.  It's being played at the four-year-old Anaheim Stadium, home of the California Angels, and NBC is taking advantage of the time difference to start the game at 7pm Eastern time, 4pm on the West Coast.

Unfortunately, starting the game at that hour produces some unintended side-effects, chief among which is that the late-afternoon sun is right in the batter's eye for much of the game.  The National League scores in the top of the second, the American League ties it up in the bottom of the sixth, and there it remains for awhile.  Quite awhile, in fact.  It isn't until Tony Perez' home run in the top of the fifteenth inning, almost four hours later, that the National League emerges triumphant, 2-1.  The game sets records for most strikeouts (30, as every one of the game's twelve pitchers records at least one strikeout) and innings played, and is the first All-Star game in which every run is scored via home run.  Had the game simply started at the usual time (1pm locally, 4pm EDT), it would have made it into prime time anyway.

Next year's game will be played in Houston, at the Astrodome (a 1-0 National League win).  In the domed stadium, the angle of the sun won't make a difference.  The game starts at 7pm local time, the first true night game in All-Star history.  Except for 1969, when the game is played on Wednesday afternoon due to rain, the game will remain in prime-time for the rest of its history.

***

Radziwill with Farley Granger in Laura

There's a note in the Doan Report that David Susskind has lined up a blockbuster for one of his two-hour ABC dramas next month: Princess Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy, will star in "The Voice of the Turtle," John Van Druten's Broadway hit, with an adaptation by Truman Capote.  Now, as far as I know, "The Voice of the Turtle" never made it to television, and the story behind that might be interesting.  What did make it to TV the next season was a disastrous adaptation of the mystery classic Laura, starring Radziwill (billed as Lee Bouvier, her maiden name), and adapted by Capote.  To say that it was panned doesn't quite do it justice; it was absolutely trashed.  "Slow moving," "Awkward material," "The wardrobe alone emerges unscathed," were some of the kinder comments.

Now that I think of it, I'm sure the story of how "The Voice of the Turtle" became Laura would be more interesting.  I do know that Capote, a longtime friend of Radziwill, was the one who encouraged her to get into acting, talked Susskind into casting her, and wrote the script for her.  Ironically, a repeat of Laura in June 1968 is postponed due to the assassination of Lee Radziwill's brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy.

***

Doan also reports on high hopes that the bill authorizing creation of the Public Broadcasting Corporation, currently in Congress, will pass.  It does, although not without some fireworks, and by 1969 we'll see the debut of PBS' most lasting legacy, Sesame Street.

Not everyone is a fan of government funding for education, however.  California Governor Ronald Reagan, himself a former actor, comes out against the government entering into "direct competition with private television," and says that educational TV should be developed through closed-circuit systems, aka cable-TV.  To this day, there's more than one TV critic - me among them - wondering what PBS offers that can't be found somewhere else on the cable-TV spectrum.

***

Alan Kogosowski today

No "Sullivan vs. The Palace" this week - Piccadilly Palace, Hollywood's summer replacement, is itself pre-empted by the Coaches' All-America college football game, which we mentioned a couple of weeks ago.  Ed's around, though, with a rerun featuring Tony Bennett, Nancy Sinatra, Count Basie and his orchestra, dancer-choreographer Peter Gennaro, comedienne Totie Fields and the comedy team of Hendra and Ullet, 13-year-old classical pianist Alan Kogosowski, and the acrobatic Mecners.

I'd never heard of Alan Kogosowski before and wondered if he ever amounted to anything, so naturally I looked him up on the always-reliable Wikipedia.  His story turns out to be quite interesting: he did indeed achieve some fame as a concert pianist, particularly in performing the works of Chopin, but perhaps more significant has been his work researching and treating carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive strain injury.  Who knew?

We've got more variety shows making appearances as summer replacements, as we discussed a couple of weeks ago. In addition to the aforementioned Piccadilly Palace, Saturday night also features Away We Go, the replacement for The Jackie Gleason Show, starring George Carlin (!), singer Buddy Greco, and the great drummer Buddy Rich.  On Sunday night there's Our Place, the replacement for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, starring Rowlf the Muppett, the comedy team of Burns and Schreiber, and the Doodletown Pipers.  Here's a clip from that show if you're interested (although it's in black-and-white, the original was broadcast in color):


On Tuesday it's Spotlight, the replacement for The Red Skelton Hour, a British import hosted by comedian Shelly Berman and singer Shani Wallis - and, for a couple of weeks, Benny Hill.  Tom Jones also had a turn as host, which led in turn to This Is Tom Jones a couple of years later.  Wednesday night Steve Allen returns to TV as the replacement for The Danny Kaye Show, and on Thursday singer Vic Damone takes over for The Dean Martin Show.  Interesting thing about these shows - with the exception of Damone's, which was on NBC, the rest are all on CBS.

There's also a program on CBS Monday night called Vacation Playhouse, a charming title which hides what used to be a staple of the summer season: a collection of unsold pilots, packaged into a series that would run for 13 or so weeks.  This week's edition stars Ethel Merman as the owner of a restaurant near a U.S. Navy base.  My recollection of these playhouse-type episodes is that it was easy to see why none of the pilots ever made it as regular series.

***

Joseph Finnigan has a wry article on the Golden Globes, which he calls "the tongue-in-cheek awards," based on their longtime reputation for awarding performances based on suspicious criteria.  For example, at this point very few nominees appeared for the show, and those who did were invariably the winners, which led more than one person to suspect that the only way to induce stars to show up was to promise they would win.  The show has had a successful run for several years as part of The Andy Williams Show, but its reputation would catch up with it in 1968, when the FCC ruled that this practice constituted "mis[leading] the public as to how the winners were determined," which in turn led NBC to drop coverage of the show until 1975.

The strange thing about this article, though, is that the Golden Globes were held on February 15, nearly five months before the article ran, and the 1968 show wouldn't be broadcast at all due to the FCC ruling.  Usually you want some kind of a hook when your piece is going to run - and I can't imagine why anyone would have been interested in reading about the Golden Globes in July.  Anyone? TV  

Not for kids only

Last week, I promised we’d take a look at why children’s programming was so awful. As I pointed out then, the Saturday morning lineup in 1968 was dominated by action-adventure cartoons featuring various forms of superheroes. The discussion points at that time were two: the presence of violence in these cartoons and its affect on young viewers, and what I referred to as the “creative poverty” of the shows themselves.

In the April 21, 1974 edition of TV Guide, Edith Efron takes a look at the continuing controversy. By 1974, some things had changed, but others remained the same. The concerns about quality are still there – FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson has labeled network children’s programming executives as “evil men” and “child molesters,” which goes to show that at least we haven’t lost our talent for name-calling. But the networks, stung by the charges of violent content, responded with changes they hoped would lead to a “Golden Age” of children’s programming. As Efron points out,

They used top TV writers to script non-violent shows, and hired sho0als of educational consultants to tell the writers how to insert “values” and social-conscious themes. . .And in a hideous anticlimax, it was denounced to the skies by other shoals of academics, ACT [Action for Children’s Television, the Sesame Street gang*] and TV critics.

*There have been many unintended consequences as the result of ACT’s involvement in children’s programming. Most of them, from the disappearance of local kids’ shows to the “short attention span theater” of Sesame Street, have been bad. Someday, if I’m in the mood, I might expand on that.

Efron agrees with the critics that the current state of children’s television is “appalling,” calling them

Chaotic, incoherent, purposeless scripts from which dramatic conflicts have been surgically excised, the vacuum filled by laugh tracks; unending self-plagiarism; and socially, racially and sexually stereotyped characters. Variety summed it up accurately as “shrunken adult programming” that was largely “witless, heartless, charmless, tasteless and artless.”

Variety’s critique is quite interesting, for it falls into a pattern of criticism that we’ve seen almost from the beginning of television. It's long been obvious that the viewing habits of adults and children aren't all that different, a point emphasized by Steven Stark in Glued to the Set, as he draws parallels between the two most influential programs in early television - The Milton Berle Show and Howdy Doody. As Stark writes, the eternal debate centers "on whether adults would permit their children to see pretty much the same type of programming that they did, since - given the choice between something educational and something entertaining - it was obvious which one kids would pick. Howdy Doody, Stark says, was "virtually indistinguishable from variety shows like Berle's, whereon the entertainment was always designed to reach the broadest audience possible." Doody, Stark argues, was in fact more successful than Berle, learning from the later's relatively quick rise and fall to incorporate elements, such as a larger supporting cast and ongoing storylines, that kept its young audience enthralled until 1960 - well after Berle had faded from the airwaves.

As Efron tries to answer the question of why kids’ programming is so bad, she talks to the network executives – the “evil men” in charge of programming. From two, NBC’s George Heinemann and ABC’s Michael Eisner, she gets much the same story: networks “strive for excellence in every detail,” that the shows promote healthy values, that criticism of their programming is misguided. Heinemann in particular makes some puerile remarks regarding his review of the storylines and logic for his shows:

“I eliminate all anxiety situations. I cut out all cliff-hangers and threat situations.” And he tells in detail how the writers of one show gave him a script in which bad guys were seeking to harm good guys. “I said: not on your life! I took out all the bad guys. The only bad guy that was left when I finished editing the script was an earthquake!”

As Efron comments, “this elimination of the conflict between good and evil is the perfect formula for gutting dramatic conflict – but Mr. Heinemann doesn’t appear to know it.”

Things change, though, when Efron talks to the third exec, Allen Ducovny of CBS. She remarks that after offering some of the same rote answers as his colleagues at the other networks, “his own rituals bored him, and he decided to say what was really on his mind.”

I have a distinct feeling that we are doing harm to children by removing adventure from their diet – adventure in the true sense. This includes mystery, suspense, jeopardy, and the ultimate is the triumph of the hero. Without giving the hero the kind of situation in which he can overcome the obstacle and triumph, we are depriving the children of a chance to develop a vision of right and wrong, or a struggle to overcome wrong – and that is what life is all about. There’s an enjoyment in seeing a struggle between two people, or two groups, or two ideologies. Life is full of struggles such as that. I feel it’s wrong to protect children from experiencing this.

It’s also futile. Children do see this on other programs. Why shouldn’t they see it on Saturday mornings?

Ducovny cites CBS figures that only 9% of children’s television viewing is done on Saturday morning – the rest of the time, they’re essentially watching the same things adults watch. “Of course prime-time programming is watched heavily by kids. The networks can rationally say that the prime-time programming is very good programming for kids – and for the whole family.”

The result, Efron concludes, is that Saturday morning programming is junk – in responding to the antiviolence campaign, cartoons “lost all purposed and coherence, and filled the conceptual void with canned yoks. The result: programming that was nonviolent but still nauseated many adults who saw it.”

This is a strong indictment not just of children’s programming, but of prime-time programming as well. “It’s not kids’ programming that’s in shockingly short supply on network TV – it’s adult programming.” Since 91% of the shows kids watch were in essence made for adults, that programming has to be “family entertainment” – suitable for both kids and adults. That being the case, the programs have been dumbed down, if you will, to the lowest common denominator.

The networks can’t admit that, of course.

You can go in several directions with this one. You can look at Ducovny’s comments and conclude that children are being protected too much, that they need to learn about danger and adventure, as this book suggests. You can read Heinemann’s remarks and contend that our society’s problems today stem in part from this refusal to imbue children with a sense of good and evil. You can look at Efron’s conclusion and surmise that the quality dilemma on television comes in large part from this desire for “one size fits all” programming, and that the reaction to it – the development of individual, specialized networks, not to mention other forms of personalized entertainment – has resulted in a fragmented society, one with no common culture at all except for the Super Bowl. You could even speculate that it has something to do with an entertainment subculture that seems to be in a perpetual state of arrested adolescence, catering to a narrow demographic reminiscent of the age today’s entertainment movers and shakers were back in 1974.

Or you can look at it as it is, an explanation of why children’s programming was so bad that it would eventually disappear from Saturday mornings altogether, replaced by morning-long news programs and infomercials, with only the occasionally bad cartoon to break the monotony.

But no matter how you look at the picture, it's not pretty.

Around the Dial

It’s a special Tuesday edition of Around the Dial, which means you’ll be able to catch Part 2 of my look at the state of children’s television on Thursday (you can recall part one here). But in the meantime:

Check out Christmas in July on Joanna Wilson’s terrific Christmas TV History blog, which will include an essay from me on the classic animated Christmas special The Little Drummer Boy. I’ll provide the link when it’s up, but in the meantime don’t miss any of the great essays Joanna will be sharing throughout the month, and feel free to participate if you’re interested – I suspect some of my readers would have some great memories to share.

Everything’s relative. Classic television fans lament how so few people are familiar with shows from the 50s and 60s, but as Terry Teachout pointed out last week, there’s an entire generation who’s never even heard of The Sopranos and James Gandolfini. (I myself didn’t realize it had been that long since the show’s premiere. Now I really feel old.) Teachout writes about that, as well as the impact The Sopranos had on television, here.

Comfort TV recalls seven series that should have lasted more than the one season they did. I remember six of the seven series; one of them’s on my (forthcoming) top-ten list, while another was the basis for the name of a blog near and dear to my heart.

Television Obscurities celebrates the 72nd anniversary of commercial television with a look at the initial broadcast schedule for WNBT-TV in New York City on July 1, 1941. We tend to forget that there was actual broadcast television prior to 1950, even prior to this country’s involvement in World War II.

Catching up on something that escaped me the first time, The Onion’s AV Club features this excellent piece by Todd VanDerWerff on Route 66, which in turn introduced me to another blog that takes a then-and-now look at various places seen in the entirely shot-on-location series. It’s a terrific look at a world that, as VanDerWerff says, “isn’t so far from the one we still have today yet feels light-years away from it.”

Finally, yours truly will also be participating in the Classic TV Blog Association’s latest blogathon, dedicated to the Summer of Classic TV as seen through the lens of Me-TV. I’ll be writing about Gene Barry’s murder cum comedy series Burke’s Law (another series that ran for too short a time). Care to join in? If so, check out the rules of the road at the CTVA. TV  

This week in TV Guide: June 28, 1975

We've been spending some time lately in the dark years of the late 60s, and frankly I'm a little tired of it, so let's jump ahead a decade to the beginning of the Bicentennial year.  True, when we think of the American Revolution Bicentennial the date that comes to mind is July 4, 1976 - but it was a year-long celebration, which actually ended on that date.*  And we needed to celebrate - we were coming off from Watergate, "Whip Inflation Now" Buttons were in vogue - come to think of it, maybe the times weren't that much better than 1968 at that.

*It doesn't quite explain why the Rose Bowl chose to adorn the gridiron with an American shield and eagles on January 1, 1975 - I guess they really wanted to get a head start.

***

I realize that 1975 is almost 40 years ago, but when viewed from the perspective of 50s and 60s TV, it most definitely was the future. The Western was dead, and the variety show was dying, and the era of live broadcasting was pretty much confined to sports and news. The networks had long since gone to an all-color schedule, so much so that TV Guide had stopped indicating which shows were colorcast, and now saved that distinction for old movies and occasional reruns in black and white. TV Guide itself had introduced a new, more modern typeset that was supposed to be sleeker, even as it lost something in character. And yet for all that, there’s still something familiar about this week’s listings, the past casting a shadow over the present.  In fact, they read something like the schedule for Me-TV, Antenna or Cozi.

This 1968 ad for WTCN shows that what's old is new again.

And that's the interesting thing - we consider those shows classics, we cheer their arrivals on DVD, and we debate the status of the ones that have yet to be released.  But in 1975, so many of them were still on TV, years after they'd disappeared from network schedules, and for old farts like me, we probably didn't think twice about them.

Channel 11 was the independent channel in the Twin Cities in 1975, so you'd expect they'd have a host of old reruns on their schedule, and they do.  Just look at their regular Monday through Friday lineup: (I've put an asterisk next to the shows that were in color; everything else was in B&W.)

10:00am - Father Knows Best
10:30am - The Andy Griffith Show
11:00am - The Lucy Show
12:30pm - That Girl
3:00pm - Petticoat Junction*
3:30pm - Bewitched
5:00pm - The Mickey Mouse Club
5:30pm - Star Trek*
6:30pm - The Andy Griffith Show
7:00pm - Ironside*
10:00pm - The F.B.I.*
11:00pm - Perry Mason
12:00am - Alfred Hitchcock Presents
12:30am - Alfred Hitchcock Presents

And that doesn't even count the weekends, which included shows like Gentle Ben, It Takes a Thief, Bracken's World and The Virginian.  Granted, several of these series were only a few years old, and they probably still would have been considered part of the TV landscape in the same way as we might look at Friends, Cheers or Seinfeld.  Still, it's entertaining to think about this, especially if you're a classic TV buff.  Think of what we could have done with a VCR back then!

The network affiliates have less room for old reruns, but they have their share as well, especially on the weekends.  Channel 4 (CBS) has The Saint, Channel 5 (NBC) offers a weekday afternoon block of Dick Van Dyke, The Mod Squad and Hogan's Heroes, and Channel 9 (ABC) runs The Name of the Game and The Untouchables.*

*The most interesting program in this lineup.  It's already been off the air over a decade, and during its original run it was considered one of the most violent programs on television; more about that in a minute.

Again, not to put too fine a point on this, but its quite interesting how many of these shows were on without any particular fanfare.  A decade later there was Nick at Night, and locally Channel 41, KXLI, would offer "TV Heaven," with nothing but old programs.  Today we love our classic TV networks; back then, they were just part of the programming day.

***

Another thing we loved in the day was the local movie.  They're all over the place on this week in 1975 - Channel 4 with one in the afternoon (following CBS' game show block) and another following the 10pm news (CBS doesn't have a late night show at this point), Channel 9 with a late movie following ABC's Wide World of Entertainment, and Channel 11 with a 1pm matinee.  Only Channel 5, with Johnny Carson and Tom Snyder established in the late night hours, lacked a weekday local movie slot.

The weekends, though - that's where the movie payoff is.  All four stations have movies on Saturday night following the local news - Channel 4 has Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Channel 5 follows the Carson rerun* with a double feature - The Giant Claw and The Monolith Monsters, Channel 9 has the movie version of McHale's Navy, a 93 minute movie which they've managed to stretch into a 2½ hour timeslot, and Channel 11 has Guns at Batasi and Horrors of the Black Museum.  Channel 4 also has morning and late-night movies on Sunday, and they're joined in the overnight hours with movies on both Channel 9 and Channel 2, the PBS station.

*NBC showed "Best of" episodes of Carson prior to the introduction of Saturday Night Live.

Are there many local stations that show movies nowadays?  A few, here and there, but even though all of them broadcast 24 hours, they seem to have less and less time for movies.  Not that there aren't movies on television, of course - there are entire networks devoted to them, and film aficionados have gotten used to seeing their movies uninterrupted and uncut, which they seldom ever were on local television.  But in the timeslots that used to be devoted to movies, we now have sports, daytime talk shows, and infomercials.  Especially infomercials.  What else can I say about infomercials, except that they're a pox on the viewing landscape.

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The big show on TV this week, one that I remember vividly, is Tom Snyder's six-hour Tomorrow marathon ringing in the Bicentennial year.  Snyder had his share of freak guests, but Tomorrow was often a literate, intriguing program, which I was only able to watch during the summer since it wasn't on Fridays.  (The Midnight Special was.)  Beginning at midnight and running until 6am Friday morning, it's a wonderful glimpse at Americana - cities preparing for parades, a reenactment of the writing of "The Star-Spangled Banner," and experts offering their thoughts on America's future.  Snyder also gets very loopy without enough sleep.*

*Remind me to tell you sometime about his recreation of the sinking of the Titanic.

NBC has another 4th of July show on Thursday night, the Stars and Stripes Show from Oklahoma City, which they broadcast annually from 1972 to 1976.  This year's show features Bob Hope, Charley Pride, Anita Bryant, John Davidson and Juliet Prowse.  It likely wasn't much different from any musical comedy show of the day, and probably was yet another aging reminder of TV's past, with increasingly less and less relevance to today's viewer.

***

There are some other interesting articles on TV's future, which I might get into at a later date.  But before we leave, one final note dealing with local movies.  Channel 9's Friday night feature is the 1964 version of The Killers, starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson and Ronald Reagan, which you might recall was intended to be the first-ever made-for-TV movie before it was deemed too violent and was released to theaters instead. It follows Channel 9's showing of The Untouchables.  Fascinating, isn't it? For all that talk we had last week about violence on TV, here we have the one-time most violent show on television, and a movie that was judged too violent for TV.

So what happened to all that hand-wringing over TV violence?  Did it just fade away?  Did our society become so much more violent that these programs actually paled in comparison?  Did people not care, since these were on late at night?  I wonder, of those people who wrote and campaigned against gratuitous TV violence, if any of them would have been surprised to see these on a local station, just seven years later?  TV  

No laughing matter

Last week’s TV Guide offered an interesting glimpse into the state of children’s programming circa 1968, one that deserves a closer look. By 1968, most children’s shows were confined to Saturday mornings, with the exception of local kids’ shows, which were to continue in their morning and late afternoon slots for a few more years, and Captain Kangaroo, the only remaining weekday network children’s program from a genre that had once included Howdy Doody and The Mickey Mouse Club.*

*Sesame Street wouldn’t premiere for over a year, and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood had yet to move into the Minneapolis-St. Paul market, where it would eventually bump such shows as Managers in Action.

But as we look at this Saturday morning, Mickey Mouse – as well as Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Alvin, Popeye and other classic cartoon characters are nowhere to be seen. What do we see?

CBS: Frankenstein, Jr., Herculoids, Shazzan!, Space Ghost, Moby Dick, Superman/Aquaman, Jonny Quest

NBC: Super 6, Super President, Young Samson, Birdman, Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel, Cool McCool

ABC: Milton the Monster, Casper, The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Journey to the Center of the Earth, King Kong

With the exception of a few standards, such as The Flintstones, we are left with, in the words, of Robert Higgins, the “Weirdo Superheroes.” As Higgins notes in an article from the March 23, 1968 TV Guide, “three-quarters of the cartoons being aired on all three networks fall into the Weirdo Superhero category.” And it’s successful business for the networks: Higgins notes that they expect to make over $50,000,000 from these cartoons in 1968 alone.

I’d describe this lineup of cartons as “creative poverty.” The animation is often bad, the stories lame, the voice dubbing atrocious. Most of all, though, they’re all alike. Even for a medium like television, which has often found itself on the wrong end of arguments regarding originality, the children’s programming genre as we see it here is creatively bankrupt.

To understand the development of children’s programming in this era will take more time and space than I have today, which is why I’ll be coming back to the subject next week. But the roots can probably be seen as far back as the late 1940’s and the advent of Howdy Doody. With this show, according to Steven Stark, came "a vast expansion of marketing to children" that had the byproduct of creating "the explosion of products designed to fuel the demand the ads created."  The strategy was wildly successful, as the sales figures indicated. By 1968 sponsors were paying nearly $10,000 a minute to advertise to an estimated audience of 14,000,000 kids.

Cartoons were profitable; that, we get. But where did the “Weirdo Superhero” come from? To a great extent, from where you’d expect it to come: comic books in general, and Marvel in particular. Said Stan Lee, who helped create (among others) Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and Iron Man), “Superheroes had been around for a million years. We revitalized them.” The “revitalized” superhero included character traits that kids could identify with - “hang-ups,” as Lee called them, such as acne, sinus trouble, and dating girls, problems that even their superpowers couldn’t overcome. Within the superhero genre was a sub-category – the “ugly hero,” such as The Thing. “People can identify with someone who’s not beautiful,” Lee said by way of explanation. “You say, ‘That guy could be me.’ But you still feel superior to him.”*

*It’s interesting, isn't it, how much this parallels the product in movie theaters today? I wonder how much of that is coincidence?

The angst-ridden superhero was designed to appeal to the growing awareness and sophistication of modern kids, who were growing up as the space program was reaching its cultural zenith. “Children today are highly sophisticated,” said Ed Vane, head of ABC’s daytime programming. “They don’t suspend that sophistication on Saturday morning.” The superhero was then grafted onto a format that had been a staple of children’s programming since the days of the Saturday matinee serial – the action-adventure genre. The result - well, you saw the result above.

It’s safe to say there was a fair amount of controversy about these cartoons, much of it centering on their violent content. Dr. Wilbur Schramm defended the content, saying that the true question revolved around “the kind of child we send to television, rather than television itself.” In other words, TV content can’t cause a problem that doesn’t already exist within the child. On the other hand, Dr. Fredric Wertham counters that “Television – and its display of violence – comes to the child with adult approval,” and that it’s foolish to think this doesn’t have an impact on the child. As I mentioned last week,* this is television’s eternal conundrum, with what might be TV’s version of Schrödinger's Cat: is it plausible to posit that viewers can be influenced by commercial content and not by the content of the program itself?

*Note that Higgins’ article comes before King, before RFK, before Chicago – would the reaction have been different if it had been written that fall, rather than that spring?

I’d interject here that there’s violence, and there’s violence. Violence has always been relative – NBC’s Larry White points out that “when we were kids, our parents had no idea what we were seeing in the movies on Saturdays.” I would strongly resist the idea that watching Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner or Tom and Jerry makes children more violent. That is, literally, “cartoon” violence, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to agree with Dr. Schramm here that any child who’d look to drop an anvil on his playmate because he saw it happen to Wile E. Coyote probably has a screw loose somewhere anyway.*

*I would include The Three Stooges in the category of “cartoon” violence even though it was live action, for a reason I get to below.

But if the “Weirdo Superhero” is supposed to relate to children in a different, more relevant, more realistic (or “sophisticated,” if you prefer) way, does it then stand to reason that the child sees this violence in a different, perhaps more malignant light? And isn’t it interesting to note how much this argument parallels the current argument about video games? Does the violence in the stunning realism of today’s video games somehow influence the effect it has on children, inuring them to the impact of the violence?

For all this, there’s only a brief mention of what struck me from the very outset when I looked at that Saturday schedule. I dubbed it “creative poverty,” and Higgins gives a specific description of what’s lacking: comedy. There’s no comedy in these cartoons. The Flintstones, which continued to run on ABC, is of course based on a sitcom, and Bullwinkle creator Jay Ward’s George of the Jungle (also on ABC) probably comes the closest to a new cartoon that’s simply funny. The Three Stooges, violent though it may be, was slapstick comedy. Take away the comedy, and you’re left with The Sopranos. Ward acknowledges the dearth of comical cartoons but acknowledges that “They’re [Weirdo Superheroes] getting the ratings and that’s all the networks care about.”

The burning question, I think, is this: why is children’s television so awful? Programs from Captain Kangaroo to Bugs Bunny to Mickey Mouse have demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be that way. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, there’s a very interesting answer to that, as we’ll find out next week.