Happy New
Year, Saturday morning fans! It’s 2020! And as we get further into the future,
it’s a good time to take a look into the past. 70 years into the past, to be
exact, for the very first Saturday morning television schedule.
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| Early television. |
That’s right—while
Saturday mornings wouldn’t evolve into the form most of us recognize until the
end of the 1960s, they actually started in the 50s. Networks began programming
for children on both weekdays and weekends, incorporating a variety of
live-action programs featuring animals, acrobats, puppets and more. In light of
this, Saturday Mornings Forever will be doing a year-long celebration of
Saturday mornings. Every two months, we’ll be covering each decade as we see
where it all began, where it ended up, and maybe even where it’s going to go.
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| 1945 television. |
When 1950 rolled around, television
was still in its infancy. Despite having been in existence for a quarter
century, the technology needed to bring some semblance of the system we’re
familiar with today hadn’t yet caught up to the concept. Add a depression and a
war, and TV’s overall development was hindered quite a bit.
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| 1950 TV by Zenith. |
However, once
the war was over, TV began finding its way into the home. The technology for
coast-to-coast broadcasting still wasn’t in place yet, so for anything
resembling a national broadcast required the participation of affiliated local
stations and physically sending a recording of the broadcast to them to air at
a later date. Despite being the last network to enter the TV game, ABC was the first to eschew local programming
for a national schedule on Saturday morning. It would be followed that winter
by CBS, then NBC
and, to a lesser extent, DuMont by
the following fall.
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| 1959 TV ad. |
The 50s are
also notorious for the lack of an archival mentality. Because of the expense of
the material used to record a program, studios opted to reuse them frequently
resulting in the wholesale destruction of anything previously recorded. Nobody
ever considered the historical significance of what they were doing, or that
anyone would ever want to see a broadcast again after seeing it once already.
The concept of the rerun slowly came into fashion towards the end of the
decade, thanks in large part to I
Love Lucy, and the practice of erasure diminished more and more.
Whatever did manage to survive was nothing short of miraculous. For many
shows, the only evidence it even existed could be limited to merely blurbs in
magazines and newspapers about them.
1 comment:
I think of the major early live Saturday Morning Shows, SPACE PATROL might be the oldest (December 1950) with existing episodes - most, if not all, of the 210 episodes of 30 minute version of the series exist in one form or another.
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