“That’s something kids today will never know about.” How many times do you say that as you grow older?  

Michelle and I were talking about cartoons the other day and I said it again. In fact, I think I say it about once a week.

Cartoons. Kids have no idea what it used to be like.  They roll their eyes when we say things like “back in my day, we only had three channels” and “you could only watch a show when it was on and if you missed it, you missed it.”

But it is true. We couldn’t tune in anytime we felt like it, and we couldn’t pause something, rewind it, or stream six more episodes. We couldn’t binge watch anything.   

It was a different world.

Saturday morning cartoons were appointment television. We would get up at an ungodly hour and watch from early morning until noon, when they’d usually show the CBS Children’s Film Festival.  

We marvel these days at how kids can learn lots of mundane details, yet not  remember teacher or parental directions for more than five minutes.  Kids can be told 16 times to pick up their laundry, and then not do it. However, they can rattle off a list of 50 strategies for battling a video game foe and include minute details that would make an engineer jealous.

But shoot, were we any different when we were growing up? I could remember a TV schedule and what channel my favorite shows were on in the blink of an eye.  

You had your favorites.  You might start out watching something at 8 a.m. on NBC and then turn the dial over to ABC for an hour, then maybe back to CBS.  We had that Saturday morning schedule down pat and protested when the schedule changed, much like senior citizens when the paper towels are moved to a different aisle at Wal-mart.  

Furthermore, we had the lyrics of commercials memorized and learned all our parts of speech plus the Preamble.

Just from watching cartoons.

After I had bored my children to tears telling them about Saturday morning TV, I started talking about the Friday night preview show.  It was on every fall, and usually had some big network star hosting it.  

The host would talk about all the new Saturday morning cartoons that were premiering, and we watched with a judgmental eye to see which ones looked like duds and which ones we’d tune in for.

But really, we tuned in for all of them, duds or not.

I remember hearing that people, in the early days of television, would sit and watch the test pattern before the station would come on the air in the evening.  

People were so fascinated by television and the picture coming into their homes that they would watch just about anything.   A top-rated show in a big city in the early 1950s was a guy reading the newspaper and commenting on the top stories. I kid you not.

Even though TV was a good 25 years old or so by the time I was watching cartoons, we still didn’t have the modern convenience of streaming services and such. Heck, cable TV didn’t even become a thing until the 1980s – and even then there were only a few new stations here and there.  

KPLR TV out of St. Louis, even though a bit fuzzy, could be picked up by those of us living in town with antennas, so we watched that station a lot.  They did show old cartoons like “Heckle and Jekyll” and also a lot of old westerns and such.  So, those of us with a fancy antenna on top of the roof thought we were right up town.

Still, nothing could beat the fresh new Saturday morning shows and as I said, we got up at the crack of dawn to watch them. We made our breakfast cereal lists from the tantalizing commercials: Post Super Sugar Crisps and Honeycomb.  Then, of course, there were numerous commercials for the latest board games, Hot Wheels race tracks, and so on. 

Christmas lists were made and added to every Saturday, I’m sure.

I think it would be fun to have a bunch of us dressed in adult-sized “footie” pajamas buy a ticket to hang out at the movie theater for an evening.  Some tech genius could recreate a Saturday morning TV schedule, maybe from a year like 1975, and show it in the movie theater. 

The concession stand could serve Rice Krispies and Tang. We could all bring TV trays to eat on.

But heck, the more I think about it, the more it just sounds weird. 

I mean, most people couldn’t get past the old folks in the strange pajamas!