October 7, 2025 • 52 mins
The greatest period in the history of humankind took place in the short era between 1970 and 1995. During that time kids could tune in every Saturday morning between 8 and noon and find the most amazing cartoons ever created, plus tons and tons of ads.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Jerry, and we are practically perfect in every way
here on Stuff you should Know.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
That's right. I'm just a bill, only a bill.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Oh yeah, Well, have you ever been to Capitol Hill?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Oh? I'm just sitting here on Capitol Hill.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Do you remember we did a whole episode on Schoolhouse
Rock once and you had Bob Nastanovitch.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
John Yeah, a Pavement who. By the way, I finally
met him in real life. Oh yeah, yeah. I was
at a hard Quartet show, the New Supergroup with Matt
Sweeney and Stephen Malkmus and Emmit Kelly and Jim White
and in Atlanta and I turned around in the Bridy
Playhouse lobby and Nastanovich comes strolling in and I was like,
(01:00):
hey man. I was like, uh, and I'm sure he
gets hay Manned a lot, so he had he has,
you know, his guard up, actually didn't. He was nice,
but I was like, hey, I said, it's Chuck from
Stuff you should know. It's like good to finally meet
you in person. And he he's like, oh, hey, man,
and we chatted for a minute and it was great.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Oh that's cool. He remembered you.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Huh yeah, yeah, we've emailed and texted here and there.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Oh, gostcha. Well that's great, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
So that's my bobn Thestandovich story.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
That's a great one. That's about as good as a
Bobnistandovich story.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Get yeah. I mean I got to meet a pavement guy.
So that was like the bucket list complete.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
So I guess I guess I can't think of a
segway from bucket list. I mean, I guess it would
be an uncrossed off thing on my bucket list to
build a time machine and go back to nineteen eighty
three and watch Saturday morning cartoons again. How's that?
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah? What I mean? What was your routine in your house?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Baby, yeah, let's hear.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I don't ever recall having to worry about my sisters
trying to change the channel like it was Saturday morning cartoons.
It was all me, yeah, oh okay morning. Yeah, it
was great.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
So they were watching.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
No, Amanda's five years older than me, Karen was thirteen
years older than me. Oh yeah, so she either one
of them had much interested in Saturday morning cartoons when
I did the interested and overlap.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, we were close enough. Scott's three years older, Michelle six,
so we overlapped a bit, and our routine was it was,
you know, Saturday morning cartoons, but it was always a
race to the big yellow chair to see who could
claim that first.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
That's you sat in a chair. I sat like three
feet from the TV on the ground, cross leg in
front of it.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, you were one of those guys. Yeah, for sure,
because you weren't blocking anybody.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
No, it was totally cool. It was just me. I
love it yep with my et cereal.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Yeah, parents sleeping in Yep, for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I Actually I can't say what anyone else in the
house was doing during eight am to twelve pm every
Saturday morning.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Yeah. I don't remember watching them, like the whole block,
but maybe I did.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did. Except I know we've
talked about it before. I don't remember what episode, but
Thunder the Barbarian I would miss it. I would get
to watch like the first seven eight minutes and then
my mom would be like, it's time to leave for
swimming lessons, and it was such a bummer. Yeah, and
I know I've talked about it before on the show
(03:33):
because a listener was so kind that they bought the
complete series of Thunder the Barbarian and mailed it to
me where that I could see it.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, beepeep peep. I'm going to insert the person's name,
but I have to get to Atlanta to find it.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Okay, beep bit peep? Was it VHS?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
No DVD? Man? They really they've styled me out, so
thank you.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
So all right, let's get into this because I'm sure
we're gonna pepper our own, like favorite cartoons that we
watched throughout this, right.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
I might mention a cartoon or two.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
You never know, Okay, I mean you were into this, right,
like for years and years you spent Saturday mornings watching cartoons, right.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, as you've reminded me over
and over through our lives. I am a bit older
than you, so there will be some overlap. But also,
you know, as evidenced by like your love of like
the Gi Joe stuff, that was a little bit after
when I was into that kind of thing. So there'll
be some misses here and there too.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I'm sorry you left out the adjective superior gi joe stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Yeah, this is a fun trip down memory lane though,
and big thanks to Julia for this.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Yeah for sure. So for those of you who were
born after the mid nineties or even the early nineties,
I guess because it took a few years to come
to realize that there was such a thing as Saturday
morning cartoons and then get into them, you might not
really get what we're talking about. Maybe you've heard of
Saturday morning cartoons like gen xers love to talk about
(05:08):
it all the time, clearly, but it was a very
special thing, like a point in time every week where
essentially every child in America and I've read also Australia
had their own, the UK had their own to an extent,
the Canada, other countries in Asia had like Saturday morning cartoons.
(05:29):
And you came and you sat down and you watched
four straight hours of cartoons, yeah, peppered with ads directed
to you a five, six, seven, eight nine year old
and loved life. And that was like your time in
the week because, like you said, parents tended to sleep
(05:50):
in during that time. They were totally happy with their
kids amusing themselves for the first four hours of the
morning watching TV and eating sugary cereal and like it's
there was a real loss when it went away, Like
I was well out of watching Saturday morning cartoons by
the time we went away. Same, but I remember feeling
(06:10):
like a real like sense of like younger kids and
like subsequent generations, like really missing out on something that
we were in retrospect, really lucky to have.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, and you know, I'm sure the counter to that
could be like, yeah, bruh, but we can watch anything
we want, whenever we want, all the time, including Saturday morning.
But and not to say like well things were better then,
but there was something special about a block when you
didn't have choice like that, Yeah, dedicated to you, aims
(06:43):
squarely at you for a certain amount of time, saying
we see you, kids, and we want to sell you things.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
It's true, Like when I read about, you know, just
how shamefully bad the commercialism was in the eighties, I
still am like I don't I don't care, Like I
loved all I loved every minute of it.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, and the commercials, as we'll see, where not that
much different than the content. And I saw this in
action when when Ruby was younger and she would watch
commercials with the same fervor, and I'll be like, yeah,
I guess I did the same thing. You know.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
I remember when we first started podcasting with ads, the
whole the whole idea was, yeah, just all of a sudden,
start talking about the products, so no one gets that
you're talking, you're giving you ad. And we were both like,
we're not doing that at all. And that's where the
idea for the the fan submitted jingles came about. Was
to make sure everybody knew an ad is coming. We're
(07:39):
not just suddenly going to start talking about how great
Ore Casper mattresses, you.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Know, right, because I love cartoons and I love printer ink.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Now that you mention it, yeah, I do too. And
you know, I've got one of those Epsen printers. They
have like a tankless or a bottomless tank where you
just refill the cartridges. You don't even have to go
buy new cartridges, do they? Yeah, Epsin.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
I wonder I people are going to suspect that's real
and not a bit.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
No, it's a bit. Everybody should send you some dough though,
you know.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, but what we're talking about is a span of
time of a few decades about sixty five to two
thousand ish, although you will see there was some one
straggler at least beyond two thousand and cartoons had been around,
but they had mainly been in movie theaters like they
would play them before. Like you get to like a
fancy movie theater and they'll be like an organ player
(08:29):
and you'd see a cartoon and maybe a newsreel. The
first sort of regular running TV cartoon was something called
Crusader Rabbit in nineteen fifty Yeah, just ran for a
couple of years. But the first big breakout was the
Mighty Mouse Playhouse. Mighty Mouse had been around since nineteen
forty two, but it made its big Saturday morning television
(08:51):
debut in nineteen fifty five on CBS.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Yeah, and that changed everything because prior to this, there
was Saturday morning programming apparently all the way back to
the days of radio. If you were a kid, you
would tune in either after school or on Saturday mornings
get to hear your favorite program. So they were well
aware that this is when kids listened and then eventually
watched TV. But if you were a kid on Saturday morning,
(09:14):
you were probably watching like some clubhouse style show where yeah,
some local dude who might or might not be dressed
as a sad clown is interacting with puppets. In the
studio audience, there's nothing but kids. There's a single camera.
It's produced by your local TV station, and like that's
what you watch. Because they were so dirt cheap to make.
(09:35):
And then when Mighty Mouse came along, it basically showed
these things are maybe a little more expensive than that
clubhouse style show, but they're way cheaper than like The
Lone Ranger or Our Gang or some of the other
stuff we're showing on Saturday mornings. And there's something else
that's really really important to remember. We talked about it.
I think in our political cartoons episode. Cartoons are a
(09:58):
super stimuli. They our brains differently than watching Alfalfa or
The Lone Ranger or that Sad clown, who are live action,
real life people the kids differently. They capture our attention differently,
and so Mighty MOUs essentially showed like, hey, you want
to like get into a kid's brain and sell them stuff, Yeah,
(10:19):
this is the way to do it. Cartoons are the
wave of the future.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, way do you get a load of droopy?
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Droopy was great, wasn't they.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, although I don't remember stuff like that Saturday Morning.
I remember stuff like Droopy, more of like afternoon after
school kind of hours. But cartoons became a big deal
shortly after they hit the small screen and in nineteen
sixty And this is one of those little weird factoids
that I think some people might not realize is that
(10:47):
Flintstones is actually a primetime show. A lot of people
do know that, but a lot of people don't. So
was The Bugs Bunny Show at first, the Jetsons and
the New Adventures of Johnny Quest. They were all primetime.
I'm you know, major network, which is to say, either ABC,
CBS or NBC. This is pre Fox. Even there were
only three and not too long after nineteen sixty seven
(11:10):
was when they said, you know what, we got to
consolidate all this stuff to Saturday Morning. And that was it.
It was a new thing. And like you said, it
was pretty cheap to make, especially, I mean some of
the cartoons were better than others. There were some that
were really cheap and kind of poorly made, where like
just the mouths moved and stuff like that, And it
was the same person voicing every character, like kind of clearly,
(11:33):
and they were like, Hey, what we can do here
is we've got these kids. We got this captive audience,
tons and tons of kids named Josh Clark sitting three
feet in front of their TV Chris Cross, Apple sauce,
and that means we can sell them toys and sugar.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yes, And they were already doing this, I mean those
clubhouse style TVs. The guy would do like what the
original podcast ads were supposed to, just suddenly be talking
about a brand new toy that he loves, right, yeah, right,
So they've been doing this before, but again, cartoons, they
just were operating on a different plane. And I think
nineteen sixty six was a pivotal year according to I
(12:11):
found a pretty good article about this by a guy
named Paul FP. Pogue It's great name on encyclopedia dot com,
and he basically says nineteen sixty six was the It
was the year because that was the first year where
all three networks showed cartoon blocks on Saturday mornings, and
from that moment on until I would argue the late
(12:34):
nineties really, yes, a golden age for cartoons on Saturday mornings.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, for sure. And you you know you didn't have
a DVRs or TVO or anything like that to record stuff.
Obviously you didn't really even have VCRs to record things, right,
You probably just had the one TV at least until
kind of mid to late seventies is when multiple TVs
really started showing up a little bit more unless you were,
you know, like the rich kid. Yeah, and so you
(13:02):
had to figure out and debate with your siblings if
they were around, what to watch by reading. Most you know,
a lot of people got TV Guide, but we did
not pay for that because we didn't pay for extra
things in our family. Sure, but you know, we had
the local paper which had the TV listings, and so
you pour through some made arguments that you know, it
had kids reading on Saturday morning as a result, and
(13:23):
you would, you know, sometimes they were real Sophie's choices
to be made on what to watch.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Right and the reason why. And this is what's hard
to understand if you're like gen Z or even like
a late millennial. There was no choice in what you
were watching when you sat on Saturday mornings. The networks
that you were watching were showing you the shows that
they decided they wanted to run. So a show you
(13:51):
watched was on a specific time, on a specific network,
on a specific day, in this case Saturday morning, so
you just sat down. I think there was something about
not having that choice that made it even more enjoyable.
So long as the stuff was good.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Yeah, I mean they were serving us exactly what we wanted.
I never had any complaints, did you No.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
The only complaint I had that I didn't have three
TVs that I could watch. Yeah, them all at the
same time or even better sequentially.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, for sure. And while this was all, you know,
kind of fun and games are not all fun and
games mostly fun and games. There are people out there,
you know, kind of smarty pants people who have made
arguments for things like, Hey, it introduced a new generation
to the Beatles, because I certainly remember watching that Beatles
cartoon when I.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Was a kid.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Oh yeah, yeah, I came out in sixty five, but
by you know, it was still running somewhere because I
watched it, and that's where I kind of got my
love of the Beatles. It introduced kids to, you know,
concepts like what might happen in the future with the Jetsons.
There's a historian named Joel Rhodes who said that the
cartoons perform what the scholars called the bardic function. Yeah,
(14:56):
as in like medieval bards, when people would sit around
and listen to the stories, and it would give kids
on the playground like they knew the same jokes, they
had same reference points. It bonded a generation.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Because they were all watching the same thing on the
same day at the same time. So, yes, that was
the the culture for kids. That's where you got your
culture largely. I mean not entirely. There was Mad magazine
after all, right, but like that, that was because there
wasn't choice, because you couldn't be like, hey, have you
seen Black Dub No, I haven't seen that, but have
(15:28):
you seen Time Crimes? It's a great Like those conversations
didn't happen. It was some kid yelled out like exit
stage left. Every kid on the playground just cracked up
because they knew exactly what they were talking about. And
if you don't know what I'm talking about, just look
up cartoon exit stage Left.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah, that's right, it was that snaggle buss. Yes, okay,
I get some of those confused sometimes.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Now you nailed it, but you nailed.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
We also hammered this home in the Schoolhouse Rock episode.
But we do have to mention that how pivotal Schoolhouse
Rock was and literally teaching kids things about history and
about politics and civics and government and math and English
like you name it. It was all there and like real learning,
(16:17):
like legitimate awesome learning, awesome stuff.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, that was a good episode. I remember I cracked
myself up and we almost like had to take our
longer break. Yeah, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Do you remember the joke?
Speaker 2 (16:30):
I think I did some weird impression of Chuck Jones
the Loony Tunes guy.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Oh man, I gotta listening to this one now.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah, maybe we.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Should put Schoolhouse Rock as our select on Saturday. Oh,
that's a great idea when this one comes out.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
That's a that's a wonderful idea to Jerry.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Make a note of that. And then now I'm doing
the Flintstones hammering something into a stone tablet.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
I looked up The Great Kazoo because anytime I hear Flintstones,
I think Great Kazoo. Yeah, and did you know he was?
He was an alien who was banished from his planet
for creating a doomsday device.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
I don't remember that part. I didn't either, I remember
him floating around, but yeah, that's.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Right and being extremely condescending. Yeah, for sure, he's a
real George Dom dumb. Shall we take a break, Yeah,
let's take a break, all right.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Whenever you call me a dumb dumb, that means I
have to go reset. We'll be right back, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
There was one other thing, that, one other place you
could find out what was running at what time on
what network Saturday morning cartoons. It was the annual ad,
full page ad in the comic books in the fall
that announced like the Saturday morning cartoon lineup.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Yes, huh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yeah, well I was gonna say go look them up
because they're very nostalgic, but they're just awesome. They're just
so great, And they would tell you what time it
was on and then it was all starting in two
short weeks and you just couldn't wait.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Well, and how sweet that you could publish a one
time thing. And that was the lineup.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Right like, it's not changing, no, for sure, although apparently
they would change lineups in spring for shows that weren't working,
but more often than not, you were seeing largely the
same shows.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, so yeah, I remember, that's when things would change
sort of mid season. That was always disconcerting.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah, and one other thing I just barely touched on
it was there was a subtext to it all. This
started right after summer ended, so you had all summer
to have a great time, Summer stops, school starts, and
then Saturday Morning Cartoon kicks off a new season.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Oh man, I love it the fall TV season. So
we mentioned advertising. This is going to be a big
part of this episode because it really goes and lockstep
with Saturday Morning Cartoons and all children's programming of all time.
But at one point, you know, like I mentioned, they
realized they had a captive audience. They could sell them
toys and sugar. But the lines started to blur in
(19:19):
the nineteen seventies between content and advertising in such a
way it was sort of like the beginning of In fact,
I'm curious when that people started using words like IP
intellectual property, because now we would just call it IP.
Back then, it was like, Hey, we got the Jackson five,
they are a successful musical group, Let's give them a cartoon.
(19:40):
We got the Osmond's Kids, love the Brady Bunch, Let's
do the Brady Bunch kids. We got the Flintstones. Hey,
let's give them a cereal, and things started just kind
of crossing streams such where, yeah, like we would just
call that IP. Today it's like, let's take a thing
and exploit it in as many different ways, sell it
in as many different ways as we can.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Right, yes, exactly. It was. They were cartoons starting, like
you said, in the seventies, became marketing tools, and at
first it was to basically extend the advertising power of
an existing TV show, like all the ones you listed.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Right and more.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, but then they started saying, like, hey, we have
this line of greeting cards. The care Bears started out
as a greeting cards line, so did Shirt Tales as
a matter of fact. Yeah, And they would say, like,
people are going crazy for these mugs with these adorable
characters on them, because care Bears did have the loveliest
animation potentially of all time, of all Saturday Morning cartoons.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
And then they said, Okay, mugs are not enough, greeting
cards are not enough. Let's like really blow out this
ip if they were calling it that, and turn it
into a kids show and then start selling like dolls
and figures of these cartoons. To the kids watching these shows,
and you could take something like the care Bears as
(21:01):
a greeting card line and turn them into a hot property.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Yeah. I mean, we'll read through a few of these.
That was a pac Man TV show of course, that
was good. Which was an arcade game, of course. There
was a Dungeons and Dragons cartoon that was pretty good
role playing game. I don't think I ever saw that
there was let me see here, obviously the Transformers. Yeah,
long before they were not so great Michael Bay movies.
(21:28):
They were toys and then a cartoon. And as you'll see,
some of these things kind of it's hard to remember
which one came before the other or if they were
like developing toys just to sell a cartoon or developing
a cartoon just to sell toys. It kind of except
for you know, Rambo and Chuck Norris, which were actual
shows in nineteen eighty six, Rambo The Force of Freedom
(21:49):
and Chuck Norris Karate Commandos Double K. I think the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the one that started out
as a show just to sell the toys, right.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, they were basically co developed at the same time
as part of a grand scheme. I know, Jim in
the Holograms was a cartoon before the toys, about a
year before the toys. Okay, there were Smurfs. When the
Smurfs came out, that was a big deal because there
(22:20):
was there was like was it one hundred or one
hundred and one Smurf with Papa Smurf, and they made
little like really collectible size action RLL not action figures
because they weren't action at all, but just little figures
of the Smurf.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
You remember those, Yeah, you could smurf them all.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
And yes, exactly, I'm pretty sure they had like a
hundred different ones that you could collect them. People went
bonkers on those things because they were just so cute
and you could put them on your desk or you
could play with them or do whatever. If the Smurfs
came first, and I think that they really kind of
helped kick off that that genuine like we can really
market the heck out of these cartoons if we make
(22:56):
figures based on these.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Yeah, see that that's a slight divide. It was a
little bit old for Smurfs, a little bit old for Smurfs.
Full stop.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Smurf is still pretty good.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Hey, they're still making those movies. Man, that was one
out last year, wasn't there.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
I have not seen that. You mean, like the CGI movies. Yeah, yeah,
I've not seen them, but yeah, I think they've got
several out.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yeah, I think it's the same thing. They're still smurfing
at the box office.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
That's great. And then there were other ones like Strawberry Shortcake,
My Little Pony. Well, like you said that, the lines
between did the cartoon come first, did the toys come first,
it really doesn't matter because they were all part of
the same package. By this point were well into the eighties,
which not coincidentally was the deregulation minded Reagan era, and
(23:42):
cartoons at this point had evolved into half hour essentially commercials. Yeah,
for the actual toy, and in the most pronounced cases,
the actual commercials were for the toys in the cartoon
that the toys were based on.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah, I've got some stats here because in the late seventies,
the FTC and we're going to talk about the FCC
and the FTC quite a bit because parents and the
government started to get a little upset. Basically, they saw
the writing on the wall, and in the late seventies
they released numbers by the FTC that highlighted what they
called it like a real health problem for this programming
(24:24):
companies every year, and this was back then in the seventies,
spent five hundred to six hundred million dollars on ads
targeted to children. Of all the foods being advertised to kids,
two thirds, I'm surprised it wasn't more than this, honestly
were highly sugared products.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
It was by my Josh math calculations, it was over
ninety five percent.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Okay, that feels about right.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yeah, for real because of all the foods. But even
of all the ads, chuck, most of them were first
sugared foods. There was a study or that Trade Commission
study looked at some data that looked at nine months
of nineteen seventy five, not even the whole year, looked
at seven five and fifteen ads. Seven and eighty two
(25:11):
of those ads were for sugary foods ninety five point
seven percent.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Was there anything for good food Yes?
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Actually there were four four ads over nine months, four
different ads for meats, vegetables, milk or cheese, and cheese,
and I think meats maybe had zero, so vegetables somehow
was basically carrying that. And I would guess all four
of those were different V eight ads or fruit juice ads.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Who was the guy? It was like, the the dairy
counsel or something. The guy that danced around and sang
about cheese.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
I think it was uh time for Timer. Was he
like a big circle with real long, skinny legs in
the That was Timer?
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Okay, Yeah, that was what was that? Was that the
dairy Council.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
I know. He was actually a response to the government
actually doing something in the late seventies, which we'll talk about,
which was so he essays to kind of counteract this stuff. Yeah,
it was a good.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Thing, Okay.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
He talked about eating proteins and stuff rather than sugar.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
God, what a very weird He looks like Twinkie the
Kid a little bit.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Yeah. I couldn't put my finger on it. Chuck, You're
absolutely right, that's who it.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Was, all right. So the writing's on the wall. These
studies are coming out and people are saying, like, really,
four ads for good food and seven thousand plus for
sugary stuff, and so people started getting upset, not just
about the ads though, but about the content. Cartoon violence
is a real thing every time there was an adult
in a cartoon, they were buffoons and morons.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Or they had like an evil plot that the kids
had to foil.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Yeah, for sure, like they were bad people like Scooby
Doo kids were. They were always foiling the adults evil
playing exactly. They were never going against fellow whatever. I mean,
how old were they even.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
They were late teens, maybe even close high school. Yeah,
I think they were bumming around with college. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I think it was ready before college.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Okay. Consumerism, of course was very much glorified in the
cartoons and the ads. And by the late sixties, you know,
jumping back a bit, there were there were groups that
were forming the Action for Children's Television got together. They
were lobbying the FCC. Obviously they regulate the media on
not cable as we'll see, but just regular TV, and
(27:33):
they were saying like, hey, this is this stuff is
we got to pull this back some like we're getting
out of hand with what we're feeding children four hours
at a time every Saturday.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yeah. Yeah, this was, like you said, the late sixties.
It started to really kind of pick up in the
seventies because the reason why is more and more research
was funded studying what effect television had on kids, and
Saturday morning cartoons were a deep focus of those studies too.
There was a nineteen seventy five study for the National
Science Foundation. It was a meta analysis. Yeah, and they said,
(28:04):
Saturday morning cartoons are creating conflict within families because kids
are going to their parents saying I want this, the
parents say no, and then the kid gets upset and
starts arguing and that Yeah, that's internal family conflict. Familial conflict.
And this same one of the surveys found that kids,
(28:26):
I think a third of kids reported arguing sometimes when
their parents said no, Six of them argued quote a lot.
So the reason why Saturday morning cartoons in particular were
causing this conflict is because there were so many ads
for so many kids products that kids saw every Saturday
that it increased the frequency of kids asking for stuff,
(28:49):
which increased the frequency of being told no, which increased
the frequency of arguing in conflict.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah, for sure, parents didn't like that. Of course, they
also didn't like that. They learned that and they did,
you know, studies on this too, and they found that
young kids or kids in general, basically couldn't tell the
difference between cartoons and ads, because sometimes it was the
literal characters from the cartoons telling you something. Sometimes it
(29:17):
was kids playing with toys and showing you the action
of the toys, and kids just love watching that. And
the old you know, the younger you were, you really
couldn't tell the difference. Once you got a little bit older,
you could tell the difference just by the link and
be like, well, those are the short cartoons.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Right exactly. Yeah, because these ads were all like there
would be a mini cartoon within the ad, you know,
like Frank and Berry would almost fall into a pit
or something like that, Chocolate would have to come turn
into a bat and rescue them or something like that,
and then they both end up eating their cereal. That Like,
(29:53):
if you're a little kid, you're like, this is great.
This is some weird short that they just put in
the middle of the show. But it's not an.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Ad hungry all of a sudden, right for that cereal?
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Mom, I want some count Chocula.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
That was actually captured really well in a Simpsons just
this almost in a side where Itching and Scratchy are
up for a cartoon award and one of the other
one of the other cartoons in the running for Best
Writing in a Cartoon Series was Action Figure Man, the
How to Buy Action Figure Man episode where it just
(30:28):
shows the little kid and goes, Mommy, I want it. Oh,
he's pointing to the action fag like not even an
ad That was.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
The episode that's really funny.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Yeah, they nailed it on that. They nailed it like snaggle.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Puss they always do. So the long and short of
all of this past few minutes is that kids didn't
know that they were being sold things right, and parents
didn't like that. I think the authors of the paper
were fairly kind when they said, certainly, most advertisers do
not deliberately set out to confuse or mislead children, nor
to promote unsafe, unhealthier, social, socially un desirable behavior, which
(31:02):
was very naive I think. But maybe they were just
trying to soft sell it.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Right, So you put all this together that again started
in the sixties, is kind of agitation. And also this
is where this is the climate that Sesame Street grew
out of and probably made Saturday morning cartoons look even
worse because it showed you could make kids shows that
didn't poison their minds, right, and then it picked up
in the seventies, and by nineteen seventy eight, the Federal
Trade Commission said, hey, we need to do something about this.
(31:30):
We're not going to do anything about it, but we're
going to make some recommendations. Through their staff report on
television advertising to children. They said, we should ban all
television advertising for any product whatsoever that's directed at very
young children. That's a big one, right, so you can
kiss my buddy goodbye. Right, ban advertising directed to older
(31:52):
children for sugar products, which makes sense. But the thing
they predicated this concern on just cracks me up, because
those things can pose serious dental health risks. Like that
was the extent of the concern with sugary products back then.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
You could rot your teeth, right, yeah, I mean that's
what you heard. That'll rot your teeth, not like just
eating tons of sugar is not good for you.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Right. I remember having like a we did a module
that included a play and some other stuff in third
grade that was sponsored by Crest. There's a big Crest
like cutout stand up and like we just in class,
we just did this whole thing about brushing your teeth
with Crest brand toothpaste. It was like that pervasive.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
We make holes and teeth. Do you remember that?
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah? I do, but I can't place it.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
It was Oh man, I mean I think it was Crest,
but it was again a cartoon that Crest was running,
and it was the cavity something wo that they had
to fight, and that was what they would chant, we
make holes and teeth.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, that might have been one of the things that
kick this off.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Yeah, probably so. And then the final requirement was advertise
mints directed to older kids for other sugar products that
they could, you know, put on TV would be balanced
by ads for other nutritional products or health disclosures at
the end of the sugar product ad.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
That's where timer came from.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Yeah, okay, I gotcha.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
That's also where bod Squad came from. Don't drown your food,
remember that one?
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
There was The cool thing about Schoolhouse Rock is they'd
already been doing this for half a decade by the
time other networks started to do something about it by
running these cute little cartoon PSAs. So essentially they were
ten to fifteen, maybe up to thirty second commercials that
the networks had to run that were cartoons too. So
(33:45):
they appealed the kids, but they rather than telling kids
to buy fruity pebbles, they were telling kids to brush
your teeth or to exercise your chompers with things like
carrots and apples, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Right, should we take a break.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Let's talk about the rest of these. There's some other
stuff that you just kind of take for granted. I
didn't realize came out of an actual deal between the
networks and the FTC.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, there was also and all this stuff I didn't
remember necessarily in the moment, but once I started reading
about it and studying it and obviously watching on YouTube,
it washed over me. NBC had one to grow on
from eighty three to eighty nine, and that was just
usually some famous person sort of giving some life lesson advice,
and they'd be like, well, that's one to grow on.
(34:32):
What else old Nancy Reagan? Of course, and just say
no to drugs? You can forget that, yeap.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Betty White taught you who to call in an emergency.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah, called Betty White, right.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Exactly, because Betty White could handle basically anything to you.
Was just that kind of person. There was also the
more you know, with the star that went over your head.
That was the nineties on NBC and all of the
NBC stars at the time, because remember NBC ruled the airwaves. Yeah,
must see TV Thursdays.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
They had their stars basically doing thirty second spots, which
are PSA's and about how to, how to you know,
maybe get into teaching, maybe stay in school, just little
life lessons like that. There were a bunch actually about
abusive parents and how not cool it was for a
dad to beat up on a mom. Oh yeah yeah,
(35:25):
real like kind of rugging and raw stuff here there,
but presented in these vignettes that kind of got through
to kids, although you can tell they were geared towards
slightly older kids.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah for sure. And then of course you're beloved. G
I Joe talked about stranger danger and always finished with
the famous line, now you know and knowing is half
the battle.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
And you've seen those parody videos of that before, right,
I don't think so. Oh, there's about thirty or so
maybe more parody videos that are just totally off the
wall but hilarious where they just take out the sound
and put in their own sound and voevocals and edit
the stuff up, kind of mix it up so that
(36:04):
they're just it's just amazing. Look up g I Joe
psa parody videos and you'll thank me later.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Or just watch probably any episode of the Family Guy.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah, probably he.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Did a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, he did.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Shall we take a break, yes, all right, we'll be
right back with more on Saturday Morning cartoons. All right. Oh,
(36:45):
by the way, I remembered it was the Cavity creeps.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Oh, great memory.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
Yeah, they just pop back. So before we left, we
talked about, you know, some of these things they were
doing to offset the effect of cartoons. It's called pro
social programming, and it came about because of an actual
deal that was made. There was an FTC hearing in
nineteen seventy eight where Kenneth Mason of Quaker Oats was
up there because you know, they're like, hey, Captain Crunch
(37:11):
is rotting our kids teeth out and you make it.
And he actually like he didn't think they were the problem.
He thought the content was the problem. But he did
come out and had a statement basically where like he said,
you know, I think we do need to change what's
going on in our cartoons and change the way our
society is using this medium to communicate with kids. So
(37:34):
it took a lot of nerve, I think for that
guy to say that, but he didn't blame the ads
like I said. So they struck a deal basically, Hey,
you can keep these ads if you add this other
programming that we were talking about before.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Yeah, And apparently the way that I took it was
it was a very crafty thing to do by blaming
the content because it took the onus off the sugary
product advertisers and everybody started looking at the cartoons themselves,
and the cartoons were like, hey, hey, we're not nearly
as bad as fruddy pebbles, but okay, we'll start doing
something about it. And the I guess cartoons themselves started
(38:10):
to get a little more pro social, like this is
where fad Albert came from, I believe. But then also
those PSAs that we were talking about, that was the
advent of them.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, for sure, but this is late seventies. I think
that was seventy seven seventy eight. Ronald Reagan would come
along in the nineteen eighties and sort of just deregulate
the United States as a whole and said, FCC stand
down and don't worry about this stuff. They didn't officially.
I mean, there were recommendations anyways, and not laws. So
(38:42):
a recommendation is only good if you sort of follow
up on that, and the FCC started not to in
the eighties they kind of didn't try in some cases.
I think between nineteen eighty and nineteen ninety they actually
saw a rise in the number of violent acts per
hour on Saturday morning cartoons from eighteen point six to
twenty six point four per hour.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Which is pretty nuts, but it gets even more nuts
when you compare it to what was on primetime, what
the adults were watching. Oh yeah, between nineteen eighty and
nineteen ninety, it pretty much held steady at just five
to six acts of violence per hour as opposed to
the twenty six per hour on cartoons.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah, and you know, it's cartoon violence, but it's still
it's not all Roadrunner falling off a cliff like a
lot of it was, you know, depict like you know,
there was a Rambo cartoon like I mentioned, right.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, but there there is research. And I'm not taking
a position on either way because people have said, like
violent video games caused violence, right, violent this is like
the predecessor to all that stuff. Violent cartoons caused violent kids.
One of the I guess arguments of that is that
even if it was cartoon violence like Roadrunner, it still
desensitized kids to the consequences of violent acts, right because
(39:56):
there was accompanied with humor.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Yeah, for sure. So the eighties were kind of the
most unchecked time, it seems like, Yeah, and the nineties
come along and finally they were like, all right, we
got to do something. Congress steps back in and the
Children's Television Act of nineteen ninety required the FCC to
enforce those original FTCs recommendations in nineteen seventy eight and said,
(40:19):
you got to reinstate restrictions on advertising during children's television
and enforce the obligations of broadcasters to meet the educational
informational needs of the child audience. And a couple of
years later, NBC was like, all right, I'm done, it's
not even worth it anymore.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Get this. Yeah. Although one good thing that came out
of this is this was the origin of Saved by
the Bell because NBC went all in on slightly older
kids team programming on Saturday mornings, and the flagship of
it was Saved by the Bell so much they shoot
they showed two episodes of it, Mourning New Ones. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
I mean this is also where you got things like
the Mighty morphin Power Rangers, And of course pee Wee's
play House was a little bit before this, or was
it in the nineties?
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Was that the German pronunciation? What did I say pee
Wee's play Hoss? Did I p's PV's play House? Perfect? Yeah?
I think that was like eighty five or something like that.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
Okay, I never watched pee Wee's Playhouse. I know we
talked about this, but I guess I was fourteen by then,
not that you I mean there. I could watch it
today and probably really love it because pee Wee defies
age groups. But it was just one of those things
that maybe at the time I didn't know about it
and didn't think it was for me or something. I
don't know, I have no excuse.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah. I wasn't into him either for sure. But I
did get to see his live version of the pee
Wee's Playhouse.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
Oh you went to that?
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
So there were a few other consequences of this, but
the big one, the upshot, was that the government Congress,
essentially Nanny stated Saturday Morning cartoons out of existence. Yeah,
because of these rules, they weren't profitable anymore. There were
certain restrictions on advertising. You could only show so many
ads during kids programming, like there was. There was just
(42:09):
a lot that took away the profit drive that made
Saturday morning cartoons so attractive.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
There were a lot of other factors too that put
the writing on the wall, not the least of which
was the rise of cable TV, which you mentioned was
outside of the purview of the FCC for a long time,
and from what I can tell, even today, networks are
required to show three hours of educational programming geared toward
(42:38):
geared to kids. So if you ever are up on
a Saturday or a Sunday and you were watching say
By the Bell reruns like I don't know some people do,
it would say it would flash like a logo that
says EI, and it would say this program has been
labeled educational and informative. That's because of the government mandate
(42:59):
that they have to run three hours of shows educational shows.
I guess a day, maybe maybe a week, because I
only remember seeing it on certain times of certain days.
But there were mandates that said you have to show
educational programming and that's why you see that today. But
cable that didn't apply to And so not only did
(43:22):
cable not have to show and take up valuable real
estate with educational programming that nobody wanted to watch unless
it was saved by the bell, there were also cable
networks that were geared exclusively two kids. That wasn't just
on Saturday mornings. These were twenty four hour a day
children's programmings like Nickelodeon and the beginning, the first iteration
(43:44):
of the Disney Channel.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Yeah, and stuff like the WB and CW two. Those
weren't exclusively kids, but I feel like most of that was.
And like through teen years basically you also had the
rise of like even though I love my tar and
stuff like that, it wasn't anything like what was to
come with at home gaming. That certainly put a dent
in things, because now kids could just get up on
(44:07):
Saturday morning and play whatever. You know, new system was out,
DBRs came along, and then, you know, so you didn't
have to crowd around the TV at a certain time. Together,
they all just started getting out of it. I think
I mentioned NBC got out in ninety two, CBS got out,
in ninety seven and ABC. Wow, ABC hung on to
(44:28):
Saturday Morning cartoons till twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Yeah, yep, for sure, bad No, I think WB and
Fox had only stopped just a couple of years before.
But again, it seems like the whole thing peaked and
ended by the late nineties, very early two thousands. And
from what I saw, the last Saturday Morning cartoon block
(44:54):
shown in the United States happened on September twenty seventh,
twenty fourteen, on the CWA, And the last cartoon show
that was shown in the history of Saturday Morning cartoons
was Yu Gi Oh Zexol, which is nothing I was
ever into, but I know there are a lot of
kids who just like drooled with nostalgia. And that was
(45:16):
the last Saturday Morning cartoon ever shown. There's a little
piece of trivia for you.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
Wow, did they have a lone Bugler play taps afterward?
Speaker 2 (45:25):
They should have? For sure?
Speaker 1 (45:26):
Man, what an end of an era? For sure?
Speaker 2 (45:29):
Yeah. But it also I mean when I look back
or look at all of this info, and I'm like,
I was smack dab in the most manipulative stretch of
Saturday Morning cartoons. Yeah, and it makes me wonder, like
what had I been watching in the early seventies or
had I been watching in the nineties or two thousands,
after like all of these restrictions, how different would would
(45:53):
I be?
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (45:55):
Yeah, Like I can recite a specific fruity pebbles that
they used to show around Christmas. Yeah, now, yes, So
I think Fred no Barney was pretending to be Santa
because he wanted to slide down the chimney and get
Fred's fruity pebbles and he said ho, ho ho, I'm hungry,
(46:17):
and then he slid down and he found Sana was
already there, and he goes, Sanna, my pebbles, and Fred
goes your pebbles, Barney. And this would like get in
my head as an earworm, and it does still sometimes today,
where like for days it'll just be going on a
loop in my head.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
That's so funny.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
And I can't even top that chuck. As I was
thinking about it today, I was highlighting, like my notes
for today, and I started drooling, So like that's how
that's the Pavlovian response that was teen to me for
fruity Pebbles. Thanks from the Morning cartoons in the Air.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Oh I love Frddy pebbles not as good as Captain
Crunch peanut butter. To me, that's my all time favorite.
But boy, love some pretty pebbles.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Did you ever have that Et cereal that I mentioned earlier?
Speaker 1 (47:04):
I don't think I ever had that. I mean we
didn't good, we weren't. You know, we didn't get a
lot of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
If you could afford cap'n Crunch peanut butter, you could
afford ET.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Yeah, but Captain Crunched peanut butter was a rarity, and
oftentimes it was the uh, the generic brands of all
that stuff. So instead of fruity pebbles, it was like
fruit stones or whatever.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Fruit tonsilstones.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Yeah, exactly gross.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
Yeah. Yeah. As far as peanut butter cereals, go Et
was the best. I think.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
Oh it was peanut butter, yes, And it was.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Not peanut butter and chocolate. It was just peanut butter
because remember Terese's pieces were ET's face. Oh, of course candy,
and it had like a glossy coating to it too
that somehow maybe even more sweet peanut butter. It was
so good.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
Was it ET's head or something?
Speaker 2 (47:52):
No, I don't remember what it was, but it was
I don't. I don't think it was. Were they and Teas?
I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Just ask if it was eas and Teas.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
It may have been, but on the box it was
obviously just a big picture of et.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
I bet you they could bring that back and people
would like it.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
I would buy all of it.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
I think it. I'm looking now, buddy, I think it's
eas and Teas.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
It's so good, Chuck. It was so good that. And
remember the lemon lime bubble Yum where it was like
a lemon center wrapped in lime outside. Yeah, those two
things are like. That was the pinnacle of my childhood
as far as eating stuff goes.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
Yeah, I was a greape Hubbabubba guy generally. I found
that they had the best tensile strength for the biggest pubbles,
for sure, But I would also do Hubba Bubba or
Bubbleicious and bubble Yum too.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Yep. Yeah, bubble Gum probably had the least bubble blowing ability.
Hubba Bubba definitely had everybody else beat.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
One last question, did you have a license plate that
you got out of a honeycomb box that you put
on your bike?
Speaker 1 (48:57):
Oh? You bet, your sweet bippy, I get.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
Too, buddy, Yeah, I don't remember what it said, but
I'll bet it was bitchin and pro America.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Yeah. I didn't even like Honeycomb cereal. So that they
got you to buy stuff just because you wanted the prize.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
That's awesome. And I'm sure you learned all about the
license plate being in the box of Honeycombs on Saturday
Morning cartoons.
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah, and man, the nostalgia's coming hard now. But if
you weren't sitting down for Saturday Morning Cartoons, you would
just have your bowl in front of you. Of course,
if you're at the kitchen table eating cereal, what were
you doing.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
Reading the back of the cereal box? You got it
so good, which is probably another ad for something else too.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Yeah, or like a puzzle or a word find or something.
Speaker 2 (49:40):
Yeah, if you're lucky. Yeah, we should probably stop because
I'm getting dizzy about a faint.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
I'm drooling now.
Speaker 2 (49:49):
If you want to know more about Saturday Morning cartoons,
I have a great little piece of advice for you.
Some saintly humans have put entire three four hour blocks
a Morning Cartoons, complete with ads, the original broadcasts on
YouTube and all sorts of other video playing sites. And
if you want to just lose yourself. Go watch some
(50:11):
of it. You will love it. Amazing, Chuck said, amazing,
which means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (50:19):
I'm going to call this grossest cockroach story ever. Hey, guys,
not to be a one upper, but I believe I
might have the worst cockroach story on Earth.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Yikes.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
A few years ago, I would let my little three
legged best friend Trip. I guy, he's got a little
tripod dog. I love those mm hm out on the
front porch because he loves laying on the porch at
night to listen to the bugs. He's the best dog
one could dream for. But on this night, he let
me down for the first time ever for not protecting
me as I opened the door to let him out.
As I turned around to walk back inside, I felt
(50:47):
something hit my head and start crawling. Quickly ripped off
my hoodie and threw it to the ground. I searched
and search but ultimately couldn't find the culprit. After a
few minutes of searching, I decided to open the front
door to see if Trip wanted to come back in.
Right as I began to out for him to come inside,
a roach the size of a milano cookie muzzed around
from inside the house and flew directly into my mouth.
(51:08):
Oh my goodness, yes, all the way into my mouth.
I quickly spit it out and tried my best to
smash this thing into oblivion. But Saliba only made him stronger,
I guess, as he evaded me with ease and flew
off into the warm summer night sky. I think about
this far too often, and wouldn't doubt if it only
added to my ongoing anxiety. He had mentioned at the
beginning that we help with anxiety for Buck so and
(51:32):
that his wife appreciates that. So part of the reason
for Buck's anxiety might be recounting this roach story for real. Again,
Thank you, guys for the years of joy, knowledge and laughs.
May your mouths be free of paraplanita Americana for forever
and longer.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
Nice Thanks Buck. That's a good email.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
Yeah, good writer.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
I can image, Yeah, I can imagine that there are
some people out there listening that are like, what does
he mean a flying cockroach? Yes, indeed there are flying cockroaches. Yeah,
on palmetto bugs and they're giant and they're flying and
their cockroaches and apparently, if you're Buck and you got
your mouth open a milano sized cookie. Cockroaches gonna find
its way right into that gaping hole.
Speaker 1 (52:12):
Horrific.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
I think I already said thanks again, Buck, but that
was such a good email it's worth saying again. So
thanks again, Buck. And if you want to be like
Buck and send us an email, send it off to
stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Jerry, and we are practically perfect in every way
here on Stuff you should Know.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
That's right. I'm just a bill, only a bill.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Oh yeah, Well, have you ever been to Capitol Hill?
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Oh? I'm just sitting here on Capitol Hill.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Do you remember we did a whole episode on Schoolhouse
Rock once and you had Bob Nastanovitch.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
John Yeah, a Pavement who. By the way, I finally
met him in real life. Oh yeah, yeah. I was
at a hard Quartet show, the New Supergroup with Matt
Sweeney and Stephen Malkmus and Emmit Kelly and Jim White
and in Atlanta and I turned around in the Bridy
Playhouse lobby and Nastanovich comes strolling in and I was like,
(01:00):
hey man. I was like, uh, and I'm sure he
gets hay Manned a lot, so he had he has,
you know, his guard up, actually didn't. He was nice,
but I was like, hey, I said, it's Chuck from
Stuff you should know. It's like good to finally meet
you in person. And he he's like, oh, hey, man,
and we chatted for a minute and it was great.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Oh that's cool. He remembered you.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Huh yeah, yeah, we've emailed and texted here and there.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Oh, gostcha. Well that's great, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
So that's my bobn Thestandovich story.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
That's a great one. That's about as good as a
Bobnistandovich story.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Get yeah. I mean I got to meet a pavement guy.
So that was like the bucket list complete.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
So I guess I guess I can't think of a
segway from bucket list. I mean, I guess it would
be an uncrossed off thing on my bucket list to
build a time machine and go back to nineteen eighty
three and watch Saturday morning cartoons again. How's that?
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah? What I mean? What was your routine in your house?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Baby, yeah, let's hear.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I don't ever recall having to worry about my sisters
trying to change the channel like it was Saturday morning cartoons.
It was all me, yeah, oh okay morning. Yeah, it
was great.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
So they were watching.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
No, Amanda's five years older than me, Karen was thirteen
years older than me. Oh yeah, so she either one
of them had much interested in Saturday morning cartoons when
I did the interested and overlap.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, we were close enough. Scott's three years older, Michelle six,
so we overlapped a bit, and our routine was it was,
you know, Saturday morning cartoons, but it was always a
race to the big yellow chair to see who could
claim that first.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
That's you sat in a chair. I sat like three
feet from the TV on the ground, cross leg in
front of it.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah, you were one of those guys. Yeah, for sure,
because you weren't blocking anybody.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
No, it was totally cool. It was just me. I
love it yep with my et cereal.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Yeah, parents sleeping in Yep, for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I Actually I can't say what anyone else in the
house was doing during eight am to twelve pm every
Saturday morning.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Yeah. I don't remember watching them, like the whole block,
but maybe I did.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I did. Except I know we've
talked about it before. I don't remember what episode, but
Thunder the Barbarian I would miss it. I would get
to watch like the first seven eight minutes and then
my mom would be like, it's time to leave for
swimming lessons, and it was such a bummer. Yeah, and
I know I've talked about it before on the show
(03:33):
because a listener was so kind that they bought the
complete series of Thunder the Barbarian and mailed it to
me where that I could see it.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Yeah, beepeep peep. I'm going to insert the person's name,
but I have to get to Atlanta to find it.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Okay, beep bit peep? Was it VHS?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
No DVD? Man? They really they've styled me out, so
thank you.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
That's amazing.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
So all right, let's get into this because I'm sure
we're gonna pepper our own, like favorite cartoons that we
watched throughout this, right.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
I might mention a cartoon or two.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
You never know, Okay, I mean you were into this, right,
like for years and years you spent Saturday mornings watching cartoons, right.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, as you've reminded me over
and over through our lives. I am a bit older
than you, so there will be some overlap. But also,
you know, as evidenced by like your love of like
the Gi Joe stuff, that was a little bit after
when I was into that kind of thing. So there'll
be some misses here and there too.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
I'm sorry you left out the adjective superior gi joe stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Yeah, this is a fun trip down memory lane though,
and big thanks to Julia for this.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Yeah for sure. So for those of you who were
born after the mid nineties or even the early nineties,
I guess because it took a few years to come
to realize that there was such a thing as Saturday
morning cartoons and then get into them, you might not
really get what we're talking about. Maybe you've heard of
Saturday morning cartoons like gen xers love to talk about
(05:08):
it all the time, clearly, but it was a very
special thing, like a point in time every week where
essentially every child in America and I've read also Australia
had their own, the UK had their own to an extent,
the Canada, other countries in Asia had like Saturday morning cartoons.
(05:29):
And you came and you sat down and you watched
four straight hours of cartoons, yeah, peppered with ads directed
to you a five, six, seven, eight nine year old
and loved life. And that was like your time in
the week because, like you said, parents tended to sleep
(05:50):
in during that time. They were totally happy with their
kids amusing themselves for the first four hours of the
morning watching TV and eating sugary cereal and like it's
there was a real loss when it went away, Like
I was well out of watching Saturday morning cartoons by
the time we went away. Same, but I remember feeling
(06:10):
like a real like sense of like younger kids and
like subsequent generations, like really missing out on something that
we were in retrospect, really lucky to have.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, and you know, I'm sure the counter to that
could be like, yeah, bruh, but we can watch anything
we want, whenever we want, all the time, including Saturday morning.
But and not to say like well things were better then,
but there was something special about a block when you
didn't have choice like that, Yeah, dedicated to you, aims
(06:43):
squarely at you for a certain amount of time, saying
we see you, kids, and we want to sell you things.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
It's true, Like when I read about, you know, just
how shamefully bad the commercialism was in the eighties, I
still am like I don't I don't care, Like I
loved all I loved every minute of it.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, and the commercials, as we'll see, where not that
much different than the content. And I saw this in
action when when Ruby was younger and she would watch
commercials with the same fervor, and I'll be like, yeah,
I guess I did the same thing. You know.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
I remember when we first started podcasting with ads, the
whole the whole idea was, yeah, just all of a sudden,
start talking about the products, so no one gets that
you're talking, you're giving you ad. And we were both like,
we're not doing that at all. And that's where the
idea for the the fan submitted jingles came about. Was
to make sure everybody knew an ad is coming. We're
(07:39):
not just suddenly going to start talking about how great
Ore Casper mattresses, you.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
Know, right, because I love cartoons and I love printer ink.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Now that you mention it, yeah, I do too. And
you know, I've got one of those Epsen printers. They
have like a tankless or a bottomless tank where you
just refill the cartridges. You don't even have to go
buy new cartridges, do they? Yeah, Epsin.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
I wonder I people are going to suspect that's real
and not a bit.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
No, it's a bit. Everybody should send you some dough though,
you know.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, but what we're talking about is a span of
time of a few decades about sixty five to two
thousand ish, although you will see there was some one
straggler at least beyond two thousand and cartoons had been around,
but they had mainly been in movie theaters like they
would play them before. Like you get to like a
fancy movie theater and they'll be like an organ player
(08:29):
and you'd see a cartoon and maybe a newsreel. The
first sort of regular running TV cartoon was something called
Crusader Rabbit in nineteen fifty Yeah, just ran for a
couple of years. But the first big breakout was the
Mighty Mouse Playhouse. Mighty Mouse had been around since nineteen
forty two, but it made its big Saturday morning television
(08:51):
debut in nineteen fifty five on CBS.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Yeah, and that changed everything because prior to this, there
was Saturday morning programming apparently all the way back to
the days of radio. If you were a kid, you
would tune in either after school or on Saturday mornings
get to hear your favorite program. So they were well
aware that this is when kids listened and then eventually
watched TV. But if you were a kid on Saturday morning,
(09:14):
you were probably watching like some clubhouse style show where yeah,
some local dude who might or might not be dressed
as a sad clown is interacting with puppets. In the
studio audience, there's nothing but kids. There's a single camera.
It's produced by your local TV station, and like that's
what you watch. Because they were so dirt cheap to make.
(09:35):
And then when Mighty Mouse came along, it basically showed
these things are maybe a little more expensive than that
clubhouse style show, but they're way cheaper than like The
Lone Ranger or Our Gang or some of the other
stuff we're showing on Saturday mornings. And there's something else
that's really really important to remember. We talked about it.
I think in our political cartoons episode. Cartoons are a
(09:58):
super stimuli. They our brains differently than watching Alfalfa or
The Lone Ranger or that Sad clown, who are live action,
real life people the kids differently. They capture our attention differently,
and so Mighty MOUs essentially showed like, hey, you want
to like get into a kid's brain and sell them stuff, Yeah,
(10:19):
this is the way to do it. Cartoons are the
wave of the future.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, way do you get a load of droopy?
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Droopy was great, wasn't they.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah, although I don't remember stuff like that Saturday Morning.
I remember stuff like Droopy, more of like afternoon after
school kind of hours. But cartoons became a big deal
shortly after they hit the small screen and in nineteen
sixty And this is one of those little weird factoids
that I think some people might not realize is that
(10:47):
Flintstones is actually a primetime show. A lot of people
do know that, but a lot of people don't. So
was The Bugs Bunny Show at first, the Jetsons and
the New Adventures of Johnny Quest. They were all primetime.
I'm you know, major network, which is to say, either ABC,
CBS or NBC. This is pre Fox. Even there were
only three and not too long after nineteen sixty seven
(11:10):
was when they said, you know what, we got to
consolidate all this stuff to Saturday Morning. And that was it.
It was a new thing. And like you said, it
was pretty cheap to make, especially, I mean some of
the cartoons were better than others. There were some that
were really cheap and kind of poorly made, where like
just the mouths moved and stuff like that, And it
was the same person voicing every character, like kind of clearly,
(11:33):
and they were like, Hey, what we can do here
is we've got these kids. We got this captive audience,
tons and tons of kids named Josh Clark sitting three
feet in front of their TV Chris Cross, Apple sauce,
and that means we can sell them toys and sugar.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yes, And they were already doing this, I mean those
clubhouse style TVs. The guy would do like what the
original podcast ads were supposed to, just suddenly be talking
about a brand new toy that he loves, right, yeah, right,
So they've been doing this before, but again, cartoons, they
just were operating on a different plane. And I think
nineteen sixty six was a pivotal year according to I
(12:11):
found a pretty good article about this by a guy
named Paul FP. Pogue It's great name on encyclopedia dot com,
and he basically says nineteen sixty six was the It
was the year because that was the first year where
all three networks showed cartoon blocks on Saturday mornings, and
from that moment on until I would argue the late
(12:34):
nineties really, yes, a golden age for cartoons on Saturday mornings.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Yeah, for sure. And you you know you didn't have
a DVRs or TVO or anything like that to record stuff.
Obviously you didn't really even have VCRs to record things, right,
You probably just had the one TV at least until
kind of mid to late seventies is when multiple TVs
really started showing up a little bit more unless you were,
you know, like the rich kid. Yeah, and so you
(13:02):
had to figure out and debate with your siblings if
they were around, what to watch by reading. Most you know,
a lot of people got TV Guide, but we did
not pay for that because we didn't pay for extra
things in our family. Sure, but you know, we had
the local paper which had the TV listings, and so
you pour through some made arguments that you know, it
had kids reading on Saturday morning as a result, and
(13:23):
you would, you know, sometimes they were real Sophie's choices
to be made on what to watch.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Right and the reason why. And this is what's hard
to understand if you're like gen Z or even like
a late millennial. There was no choice in what you
were watching when you sat on Saturday mornings. The networks
that you were watching were showing you the shows that
they decided they wanted to run. So a show you
(13:51):
watched was on a specific time, on a specific network,
on a specific day, in this case Saturday morning, so
you just sat down. I think there was something about
not having that choice that made it even more enjoyable.
So long as the stuff was good.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Yeah, I mean they were serving us exactly what we wanted.
I never had any complaints, did you No.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
The only complaint I had that I didn't have three
TVs that I could watch. Yeah, them all at the
same time or even better sequentially.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, for sure. And while this was all, you know,
kind of fun and games are not all fun and
games mostly fun and games. There are people out there,
you know, kind of smarty pants people who have made
arguments for things like, Hey, it introduced a new generation
to the Beatles, because I certainly remember watching that Beatles
cartoon when I.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Was a kid.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Oh yeah, yeah, I came out in sixty five, but
by you know, it was still running somewhere because I
watched it, and that's where I kind of got my
love of the Beatles. It introduced kids to, you know,
concepts like what might happen in the future with the Jetsons.
There's a historian named Joel Rhodes who said that the
cartoons perform what the scholars called the bardic function. Yeah,
(14:56):
as in like medieval bards, when people would sit around
and listen to the stories, and it would give kids
on the playground like they knew the same jokes, they
had same reference points. It bonded a generation.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Because they were all watching the same thing on the
same day at the same time. So, yes, that was
the the culture for kids. That's where you got your
culture largely. I mean not entirely. There was Mad magazine
after all, right, but like that, that was because there
wasn't choice, because you couldn't be like, hey, have you
seen Black Dub No, I haven't seen that, but have
(15:28):
you seen Time Crimes? It's a great Like those conversations
didn't happen. It was some kid yelled out like exit
stage left. Every kid on the playground just cracked up
because they knew exactly what they were talking about. And
if you don't know what I'm talking about, just look
up cartoon exit stage Left.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah, that's right, it was that snaggle buss. Yes, okay,
I get some of those confused sometimes.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Now you nailed it, but you nailed.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
We also hammered this home in the Schoolhouse Rock episode.
But we do have to mention that how pivotal Schoolhouse
Rock was and literally teaching kids things about history and
about politics and civics and government and math and English
like you name it. It was all there and like real learning,
(16:17):
like legitimate awesome learning, awesome stuff.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, that was a good episode. I remember I cracked
myself up and we almost like had to take our
longer break. Yeah, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Do you remember the joke?
Speaker 2 (16:30):
I think I did some weird impression of Chuck Jones
the Loony Tunes guy.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Oh man, I gotta listening to this one now.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah, maybe we.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Should put Schoolhouse Rock as our select on Saturday. Oh,
that's a great idea when this one comes out.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
That's a that's a wonderful idea to Jerry.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Make a note of that. And then now I'm doing
the Flintstones hammering something into a stone tablet.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
I looked up The Great Kazoo because anytime I hear Flintstones,
I think Great Kazoo. Yeah, and did you know he was?
He was an alien who was banished from his planet
for creating a doomsday device.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
I don't remember that part. I didn't either, I remember
him floating around, but yeah, that's.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Right and being extremely condescending. Yeah, for sure, he's a
real George Dom dumb. Shall we take a break, Yeah,
let's take a break, all right.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Whenever you call me a dumb dumb, that means I
have to go reset. We'll be right back, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
There was one other thing, that, one other place you
could find out what was running at what time on
what network Saturday morning cartoons. It was the annual ad,
full page ad in the comic books in the fall
that announced like the Saturday morning cartoon lineup.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Yes, huh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yeah, well I was gonna say go look them up
because they're very nostalgic, but they're just awesome. They're just
so great, And they would tell you what time it
was on and then it was all starting in two
short weeks and you just couldn't wait.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Well, and how sweet that you could publish a one
time thing. And that was the lineup.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Right like, it's not changing, no, for sure, although apparently
they would change lineups in spring for shows that weren't working,
but more often than not, you were seeing largely the
same shows.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Yeah, so yeah, I remember, that's when things would change
sort of mid season. That was always disconcerting.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah, and one other thing I just barely touched on
it was there was a subtext to it all. This
started right after summer ended, so you had all summer
to have a great time, Summer stops, school starts, and
then Saturday Morning Cartoon kicks off a new season.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Oh man, I love it the fall TV season. So
we mentioned advertising. This is going to be a big
part of this episode because it really goes and lockstep
with Saturday Morning Cartoons and all children's programming of all time.
But at one point, you know, like I mentioned, they
realized they had a captive audience. They could sell them
toys and sugar. But the lines started to blur in
(19:19):
the nineteen seventies between content and advertising in such a
way it was sort of like the beginning of In fact,
I'm curious when that people started using words like IP
intellectual property, because now we would just call it IP.
Back then, it was like, Hey, we got the Jackson five,
they are a successful musical group, Let's give them a cartoon.
(19:40):
We got the Osmond's Kids, love the Brady Bunch, Let's
do the Brady Bunch kids. We got the Flintstones. Hey,
let's give them a cereal, and things started just kind
of crossing streams such where, yeah, like we would just
call that IP. Today it's like, let's take a thing
and exploit it in as many different ways, sell it
in as many different ways as we can.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Right, yes, exactly. It was. They were cartoons starting, like
you said, in the seventies, became marketing tools, and at
first it was to basically extend the advertising power of
an existing TV show, like all the ones you listed.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Right and more.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, but then they started saying, like, hey, we have
this line of greeting cards. The care Bears started out
as a greeting cards line, so did Shirt Tales as
a matter of fact. Yeah, And they would say, like,
people are going crazy for these mugs with these adorable
characters on them, because care Bears did have the loveliest
animation potentially of all time, of all Saturday Morning cartoons.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
And then they said, Okay, mugs are not enough, greeting
cards are not enough. Let's like really blow out this
ip if they were calling it that, and turn it
into a kids show and then start selling like dolls
and figures of these cartoons. To the kids watching these shows,
and you could take something like the care Bears as
(21:01):
a greeting card line and turn them into a hot property.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Yeah. I mean, we'll read through a few of these.
That was a pac Man TV show of course, that
was good. Which was an arcade game, of course. There
was a Dungeons and Dragons cartoon that was pretty good
role playing game. I don't think I ever saw that
there was let me see here, obviously the Transformers. Yeah,
long before they were not so great Michael Bay movies.
(21:28):
They were toys and then a cartoon. And as you'll see,
some of these things kind of it's hard to remember
which one came before the other or if they were
like developing toys just to sell a cartoon or developing
a cartoon just to sell toys. It kind of except
for you know, Rambo and Chuck Norris, which were actual
shows in nineteen eighty six, Rambo The Force of Freedom
(21:49):
and Chuck Norris Karate Commandos Double K. I think the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the one that started out
as a show just to sell the toys, right.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, they were basically co developed at the same time
as part of a grand scheme. I know, Jim in
the Holograms was a cartoon before the toys, about a
year before the toys. Okay, there were Smurfs. When the
Smurfs came out, that was a big deal because there
(22:20):
was there was like was it one hundred or one
hundred and one Smurf with Papa Smurf, and they made
little like really collectible size action RLL not action figures
because they weren't action at all, but just little figures
of the Smurf.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
You remember those, Yeah, you could smurf them all.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
And yes, exactly, I'm pretty sure they had like a
hundred different ones that you could collect them. People went
bonkers on those things because they were just so cute
and you could put them on your desk or you
could play with them or do whatever. If the Smurfs
came first, and I think that they really kind of
helped kick off that that genuine like we can really
market the heck out of these cartoons if we make
(22:56):
figures based on these.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Yeah, see that that's a slight divide. It was a
little bit old for Smurfs, a little bit old for Smurfs.
Full stop.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
Smurf is still pretty good.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Hey, they're still making those movies. Man, that was one
out last year, wasn't there.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
I have not seen that. You mean, like the CGI movies. Yeah, yeah,
I've not seen them, but yeah, I think they've got
several out.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yeah, I think it's the same thing. They're still smurfing
at the box office.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
That's great. And then there were other ones like Strawberry Shortcake,
My Little Pony. Well, like you said that, the lines
between did the cartoon come first, did the toys come first,
it really doesn't matter because they were all part of
the same package. By this point were well into the eighties,
which not coincidentally was the deregulation minded Reagan era, and
(23:42):
cartoons at this point had evolved into half hour essentially commercials. Yeah,
for the actual toy, and in the most pronounced cases,
the actual commercials were for the toys in the cartoon
that the toys were based on.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah, I've got some stats here because in the late seventies,
the FTC and we're going to talk about the FCC
and the FTC quite a bit because parents and the
government started to get a little upset. Basically, they saw
the writing on the wall, and in the late seventies
they released numbers by the FTC that highlighted what they
called it like a real health problem for this programming
(24:24):
companies every year, and this was back then in the seventies,
spent five hundred to six hundred million dollars on ads
targeted to children. Of all the foods being advertised to kids,
two thirds, I'm surprised it wasn't more than this, honestly
were highly sugared products.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
It was by my Josh math calculations, it was over
ninety five percent.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Okay, that feels about right.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yeah, for real because of all the foods. But even
of all the ads, chuck, most of them were first
sugared foods. There was a study or that Trade Commission
study looked at some data that looked at nine months
of nineteen seventy five, not even the whole year, looked
at seven five and fifteen ads. Seven and eighty two
(25:11):
of those ads were for sugary foods ninety five point
seven percent.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Was there anything for good food Yes?
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Actually there were four four ads over nine months, four
different ads for meats, vegetables, milk or cheese, and cheese,
and I think meats maybe had zero, so vegetables somehow
was basically carrying that. And I would guess all four
of those were different V eight ads or fruit juice ads.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Who was the guy? It was like, the the dairy
counsel or something. The guy that danced around and sang
about cheese.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
I think it was uh time for Timer. Was he
like a big circle with real long, skinny legs in
the That was Timer?
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Okay, Yeah, that was what was that? Was that the
dairy Council.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
I know. He was actually a response to the government
actually doing something in the late seventies, which we'll talk about,
which was so he essays to kind of counteract this stuff. Yeah,
it was a good.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Thing, Okay.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
He talked about eating proteins and stuff rather than sugar.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
God, what a very weird He looks like Twinkie the
Kid a little bit.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Yeah. I couldn't put my finger on it. Chuck, You're
absolutely right, that's who it.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Was, all right. So the writing's on the wall. These
studies are coming out and people are saying, like, really,
four ads for good food and seven thousand plus for
sugary stuff, and so people started getting upset, not just
about the ads though, but about the content. Cartoon violence
is a real thing every time there was an adult
in a cartoon, they were buffoons and morons.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Or they had like an evil plot that the kids
had to foil.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Yeah, for sure, like they were bad people like Scooby
Doo kids were. They were always foiling the adults evil
playing exactly. They were never going against fellow whatever. I mean,
how old were they even.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
They were late teens, maybe even close high school. Yeah,
I think they were bumming around with college. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I think it was ready before college.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Okay. Consumerism, of course was very much glorified in the
cartoons and the ads. And by the late sixties, you know,
jumping back a bit, there were there were groups that
were forming the Action for Children's Television got together. They
were lobbying the FCC. Obviously they regulate the media on
not cable as we'll see, but just regular TV, and
(27:33):
they were saying like, hey, this is this stuff is
we got to pull this back some like we're getting
out of hand with what we're feeding children four hours
at a time every Saturday.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Yeah. Yeah, this was, like you said, the late sixties.
It started to really kind of pick up in the
seventies because the reason why is more and more research
was funded studying what effect television had on kids, and
Saturday morning cartoons were a deep focus of those studies too.
There was a nineteen seventy five study for the National
Science Foundation. It was a meta analysis. Yeah, and they said,
(28:04):
Saturday morning cartoons are creating conflict within families because kids
are going to their parents saying I want this, the
parents say no, and then the kid gets upset and
starts arguing and that Yeah, that's internal family conflict. Familial conflict.
And this same one of the surveys found that kids,
(28:26):
I think a third of kids reported arguing sometimes when
their parents said no, Six of them argued quote a lot.
So the reason why Saturday morning cartoons in particular were
causing this conflict is because there were so many ads
for so many kids products that kids saw every Saturday
that it increased the frequency of kids asking for stuff,
(28:49):
which increased the frequency of being told no, which increased
the frequency of arguing in conflict.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah, for sure, parents didn't like that. Of course, they
also didn't like that. They learned that and they did,
you know, studies on this too, and they found that
young kids or kids in general, basically couldn't tell the
difference between cartoons and ads, because sometimes it was the
literal characters from the cartoons telling you something. Sometimes it
(29:17):
was kids playing with toys and showing you the action
of the toys, and kids just love watching that. And
the old you know, the younger you were, you really
couldn't tell the difference. Once you got a little bit older,
you could tell the difference just by the link and
be like, well, those are the short cartoons.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Right exactly. Yeah, because these ads were all like there
would be a mini cartoon within the ad, you know,
like Frank and Berry would almost fall into a pit
or something like that, Chocolate would have to come turn
into a bat and rescue them or something like that,
and then they both end up eating their cereal. That Like,
(29:53):
if you're a little kid, you're like, this is great.
This is some weird short that they just put in
the middle of the show. But it's not an.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Ad hungry all of a sudden, right for that cereal?
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Mom, I want some count Chocula.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
That was actually captured really well in a Simpsons just
this almost in a side where Itching and Scratchy are
up for a cartoon award and one of the other
one of the other cartoons in the running for Best
Writing in a Cartoon Series was Action Figure Man, the
How to Buy Action Figure Man episode where it just
(30:28):
shows the little kid and goes, Mommy, I want it. Oh,
he's pointing to the action fag like not even an
ad That was.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
The episode that's really funny.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Yeah, they nailed it on that. They nailed it like snaggle.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Puss they always do. So the long and short of
all of this past few minutes is that kids didn't
know that they were being sold things right, and parents
didn't like that. I think the authors of the paper
were fairly kind when they said, certainly, most advertisers do
not deliberately set out to confuse or mislead children, nor
to promote unsafe, unhealthier, social, socially un desirable behavior, which
(31:02):
was very naive I think. But maybe they were just
trying to soft sell it.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Right, So you put all this together that again started
in the sixties, is kind of agitation. And also this
is where this is the climate that Sesame Street grew
out of and probably made Saturday morning cartoons look even
worse because it showed you could make kids shows that
didn't poison their minds, right, and then it picked up
in the seventies, and by nineteen seventy eight, the Federal
Trade Commission said, hey, we need to do something about this.
(31:30):
We're not going to do anything about it, but we're
going to make some recommendations. Through their staff report on
television advertising to children. They said, we should ban all
television advertising for any product whatsoever that's directed at very
young children. That's a big one, right, so you can
kiss my buddy goodbye. Right, ban advertising directed to older
(31:52):
children for sugar products, which makes sense. But the thing
they predicated this concern on just cracks me up, because
those things can pose serious dental health risks. Like that
was the extent of the concern with sugary products back then.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
You could rot your teeth, right, yeah, I mean that's
what you heard. That'll rot your teeth, not like just
eating tons of sugar is not good for you.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Right. I remember having like a we did a module
that included a play and some other stuff in third
grade that was sponsored by Crest. There's a big Crest
like cutout stand up and like we just in class,
we just did this whole thing about brushing your teeth
with Crest brand toothpaste. It was like that pervasive.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
We make holes and teeth. Do you remember that?
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah? I do, but I can't place it.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
It was Oh man, I mean I think it was Crest,
but it was again a cartoon that Crest was running,
and it was the cavity something wo that they had
to fight, and that was what they would chant, we
make holes and teeth.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, that might have been one of the things that
kick this off.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Yeah, probably so. And then the final requirement was advertise
mints directed to older kids for other sugar products that
they could, you know, put on TV would be balanced
by ads for other nutritional products or health disclosures at
the end of the sugar product ad.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
That's where timer came from.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Yeah, okay, I gotcha.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
That's also where bod Squad came from. Don't drown your food,
remember that one?
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
There was The cool thing about Schoolhouse Rock is they'd
already been doing this for half a decade by the
time other networks started to do something about it by
running these cute little cartoon PSAs. So essentially they were
ten to fifteen, maybe up to thirty second commercials that
the networks had to run that were cartoons too. So
(33:45):
they appealed the kids, but they rather than telling kids
to buy fruity pebbles, they were telling kids to brush
your teeth or to exercise your chompers with things like
carrots and apples, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Right, should we take a break.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Let's talk about the rest of these. There's some other
stuff that you just kind of take for granted. I
didn't realize came out of an actual deal between the
networks and the FTC.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, there was also and all this stuff I didn't
remember necessarily in the moment, but once I started reading
about it and studying it and obviously watching on YouTube,
it washed over me. NBC had one to grow on
from eighty three to eighty nine, and that was just
usually some famous person sort of giving some life lesson advice,
and they'd be like, well, that's one to grow on.
(34:32):
What else old Nancy Reagan? Of course, and just say
no to drugs? You can forget that, yeap.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Betty White taught you who to call in an emergency.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah, called Betty White, right.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Exactly, because Betty White could handle basically anything to you.
Was just that kind of person. There was also the
more you know, with the star that went over your head.
That was the nineties on NBC and all of the
NBC stars at the time, because remember NBC ruled the airwaves. Yeah,
must see TV Thursdays.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
They had their stars basically doing thirty second spots, which
are PSA's and about how to, how to you know,
maybe get into teaching, maybe stay in school, just little
life lessons like that. There were a bunch actually about
abusive parents and how not cool it was for a
dad to beat up on a mom. Oh yeah yeah,
(35:25):
real like kind of rugging and raw stuff here there,
but presented in these vignettes that kind of got through
to kids, although you can tell they were geared towards
slightly older kids.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Yeah for sure. And then of course you're beloved. G
I Joe talked about stranger danger and always finished with
the famous line, now you know and knowing is half
the battle.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
And you've seen those parody videos of that before, right,
I don't think so. Oh, there's about thirty or so
maybe more parody videos that are just totally off the
wall but hilarious where they just take out the sound
and put in their own sound and voevocals and edit
the stuff up, kind of mix it up so that
(36:04):
they're just it's just amazing. Look up g I Joe
psa parody videos and you'll thank me later.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Or just watch probably any episode of the Family Guy.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah, probably he.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Did a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, he did.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Shall we take a break, yes, all right, we'll be
right back with more on Saturday Morning cartoons. All right. Oh,
(36:45):
by the way, I remembered it was the Cavity creeps.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Oh, great memory.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
Yeah, they just pop back. So before we left, we
talked about, you know, some of these things they were
doing to offset the effect of cartoons. It's called pro
social programming, and it came about because of an actual
deal that was made. There was an FTC hearing in
nineteen seventy eight where Kenneth Mason of Quaker Oats was
up there because you know, they're like, hey, Captain Crunch
(37:11):
is rotting our kids teeth out and you make it.
And he actually like he didn't think they were the problem.
He thought the content was the problem. But he did
come out and had a statement basically where like he said,
you know, I think we do need to change what's
going on in our cartoons and change the way our
society is using this medium to communicate with kids. So
(37:34):
it took a lot of nerve, I think for that
guy to say that, but he didn't blame the ads
like I said. So they struck a deal basically, Hey,
you can keep these ads if you add this other
programming that we were talking about before.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Yeah, And apparently the way that I took it was
it was a very crafty thing to do by blaming
the content because it took the onus off the sugary
product advertisers and everybody started looking at the cartoons themselves,
and the cartoons were like, hey, hey, we're not nearly
as bad as fruddy pebbles, but okay, we'll start doing
something about it. And the I guess cartoons themselves started
(38:10):
to get a little more pro social, like this is
where fad Albert came from, I believe. But then also
those PSAs that we were talking about, that was the
advent of them.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, for sure, but this is late seventies. I think
that was seventy seven seventy eight. Ronald Reagan would come
along in the nineteen eighties and sort of just deregulate
the United States as a whole and said, FCC stand
down and don't worry about this stuff. They didn't officially.
I mean, there were recommendations anyways, and not laws. So
(38:42):
a recommendation is only good if you sort of follow
up on that, and the FCC started not to in
the eighties they kind of didn't try in some cases.
I think between nineteen eighty and nineteen ninety they actually
saw a rise in the number of violent acts per
hour on Saturday morning cartoons from eighteen point six to
twenty six point four per hour.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Which is pretty nuts, but it gets even more nuts
when you compare it to what was on primetime, what
the adults were watching. Oh yeah, between nineteen eighty and
nineteen ninety, it pretty much held steady at just five
to six acts of violence per hour as opposed to
the twenty six per hour on cartoons.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah, and you know, it's cartoon violence, but it's still
it's not all Roadrunner falling off a cliff like a
lot of it was, you know, depict like you know,
there was a Rambo cartoon like I mentioned, right.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, but there there is research. And I'm not taking
a position on either way because people have said, like
violent video games caused violence, right, violent this is like
the predecessor to all that stuff. Violent cartoons caused violent kids.
One of the I guess arguments of that is that
even if it was cartoon violence like Roadrunner, it still
desensitized kids to the consequences of violent acts, right because
(39:56):
there was accompanied with humor.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
Yeah, for sure. So the eighties were kind of the
most unchecked time, it seems like, Yeah, and the nineties
come along and finally they were like, all right, we
got to do something. Congress steps back in and the
Children's Television Act of nineteen ninety required the FCC to
enforce those original FTCs recommendations in nineteen seventy eight and said,
(40:19):
you got to reinstate restrictions on advertising during children's television
and enforce the obligations of broadcasters to meet the educational
informational needs of the child audience. And a couple of
years later, NBC was like, all right, I'm done, it's
not even worth it anymore.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Get this. Yeah. Although one good thing that came out
of this is this was the origin of Saved by
the Bell because NBC went all in on slightly older
kids team programming on Saturday mornings, and the flagship of
it was Saved by the Bell so much they shoot
they showed two episodes of it, Mourning New Ones. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
I mean this is also where you got things like
the Mighty morphin Power Rangers, And of course pee Wee's
play House was a little bit before this, or was
it in the nineties?
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Was that the German pronunciation? What did I say pee
Wee's play Hoss? Did I p's PV's play House? Perfect? Yeah?
I think that was like eighty five or something like that.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
Okay, I never watched pee Wee's Playhouse. I know we
talked about this, but I guess I was fourteen by then,
not that you I mean there. I could watch it
today and probably really love it because pee Wee defies
age groups. But it was just one of those things
that maybe at the time I didn't know about it
and didn't think it was for me or something. I
don't know, I have no excuse.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah. I wasn't into him either for sure. But I
did get to see his live version of the pee
Wee's Playhouse.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
Oh you went to that?
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
So there were a few other consequences of this, but
the big one, the upshot, was that the government Congress,
essentially Nanny stated Saturday Morning cartoons out of existence. Yeah,
because of these rules, they weren't profitable anymore. There were
certain restrictions on advertising. You could only show so many
ads during kids programming, like there was. There was just
(42:09):
a lot that took away the profit drive that made
Saturday morning cartoons so attractive.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
There were a lot of other factors too that put
the writing on the wall, not the least of which
was the rise of cable TV, which you mentioned was
outside of the purview of the FCC for a long time,
and from what I can tell, even today, networks are
required to show three hours of educational programming geared toward
(42:38):
geared to kids. So if you ever are up on
a Saturday or a Sunday and you were watching say
By the Bell reruns like I don't know some people do,
it would say it would flash like a logo that
says EI, and it would say this program has been
labeled educational and informative. That's because of the government mandate
(42:59):
that they have to run three hours of shows educational shows.
I guess a day, maybe maybe a week, because I
only remember seeing it on certain times of certain days.
But there were mandates that said you have to show
educational programming and that's why you see that today. But
cable that didn't apply to And so not only did
(43:22):
cable not have to show and take up valuable real
estate with educational programming that nobody wanted to watch unless
it was saved by the bell, there were also cable
networks that were geared exclusively two kids. That wasn't just
on Saturday mornings. These were twenty four hour a day
children's programmings like Nickelodeon and the beginning, the first iteration
(43:44):
of the Disney Channel.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Yeah, and stuff like the WB and CW two. Those
weren't exclusively kids, but I feel like most of that was.
And like through teen years basically you also had the
rise of like even though I love my tar and
stuff like that, it wasn't anything like what was to
come with at home gaming. That certainly put a dent
in things, because now kids could just get up on
(44:07):
Saturday morning and play whatever. You know, new system was out,
DBRs came along, and then, you know, so you didn't
have to crowd around the TV at a certain time. Together,
they all just started getting out of it. I think
I mentioned NBC got out in ninety two, CBS got out,
in ninety seven and ABC. Wow, ABC hung on to
(44:28):
Saturday Morning cartoons till twenty ten.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Yeah, yep, for sure, bad No, I think WB and
Fox had only stopped just a couple of years before.
But again, it seems like the whole thing peaked and
ended by the late nineties, very early two thousands. And
from what I saw, the last Saturday Morning cartoon block
(44:54):
shown in the United States happened on September twenty seventh,
twenty fourteen, on the CWA, And the last cartoon show
that was shown in the history of Saturday Morning cartoons
was Yu Gi Oh Zexol, which is nothing I was
ever into, but I know there are a lot of
kids who just like drooled with nostalgia. And that was
(45:16):
the last Saturday Morning cartoon ever shown. There's a little
piece of trivia for you.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
Wow, did they have a lone Bugler play taps afterward?
Speaker 2 (45:25):
They should have? For sure?
Speaker 1 (45:26):
Man, what an end of an era? For sure?
Speaker 2 (45:29):
Yeah. But it also I mean when I look back
or look at all of this info, and I'm like,
I was smack dab in the most manipulative stretch of
Saturday Morning cartoons. Yeah, and it makes me wonder, like
what had I been watching in the early seventies or
had I been watching in the nineties or two thousands,
after like all of these restrictions, how different would would
(45:53):
I be?
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (45:55):
Yeah, Like I can recite a specific fruity pebbles that
they used to show around Christmas. Yeah, now, yes, So
I think Fred no Barney was pretending to be Santa
because he wanted to slide down the chimney and get
Fred's fruity pebbles and he said ho, ho ho, I'm hungry,
(46:17):
and then he slid down and he found Sana was
already there, and he goes, Sanna, my pebbles, and Fred
goes your pebbles, Barney. And this would like get in
my head as an earworm, and it does still sometimes today,
where like for days it'll just be going on a
loop in my head.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
That's so funny.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
And I can't even top that chuck. As I was
thinking about it today, I was highlighting, like my notes
for today, and I started drooling, So like that's how
that's the Pavlovian response that was teen to me for
fruity Pebbles. Thanks from the Morning cartoons in the Air.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Oh I love Frddy pebbles not as good as Captain
Crunch peanut butter. To me, that's my all time favorite.
But boy, love some pretty pebbles.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Did you ever have that Et cereal that I mentioned earlier?
Speaker 1 (47:04):
I don't think I ever had that. I mean we
didn't good, we weren't. You know, we didn't get a
lot of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
If you could afford cap'n Crunch peanut butter, you could
afford ET.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
Yeah, but Captain Crunched peanut butter was a rarity, and
oftentimes it was the uh, the generic brands of all
that stuff. So instead of fruity pebbles, it was like
fruit stones or whatever.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Fruit tonsilstones.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Yeah, exactly gross.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
Yeah. Yeah. As far as peanut butter cereals, go Et
was the best. I think.
Speaker 1 (47:33):
Oh it was peanut butter, yes, And it was.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
Not peanut butter and chocolate. It was just peanut butter
because remember Terese's pieces were ET's face. Oh, of course candy,
and it had like a glossy coating to it too
that somehow maybe even more sweet peanut butter. It was
so good.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
Was it ET's head or something?
Speaker 2 (47:52):
No, I don't remember what it was, but it was
I don't. I don't think it was. Were they and Teas?
I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Just ask if it was eas and Teas.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
It may have been, but on the box it was
obviously just a big picture of et.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
I bet you they could bring that back and people
would like it.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
I would buy all of it.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
I think it. I'm looking now, buddy, I think it's
eas and Teas.
Speaker 2 (48:15):
It's so good, Chuck. It was so good that. And
remember the lemon lime bubble Yum where it was like
a lemon center wrapped in lime outside. Yeah, those two
things are like. That was the pinnacle of my childhood
as far as eating stuff goes.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
Yeah, I was a greape Hubbabubba guy generally. I found
that they had the best tensile strength for the biggest pubbles,
for sure, But I would also do Hubba Bubba or
Bubbleicious and bubble Yum too.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Yep. Yeah, bubble Gum probably had the least bubble blowing ability.
Hubba Bubba definitely had everybody else beat.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
One last question, did you have a license plate that
you got out of a honeycomb box that you put
on your bike?
Speaker 1 (48:57):
Oh? You bet, your sweet bippy, I get.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
Too, buddy, Yeah, I don't remember what it said, but
I'll bet it was bitchin and pro America.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Yeah. I didn't even like Honeycomb cereal. So that they
got you to buy stuff just because you wanted the prize.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
That's awesome. And I'm sure you learned all about the
license plate being in the box of Honeycombs on Saturday
Morning cartoons.
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah, and man, the nostalgia's coming hard now. But if
you weren't sitting down for Saturday Morning Cartoons, you would
just have your bowl in front of you. Of course,
if you're at the kitchen table eating cereal, what were
you doing.
Speaker 2 (49:29):
Reading the back of the cereal box? You got it
so good, which is probably another ad for something else too.
Speaker 1 (49:37):
Yeah, or like a puzzle or a word find or something.
Speaker 2 (49:40):
Yeah, if you're lucky. Yeah, we should probably stop because
I'm getting dizzy about a faint.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
I'm drooling now.
Speaker 2 (49:49):
If you want to know more about Saturday Morning cartoons,
I have a great little piece of advice for you.
Some saintly humans have put entire three four hour blocks
a Morning Cartoons, complete with ads, the original broadcasts on
YouTube and all sorts of other video playing sites. And
if you want to just lose yourself. Go watch some
(50:11):
of it. You will love it. Amazing, Chuck said, amazing,
which means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (50:19):
I'm going to call this grossest cockroach story ever. Hey, guys,
not to be a one upper, but I believe I
might have the worst cockroach story on Earth.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
Yikes.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
A few years ago, I would let my little three
legged best friend Trip. I guy, he's got a little
tripod dog. I love those mm hm out on the
front porch because he loves laying on the porch at
night to listen to the bugs. He's the best dog
one could dream for. But on this night, he let
me down for the first time ever for not protecting
me as I opened the door to let him out.
As I turned around to walk back inside, I felt
(50:47):
something hit my head and start crawling. Quickly ripped off
my hoodie and threw it to the ground. I searched
and search but ultimately couldn't find the culprit. After a
few minutes of searching, I decided to open the front
door to see if Trip wanted to come back in.
Right as I began to out for him to come inside,
a roach the size of a milano cookie muzzed around
from inside the house and flew directly into my mouth.
(51:08):
Oh my goodness, yes, all the way into my mouth.
I quickly spit it out and tried my best to
smash this thing into oblivion. But Saliba only made him stronger,
I guess, as he evaded me with ease and flew
off into the warm summer night sky. I think about
this far too often, and wouldn't doubt if it only
added to my ongoing anxiety. He had mentioned at the
beginning that we help with anxiety for Buck so and
(51:32):
that his wife appreciates that. So part of the reason
for Buck's anxiety might be recounting this roach story for real. Again,
Thank you, guys for the years of joy, knowledge and laughs.
May your mouths be free of paraplanita Americana for forever
and longer.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
Nice Thanks Buck. That's a good email.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
Yeah, good writer.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
I can image, Yeah, I can imagine that there are
some people out there listening that are like, what does
he mean a flying cockroach? Yes, indeed there are flying cockroaches. Yeah,
on palmetto bugs and they're giant and they're flying and
their cockroaches and apparently, if you're Buck and you got
your mouth open a milano sized cookie. Cockroaches gonna find
its way right into that gaping hole.
Speaker 1 (52:12):
Horrific.
Speaker 2 (52:14):
I think I already said thanks again, Buck, but that
was such a good email it's worth saying again. So
thanks again, Buck. And if you want to be like
Buck and send us an email, send it off to
stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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