Okay, so not every cartoon Joe Garner and Michael Ashley
cover in It’s Saturday Morning!
Celebrating the Golden Age of Cartoons 1960s-1990s aired on Saturday morning.
In fact, they aren’t even all cartoons (see the entry on Pee Wee’s Playhouse). Yet the writers do a good job a selecting the
shows that best defined each of the four generations their book explores. These
are not cursory, encyclopedia-style entries; each is about four or five pages
long, and each gets reasonably in depth about the genesis, content, and legacy
of shows never intended to have a legacy once the six-year olds lost interest: Josie and the Pussycats, GI Joe, Space Ghost, He-Man and the
Masters of the Universe, The Smurfs,
and so on.
The odd part (aside from the authors’ bizarrely clueless
insistence that all of these shows aired on Saturday mornings) is that Garner
and Ashley deal with such a weightlessly fun topic as if has some greater value
than stimulating nostalgia. The tone of the book should have been fun,
friendly, and perhaps even a bit snarky, like that of Robinson and Karp’s Just Can’t Get Enough: Toys, Games, and
Other Stuff From the ’80s That Rocked. The reverence seems to miss the
obvious fact that most of these shows were great fun for six-year olds buzzed
on Frankenberry but pretty crappy in essence. Garner and Ashley want us to
believe that The Smurfs has a
“complex mythology,” Garfield
possessed “smart storytelling,” and that most of these shows were better
animated, better written, and more educational than they actually were. All I
ever learned from watching He-Man was
how to perfect my Christmas wish list. There’s also a dogged determination to
keep things reverent, which becomes a bit odd during a discussion of Fat Albert that continually references
Bill Cosby’s artistry without at all acknowledging the monstrousness for which
he is now best known.
While the tone could have been more appropriate to the
material, the look of It’s Saturday
Morning! gets everything right with big, color images from those
delightfully garish childhood memories.
