luckily, in Detroit, sundays were Abbott and Costello on channel 7. but yes, I always wondered about that, too.
Hanna-Barbera wasn’t everything.
And that kind of formula-dependent crappiness definitely got worse in the 80s, if anything.
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Screw Saturday mornings (excepting Fleischer/Avery/Jones) Saturday nights were what I lived for:
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You had me at Thundarr. Loved that show. But yea on KTLA in Los Angeles you had Tom Hatten playing the greatest old school cartoons, from the Ali Baba Popeye episode, which might be the greatest single epic cartoon episode of all-time, to just down right odd faire. I miss Tom Hatten, man.
But if you want 80’s cartoon nostalgia you have G-Force and Robotech
But 70’s cartoons in Southern California was the best. Toss in some Sid & Marty Kroft and you are in heaven.
Sorry don’t know what Sugarbombs are.
Thundarr…so awesome.
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I only just realised that the website had a section for the 70s too.
http://www.inthe70s.com/saturdays.shtml
Now, there’s some nostalgia! 
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Saturday morning in the 70’s: 2 hours of Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies. Might be able to catch some Tom & Jerry on the local UHF station, too. All of the other Saturday morning shows were second-rate, as far as I was concerned.
At some point, as the Saturday morning shows became more and more commercialized and, at the same time, more sensitive to onscreen violence, the cartoons were butchered, with large sections of gratuitous violence (even more gratuitous than normal, that is) removed. Of course, if you remove the action from a Looney Tunes cartoon, there may not be much left. As I recall, I noticed the same butchery happening to Tom & Jerry cartoons - the truly funny old ones, not the unfunny later series - at about the same time. I think that was the precursor to today’s lame cartoons, where everybody stands around talking (in unnatural squeaky voices, using words that no kid would ever spontaneously use) and nothing interesting ever happens.
Below, a snap which seemed appropriate, from the main BB page. “Crappy Doo,” indeed.
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The Antenna TV network airs an hour of Totally Tooned In every Saturday and Sunday morning. Airs in over 100 US cities. Mostly on UHF sideband channels, but they count.
Mr Magoo gets the headline spot. Various Columbia characters round out the lineup.
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There is a Bugs Bunny Valkyrie bearing down on you RIGHT NOW for that blasphemy!
(Fetch me my spear and magic HEELLLL-MEEEETT!!!)
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I remember that Warner Brother cartoons took a dive in the 70s too, at least I’ve always thought the road runner cartoons from this era are pretty bad as well as the Tom and Jerry ones. And agreed, except for Scooby Doo, Hanna Barbera cartoons suck.
I’ve always thought that the best cartoons were made in the 40’s and 50’s, then the late 90’s reaching their apex with Freakazoid.
There are some good ones today like Phineas and Ferb but I’ll wait a few years before I finally decide how good things are today. 
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I remember one year (probably 1976) they had Jimmy Osmond introducing the new Saturday morning lineup – during an evening program, for some reason. It may have been a tie-in with Kaptain Kool and the Kongs – which wasn’t a cartoon, but it had Osmond involvement – but I remember Jimmy introducing Scooby Doo, as though the latter were on stage with him.
I think the greatest kids’ show ever (at least, in the US) was Wonderama, which ended in the late 70s IIRC. (EDIT: I think Wonderama may have aired on Sunday mornings.)
Those were a little after my time. I remember that a given afternoon, after school, would include Woody Woodpecker, Spider-Man (from the late 60s), Tom & Jerry, Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse, Battle of the Planets (G-Force), The Soupy Sales Show, and a Godzilla-type movie, all before dinner was ready. Channel 5 (in New York) would have a brief reminder “Have you done your homework today?” And no, I had not.
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I miss Soupy Sales - what a goofy show that was. Good times.
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The one that stuck with me:
(Soupy turns on a radio)
Despairing voice: “What is life? What is life?”
Gruff voice: “It’s a magazine, you dope!”
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“…here is your Proustian madeline.”
… I don’t remember any Madeline character in “À la recherche du temps perdu”… I think you’re talking about the madelEine cake.
I was more of a 70’s girl, and I checked out that chart as well as the 80’s one. There were a couple of craptastic shows I had obliterated from my memory: JabberJaw and Heathcliff. OMG - awful and yet compelling.
I had to explain the concept of Saturday morning cartoons to my daughter, because she has never known about the TV show programming schedules that the networks had. This led to a discussion of Prime Time and of Family Time vs. the Late Night shows. It seems really archaic now that we had the News and then those very saccharine family oriented shows where no one cussed and things like DRUGS and SEX were always treated in the most priggish way.
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Take that back. You take that back, right now.
JMS cut his teeth on that show. It referenced Cthulhu! My first taste of Lovecraftian horror came between Flinstone Kids (part of a trend Flinstones Kids, Muppet Babies, A Pup Named Scooby Doo) and Pound Puppies (which was essentially a Hogan’s Heroes rip-off with dogs and no Nazis).
EDIT: I will admit that shit went downhill when Slimer got top billing.
The ‘real’ in the title pissed me off (I thought it was an insult to the film) and the voices were all wrong (characters looked wrong, too). I took an immediate dislike to the series because of that.
Was Rude Dog and the Dweebs a Saturday Morning show?
The “real” tag in there made no sense. Was there some unlicensed knockoff Ghostbusters cartoon floating around at the time?
Of course the cartoon missed the spirit of the movie by having them spend a lot of time busting ghosts with their fancy ghost gadgets, but I guess the spirit of the Ghostbusters movie wouldn’t exactly fit in the traditional saturday morning cartoon crowd.
The “Real” was there because there was a mid-70s live-action Filmation TV show starring Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch (the guys from F-Troop) called the Ghost Busters. (There was also a guy in a gorilla costume.)
They added the “Real” when Filmation decided to produce a cheap-o cartoon version of the TV series , which they called Ghostbusters, after the movie became a hit.
EDIT: Just Googled, and I think my remembering was right. Columbia licensed the title from Filmation for the movie.
But some bonus trivia:
Harvey Cartoons sued Columbia but the suit was dropped when Harvey hadn’t maintained the copyright on Fatso the ghost (one of Casper’s antagonists).
Huey Lewis sued Columbia claiming Ray Parker Jr.'s Ghostbusters song ripped of “I wanna new drug” they settled for $5 million.
Ray Parker Jr. later Huey Lewis for breach of contract after Lewis mentioned this in a VH1 documentary, but I don’t know if was ever settled.
Bonus link:
Legal Dorkery:
WHO YA GONNA C(S)ITE?" GHOSTBUSTERS AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION DEBATE
CHRISTINE ALICE CORCOS
Copyright © 1997 Florida State University Journal of Land Use & Environmental Law
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See my reply to jandrese. In short, the Real was a reference to the Ghostbusters series by Filmation (an incarnation of which predated the movie by a decade).
