Saturday Morning Wonderland

 

Nothing's on TV

Yes friends, television was different back in my day.  You may have your singing dragons, your super quadruplets, your dysfunctional family-owned conglomerates.  Give me the cereal sponsored pablum of my childhood: shows with such titles as Magic Maude and her Wonder Flute, The Boy Who Ate Marbles, and the gentle western flavored heroics of Cactus Cal and the Jolly Tinker. When the sun rose after five hours of morning chores on another weekend, nothing beat that toasty feeling of sitting your tired ass down with a bowl of maple flavored millet for 5 more hours of Saturday morning tv.  It was a new medium with a lot of dead air to fill and a limited amount of time and money to fill it with.  They could have just turned the camera on a bucket of toads and we would have been entertained, but what they did instead was hire admen, retired vaudevilleans, has-been B movie stars and young out-of-work method actors and let the magic happen.  

And there was none of this politically correct stuff back then.  Just trust me.

We're talking limited animation classics like Zip Magruder,  the Chimp from Outer Space brought to you by Duvernois Filterless Cigarettes, and Betsy and Kimmy Meet the Mummy.  

But perhaps my favorite weekly serial featured the antics of that canine corpse, Dixie the Ghost Dog.  Follow the spooky pooch and her young master Terri as they traverse the globe in search of rights to wrong and wrongs to right!  Nothing today could quite hope to compare to the excitement and anticipation a young lad got each week hearing the melodic strains of the opening theme song:

Oh there's a late fox terrier;
No canine spook is scarier.
(The ghost of) Dixie Doodle! Dixie Doodle!
Hair like wire,
Breath of dog shit and Hell Fire.
(The ghost of) Dixie Doodle! (She ain't no fuckin' poodle!)
She used to stand around;
Now she's a real Hell hound!
Gents and Ladies, meet the bitch from Hades:
Dixie Doodle! 

We don't know what it was about, but did it kill us to watch?  No, it did not!  And we assume for that reason it might have made us stronger.