Saturday mornings, then and now

Dastardly emulsion.  Those are the two words Nora woke up with today... not necessarily connected, but when you've got an adjective and a noun, the temptation is great.

I was raised on 1960s Saturday cartoons.  I used to get up early... EARLY early, like 5:00... and go downstairs and turn on the big Sylvania black-and-white console.  This was before cable, before 24-hour broadcasting, and before remote controls.  So I would turn the dial to either channel 3 (CBS), 8 (NBC) or 13 (ABC) -- why do I remember these things? -- and wait for the shows to start.

The first show that was on was the test pattern.  I used to sit and study that in puzzled wonder.  The circles, the grid, the numbers, and the Indian portrait on the top... what was that about?  I was like a caveman who'd stumbled across a Philips screwdriver... I knew it was something momentous, but what?

Then at 6:00, the agricultural report.  Farmers were supposed to be up at 6:00, not little suburban boys; so I heard about the price of corn and the price of hogs and the state legislature deciding what to do about rural roads.  None of it really sunk in, but they sounded so serious that I knew it was Important Stuff.

Then at 6:30, there was the College Quiz Bowl.

Phyl. Hurwitz is now probably a Professor Emeritus of Women's Studies somewhere, no?

Even when I was 8 years old, I recognized that the set probably cost about $20.  The curtain, the felt pennants hung with fishing line, and worst of all, that big seam running right straight up the middle of the team's desk.  When little kids can see that your craftsmanship is bad, it must be really bad.  But I knew some of the answers to the quiz questions, so that made me feel good.

Then, finally, it was 7:00, and the cartoons came on.  First it was a locally-produced full hour of old Warner Brothers, which was really the high point of the day on most weekends.  Then later, there was a lot of schlock that advertised cereal.  I do remember that George of the Jungle was pretty good... but I really loved Jonny Quest! The notion of a little boy and his dad with a friend and an older mentor and a dog, running around the world from one adventure to another... sigh... .  And that show was SCARY, too.  Mummies, and giant mechanical spiders, and terrorists, and ghosts in the Sargasso Sea.  But the best part was the theme music.  There's some music that didn't talk down to kids.  And if somebody had only TOLD me that most of the lead lines were played on a trombone, I'd have practiced harder.

Anyway, all this comes to mind because of Nora's word dastardly, which I vaguely remembered as the name of a cartoon character.  And sure enough, he was a villain (along with his sniggering bulldog Muttley), Dick Dastardly, who ended up getting his own show later on.

My Saturday mornings are just as lazy now as they were then, but I don't watch as many cartoons.  Nora's out watering the garden before it gets hot, while I write and reminisce and look up words.  (The other word, if you'll remember, was emulsion, which to my knowledge was never a cartoon character.)