Saturday Morning Fever
by Timothy Burke and Kevin Burke
St Martin's Griffin, 247 pages, paperback, 1999
In his book The Mechanics of Wonder (Liverpool University Press, 1998) and elsewhere Gary Westfahl puts forward an alternative explanation to the usual one for the dramatic improvement in the quality of sf published during the early years of John W. Campbell's tenure as editor of Astounding. It is Westfahl's suggestion (and he acknowledges that it is not entirely original to him) that the credit should be accorded not to Campbell but to Hugo Gernsback. For, Westfahl argues, it was Gernsback who published the sf magazines that the authors of the "Campbell stable" read during the formative years of their early adolescence; Campbell was just the editor who was lucky enough to be there when those writers hit maturity.
You don't need to agree entirely with Westfahl's argument (although in this instance I probably do) to recognize that he is pointing to something that is largely overlooked in critical studies of science fiction and fantasy: critics may talk of the influence of the works of Writer A on Writer B but in fact the most important influences on the latter are much more likely to have been Kemlo, or sf children's stories by Captain W.E. Johns and Patrick Moore, or the Dr Who novels, or ...
Or children's tv series. If Writer B is an American, the chances are high that her/his sciencefictional perceptions will have been early moulded by exposure to the programmes screened during those hours on Saturday mornings when kidvid took over the schedules. Secure in a world where no adult dared to tread – and, indeed, of whose nature few adults can have been aware, to judge by the inanities enunciated by those who made a profession of denouncing the Saturday morning output – the imaginations of the watching kids were stimulated and shaped. The fact that many of the series involved were junk is irrelevant to their importance (who would in adulthood defend Captain Johns's The Death Rays of Ardilla as a work of literature, or even as a competent piece of storytelling?), in particular because most of the watching kids were perfectly well able to discriminate between the gems and the crude ore: even the junk was liked as junk, and most of it served its imagination-stimulating purpose far better than the occasional self-consciously "educational" programme that the networks were bullied by the lobbyists into broadcasting.
I was talking recently to a 21-year-old who reads very little fantasy or sf, but what little she does read, she was telling me, is as a result of watching series like Bagpuss and Willo the Wisp – not to mention Disney animations – in childhood. So it's not just writers who owe something to children's television but readers as well.
The Burkes' Saturday Morning Fever is thus a far more important book than it might on the surface appear; if we are to understand modern fantasy and sf aright then it, or something like it, should be required reading. It is also among the most entertaining books I have read recently, and certainly far more entertaining than any "significant" book has any right to be. Here, for example, is the Burkes' initial statement of its thesis:
Saturday morning cartoons are regarded by most American adults over the age of forty as having marginally more redeeming social value than hard-core pornography ... but perhaps not quite as much value as an episode of a television talk show dealing with incestuous anorexic biker Rotarians. "Saturday morning" has long served as a shorthand epithet for culture judged to be juvenile, low-quality, moronic, mind-numbing, or cut-rate.
We have two words to the folks who think this way: Piss off.
Elsewhere, in their synopsis of the sf series Land of the Lost – in which a family falls through a time portal into an alternate world populated by strange creatures including the monstrous Sleestaks – the Burkes note that there was more than one flaw in the series' visualization:
The family should have looked like refugees from Lord of the Flies by their third year, given that they were running around in a swampy, humid climate being chased by dinosaurs and lizard people. However, everything stayed neat and clean, including the characters' psyches. You'd think by year three that the main human characters would be going a bit bugshit, particularly given that the son was right smack-dab in the middle of adolescence and was probably giving some thought to putting the moves on a female Sleestak once he could figure out which ones were female.
The majority of the fantasy and sf series discussed in the book were animations, with Hanna-Barbera the major producers in terms of bulk if not of either general or genre-specific interest. To the fantasist the most important single stable was Sid and Marty Krofft Productions, which generated series that must technically be described as live-action, although the frequent surrealistic use of bizarrely costumed characters makes the term seem somehow inapposite. Prime among such productions was H.R. Pufnstuf, whose title character was a mutant yellow dragon, H.R. Pufnstuf himself, mayor of Living Island, the alternate world into which youthful hero Jimmy plus his pal Freddie the Talking Flute were cast by the machinations of a sorceress called Witchiepoo, who desired the talking flute for herself (useful things, talking flutes?) and one of whose sidekicks was named, wonderfully, Stupid Bat. Is it any wonder H.R. Pufnstuf devotees still roam the land (the UK too) as adults? And is it any wonder there's a quasi-rumour that the eponym's enigmatic initials stood for "hand-rolled"?
It was on Saturday mornings that many more widely recognized fantasy and sciencefictional characters made their screen debuts or knew their finest hours. Hours, anyway; maybe not finest. Among them were Superman, Batman, the Addams Family, GI Joe, Godzilla, Dr Dolittle, Casper, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to name just a few. The company in which they mixed included lesser and since largely forgotten shows like Goober and the Ghost Chasers, The Groovie Goolies and a series whose title character baffles comprehension, Rubik the Amazing Cube; but Star Trek and Planet of the Apes (in both cases the animated series), The Flintstones, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Jonny Quest were in there as well.
The Burkes' book does not serve well as a reference guide to these and many other shows that have, as noted, indirectly played such a significant role in forming today's fantasy and sf: here you will find little by way of rigorous data on running times, seasons aired, production credits, etc. But that is not the Burkes' purpose. Instead they seek to convey the sensation of being a Saturday morning kid during the Golden Age of the 1970s and 1980s, and in this they triumph superbly. Consider: I was reared in Scotland rather than the United States, and in fact my home did not possess a tv set until I was anyway a little too old to appreciate what I would by then undoubtedly have dismissed as "kids' stuff", yet, thanks to the Burkes, I now have a fairly clear impression of (and here I wish to choose my words carefully) what I would now remember it felt like had I spent my formative years as an American Saturday morning tv kid. That is no mean achievement. And the experience has opened my eyes to the why of some of the sf and fantasy (art as well as the written word) of the 1990s.
There are minor cavils. The index is not 100% reliable and the copy-editor might wisely have read through the text one extra time. But otherwise this gloriously irreverent, gloriously partisan, gloriously affectionate text offers a splendid insight into one of the foundation stones of the modern fantasy/sf edifice.
—Samhain