When I was a kid, there were three distinct blocks of important children’s television programming, all with their own rules, codes, and styles. There was weekday morning television, which was a vicious gang war, in which all children were forced to choose a side between the brilliant-mad puppet-genius of Channel 7’s Agro’s Cartoon Connection, and the lazy, pandering garbage of Channel 10’s Cheez TV. This is a war which now, with the passage of time, I am able to be completely objective about.
Yeah, Cheez TV sure was terrible. Not like this cool dude.
There was weekday afternoon television, which was significantly more egalitarian in nature – one could quite happily flip between Channel 9’s The Cool Room and ABC’s ABC Kids block and whatever weird game show Channel 7 were trying out that week without feeling like you were betraying the cause.
Some of those weird game shows were pretty... A*mazing.
These televisual blocks were comfort blankets. They were always there for you, playing the same stuff, day in, day out, five days a week. If you wanted to watch Rugrats, or Scooby Doo, or Dragon Ball Z (which was shown on Cheez TV and was therefore stupid garbage for babies, but still,) then you could. Every single day. At the exact same time. Pingu was always waiting for you.
But there was a third block of programming. An elusive block. A magical block, a fleeting two hours a week. And that was the Saturday Morning Cartoons. Specifically, it was Saturday Disney.
If this doesn't sum up the late nineties better than any other single image possibly could, I do not want to see that image.
There was something beautiful about Saturday Disney. Part of it was the hosts – as much as I loved Agro’s Cartoon Connection, and as much as idiots with no taste loved Cheez TV, there is a reason that none of those hosts ever went on to greater stardom, whereas many of the Saturday Disney hosts did. They were professionals, who knew what they were doing. Also, they only had to fill two hours a week, whereas the weekday hosts had to fill two hours a day.
But that wasn’t all of it.
Part of it was the audience participation. Saturday Disney would get children to send in what was basically Disney fan art, and the hosts would display it and discuss how amazing it was. And every single week, you’d watch, hoping against hope that the terrible picture you drew of Mickey Mouse and Aladdin holding hands or whatever would get shown, and feeling insanely resentful and jealous of all these no-talent hacks whose work the hosts chose to display instead. “That seven year old can’t even hold a pencil properly!” you’d think, “how dare they celebrate his Donald Duck board game! It’s clearly a Snakes & Ladders rip off! No originality at all! Why can’t I win a year’s subscription to Disney Adventures Magazine?”
I could have been getting this in the mail for free! Every month! Rather than paying, like, $3 for it!
But again, that was not all of it.
Part of it was the quality of the cartoons. Perhaps quality is too strong a word. Consistency would be better. The Disney television cartoons, at least in the nineties, had a consistency of tone and style that made them all feel like they fit together, in a way that no other children’s programming quite did. You could pick your favourites, obviously, and there would always be that one cartoon, the one they played in the middle, that was kind of mediocre, but it was rarely outright bad, and even when it was bad, it was at least bad in a perfectly watchable way.
Some of them were unwatchably bad, though.
That consistency was important, but still, it was not the whole appeal.
The main appeal was the ritual. It was getting up on a Saturday morning, pouring yourself a big bowl of cereal, loading it with sugar (taken straight from the 1kg sugar bag, kept in the cupboard near the nuts and the sultanas, rather than the sugar bowl kept near the coffee jar, as we weren’t allowed to load our cereal with sugar, and I was always paranoid about getting caught,) pouring milk right up to the top of the bowl, and letting it all go soggy, so you could chew it less. It was dragging your quilt from your bedroom to the couch, and snuggling up under it in front of the television. It was watching television in your pyjamas, and nobody telling you not to. It was knowing which cartoon would play when, and what types of sketches the hosts would do at what times, and being delighted when an unexpected change occurred. It was even the exquisite agony of organising all of this perfectly, orchestrating everything just so, and then finding out that the goddamn football grand final was on that day, so instead of playing your cartoons, Channel 7 decide to play a stupid bloody black and white football match from 1956. “The first grand final ever televised!” That feeling of intense anger at the mere existence of sports – that was all a part of it. It was all part of the ritual.
Bunch of stupid jerks, taking my Goofy away from me.
I think Australian children are lucky in this sense. I think the children’s television host adds an element of ritual and continuation and cohesion to the entire enterprise that is sorely lacking in other country’s children’s television. And the reason for this is simple – the Australian government mandated that all free-to-air television stations had to show a minimum of 60% Australian productions. To get around this, most stations chose to buy content from overseas and package it with some very cheaply filmed Australian presenters saying, “here’s Donald Duck!” All of a sudden a two hour block of American cartoons becomes a two hour block of an Australian-hosted variety show. It was the exact same reason that Sandra Sully was brought in to film one minute introductions to two hour British documentaries under the name Sandra Sully Presents. Even though it was an entirely mercenary thing done to avoid producing actual Australian content, I still think it was a good idea. It made Saturday Disney feel weirdly ceremonial.
Of course, this ceremony could be disrupted. My sister was four years older than I was, and our house only had the one television. So when I wanted to watch Saturday Disney, she wanted to slump on the couch, disaffected fourteen year old that she was, and desultorily channel flip between Rage and Video Hits. She was too old and mature for cartoons. She was fourteen, not twelve.
Saturday Disney ran from 7am to 9am, which meant you had to be vigilant about getting up early, lest you miss the latest episode of Darkwing Duck. On Saturdays, Video Hits ran from 10am to 12, so Saturday Disney was over by then. After 9 it was just repeats of the stuff they were playing on Saturday Disney like, two years earlier. Which was still good, don’t get me wrong, just not essential. So Video Hits did not pose a major problem.
But Rage. Oh, Rage.
My mortal enemy. Until I turned 14, then it was the best.
Rage ran from the middle of the night until 11.30am. It always hovered over my head. I knew that if my sister could just be bothered to get up before 9am, I was screwed. She was four years older, and that meant she had seniority over the remote control.
Fortunately she was a teenager, and she liked being asleep. Particularly on Saturday mornings. But, on the other hand, the television was in the lounge, which was right next to my sister’s bedroom. I was a child with bad hearing and poor impulse control. I would ride that volume control button like I was playing a game of Pacman. If I woke her up, it was all over. I would be stuck watching Rage for the next three hours, knowing full well that I would have to watch every single one of these music videos all over again the next day, on Sunday, when I couldn’t even argue there were any cartoons worth watching.
I would be stuck watching Rage, or, worse, if she got up during a big clump of music that she considered rubbish, I would be stuck watching Titanic on VHS for the millionth time. All four damn hours of it. So I rode that volume control. And I prayed my sister had snuck out the night before to go to some party, making her too tired to bother.
Or at the very minimum, if she did get up before 9, at least she did so when The Little Mermaid was playing. She may have been too old for cartoons, but she was never too old for mermaids.
As far as I am aware, she is still not too old for mermaids.