Saturday Morning Cartoon Dream Team

This week's topic for the venerable members of the League is to create the ultimate Saturday Morning cartoon schedule! I feel especially qualified for this because as a kid, that's pretty much what I did on a yearly basis. When the TV Guide featuring the new Saturday morning schedule came out every year, I went through each time slot and highlighted the show I wanted to watch ahead of time. I had to be sure that my Saturday morning experience would be optimally awesome with no time wasted flipping channels.

I didn't stop watching cartoons after my childhood, so this list will include a range of shows spanning three decades. But I'll restrict it to only those cartoons that I watched on Saturday mornings, meaning weekday cartoons like Thundercats and Duck Tales won't be included.

I'll schedule my cartoons in blocks according to themes. So let's start the day with...

Comedies

When kids first get up, they need some light comedies to get their morning started. It helps for the cartoons to have wacky visuals to give them some much-needed visual stimulus to start their day. With that in mind, we'll start the morning off with two classics from the late 80's. A Pup Named Scooby Doo (7:00) was a great self-parody of the Scooby Doo franchise.

Beetlejuice (7:30) perfectly personifies the gross-out kid culture of the 80's. I remember a different intro from the one below, but this one rocks all kinds of lobster.

Kid-Friendly

Now that everybody's awake, let's get into the kid-friendly fare. For that, you can't do better than Muppet Babies (8:00), a mainstay for Saturday mornings for many years.

Let's throw in an often-overlooked claymation show that I loved back in my college days, Bump in the Night (8:30). (It's so overlooked that I didn't think to include it until I read Brothermidnight's list over at Green Plastic Squirt Gun.)

Video Game Cartoons

There was something mesmerizing about seeing your favorite video game characters in a fully animated cartoon series. Let's make the 9-10AM time slot the Pac-Man / Captain N Power Hour!

Action/Adventure

We'll save the action/adventure cartoons for mid-morning as the older kids wake up, starting with Challenge of the Super Friends (10:00). This cartoon is the main reason why I'm a DC fan today.

At 10:30, we head over to ReBoot, a CGI cartoon featuring anthropomorphic programs playing video games (it's like Tron for the 90's). I prefer the early seasons in which the cartoon was lighter and took itself much less seriously. Stay frosty!

Next up is 2003's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (11:00). I've always considered this the best incarnation of the Turtles, whether animated, live-action, or comic (at least, until I see the 2012 cartoon). It blends the fun of the original cartoon with Mirage-inspired story lines and character arcs, while expanding the TMNT property with its own unique concepts.

We'll end with my favorite cartoon, Thundarr the Barbarian (11:30). It's Conan meets Star Wars on a Planet of the Apes post-apocalyptic world!

That's it for this Saturday's cartoons...

...now go outside and play! But before you do, be sure to check out other Leaguers' lists below.

• Green Plastic Squirtgun digs the creature-features!
• Rediscover the 80's also had the idea to block off the schedule by themes. Great minds think alike.
• Branded in the 80's made its own awesome comic book ad for its schedule! What an over-achiever. :P