Thank God for Saturday Morning!

As I’ve been forced to admit in some recent posts, the car culture that has defined my own life is dying out. I’d like to believe there are multiple generations interested in slot cars, and I think there probably are some younger guys that have an interest in the lexan-bodied hypercars that can move along sintra tracks at speeds the human eye can barely detect. But when it comes to the old Thunderjets, let’s be realistic: I suspect that almost anyone who drops by to peruse this blog is within “striking distance” of my own age. They’re valuable collectibles now, but T-jets were toys first and foremost, and thus those that are most fond of them are likely those that remember them from childhood. If I’m right about that, I’m probably not the only one for whom the memories of these toys is bound up indelibly with the memory of another generational experience: the joy of Saturday morning cartoons!

I’ve recently had the pleasure of discovering a really excellent YouTube channel that is linked to a podcast run by a guy in Ohio named Paul Lee who, I would guess, is a few years my junior but clearly a “Gen X baby.” He is obviously a serious gamer, a Star Wars and sci-fi fan, and has a large and ever growing body of work discussing these now fading elements of our culture. One aspect of his “Group Therapy Podcast” is a series of videos appropriately called “Saturday Morning Serials” in which he screens VHS-ripped episodes of many forgotten cartoons from the 1980’s. He is a great host, knowledgeable in his subject matter, who introduces each episode with some facts and info about these long-gone shows, and, I’ll add, his toy room puts mine to shame!

As I’ve oft said, My journey into the slot car hobby began in January 2020 partly out of a need to find some way to keep myself occupied during the “lockdowns” as the whole world was scared into submission over a virus, but it was also borne out of nostalgia for the toys of my youth. Thus, from the beginning, the TV sets that adorn the walls of my basement where both my small and large tracks are set up have often played the vintage cartoons I remember as a kid, as the two seem to just go together.

My personal favorite was Scooby Doo! I got hooked on the original series when I was barely more than an infant and watched it well into my teenage years, still getting up early on Saturdays to watch “A Pup Named Scooby Doo” when it first aired in 1988 when I was in high school! It is very cool to see that this is one element of my youth that hasn’t died out; the Scooby gang seems to be as popular today as ever, and even now there are new episodes of TV shows and movies being produced that star them in one capacity or another. But there are a whole host of other cartoons from that era that aren’t as well remembered that are still very entertaining: for example, do you remember the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon? This was another one of my favorites that I watched every week. Other semi-forgotten gems of this era included Thundaar The Barbarian, Blackstar, Goldie Gold, and course the myriad “educational” shows like the ABC Weekend Special and CBS Storybreak, which were often animated.

And speaking of “educational” shows, that was probably the best part of Saturday morning TV: Schoolhouse Rock! There can’t be anyone who was a kid in the USA in the ‘70s and ‘80’s that doesn’t remember those catchy tunes that helped us learn everything from multiplication tables to American History, “earworms” likely embedded in our minds forever. And these memories don’t even touch on all the commercials from the era hocking sugar-bombed breakfast cereals and toys, and all their irresistible ditties; not to mention the great PSAs like “Time for Timer” and “The Bod Squad.” There’s a near lifetime of memories to be mined from that decade of our pasts, and although we are always supposed to be looking forward rather than backward, its hard to not look at what life was life 40 years ago and ask, “what the hell happened?”

Tragic, then, that today’s kids are unlikely to be exposed to lot of these classics; the “America Rock” episodes of Schoolhouse Rock, for example, are surely not “woke” enough for today’s kids, teaching about the likes of the Revolution and the Constitution-things kids are now taught to actively despise if they are taught about them at all. But, you never know! Even as a kid I was interested in the culture of the generation before mine, since before I ended grade school I was building fleets of models of World War II-era aircraft and was obsessed with 1950’s cars, so it’s important to remember that there may be some kids out there who will be receptive to the things we grew up with and may have an interest in preserving them. For example, I recently met the grandson of a neighbor of my mom’s who, at the age of roughly 12, is nuts for 1960’s muscle cars, which is very encouraging. There may yet be some hope for some people in the generations to come, and it is incumbent upon those of my generation to do all we can to encourage free thinking and an interest in history in their lives where ever we can. That’s where the “rubber meets the road,” where merely reminiscing about the past expands into sharing it with others.

Well, that’s about all the reminiscing your humble blogger has time for now; Its Saturday morning! There’s racing to be done and I feel a tournament coming on, so pardon me while I pour a bowl of Super Sugar Crisp (no, not “Super Golden Crisp!”) and put some cartoons on the jumbotron while I queue up a fleet of slot cars! Saturday mornings are just as fun today as they were when I was a kid, because getting older doesn’t mean we have to grow up!

“We’ll return after these messages!” Meanwhile, check out “Saturday Morning Serials” for your next weekend day in your own toy room or happy place!