Joe Barbera & How The 80s Ruined Kids TV

“Ruined” may be harsher than I intend, because I happily defend 80s Saturday morning shows. However, a clip from CBS’s 60 Minutes following Joe Barbera, one half of SatAM overlords Hanna-Barbera, points out that times were already changing when it comes to how kids TV was being presented.

This story from 1985 came to my attention when YouTube recommended a clip from the YouTube channel Film Threat. We’ll watch the 60 Minutes interview in full before watching the part panelist Chris Gore, founder of the original “zine” style magazine version of Film Threat, In that portion of the interview, CBS somehow got into an NBC pitch meeting for some new Hanna-Barbera show. I’m not sure why, since CBS also had HB shows on their lineup. I guess so their SatAM staff didn’t look bad. This leads to Barbera discussing how more difficult it had become to pitch a show thanks to parent groups and stricter standards and practices rules.

Gore, however, who comments more on the culture war damage of storytelling than I do, pointed to this segment as the early days of so-called “wokeness”, when trying to be politically correct, inclusive just to check boxes, and worrying about sensitive kids a lot more than when Hanna-Barbera started on television takes precedence over the story and the comedy. There’s a few things I’d like to point out as well as I’ve heard the stories of creators unhappy with the stricter SatAM rules in the 1980s. Again, I’ll defend what I grew up with…but they’re not wrong, either.

First here’s the 60 Minutes interview, as the reporter spends a day or so with Joe Barbera, attends a pitch meeting for NBC, and discusses cartoons then and “now”. See if you can guess which part Chris Gore and his panelists focused on. It’s also an interesting look at Barbera’s career up to 1985.

The reporter talking to the writers about creating people that “don’t exist” is odd. In live-action productions most stories are about people who never existed. Some cartoons are about people who did exist. One of the shows clipped in the interview was The Greatest Adventure Of All, which featured Bible stories through the eyes of three time-travelling kids, released on home video. I recently got to see the whole series on MeTV Toons. The only difference is that instead of a physical actor you have animated drawings matched with a voice actor, all real people telling the story of fake people just like the live-action stories do, just with more real people involved in bringing the character to life. Even here you can see the biases about cartoons and animation showing through.

Hanna-Barbera Productions would eventually buy the Tom & Jerry cartoons when MGM decided to sell their classic cartoon library off. Now they’re part of the massive animation library owned by Warner Brothers Discovery (or whatever they’re about to become) due to all the various buyouts over the years. I reject the statement that Jerry never picked on Tom. There were plenty of stories, including the one at the end of the news story involving Jerry disrupting Tom’s piano concert, where Jerry was clearly in the wrong but still came out on top. It’s one of the reasons I can’t get into early Tom and Jerry cartoons, while later ones where they were either friendly rivals or Jerry was more clearly in the right so you want to see him win appeal to me more, the opposite of most people. If you’re surprised then you’re clearly new here. Hi.

I wish I knew what show Barbera was pitching to NBC. I don’t recognize the description or the few images we’re shown. The closest I can think of to a military school situation was Scooby-Doo & The Ghoul School, but that was a syndicated TV movie that came out after this interview, not a show for NBC. Also the boys school was military and the monster school was girls. That was kind of the point of the conflict between the two schools besides their philosophies. It was about the two sides coming together to help Scooby, Scrappy, and Shaggy defeat a villain who wanted the monster kids to follow the evil path their parents rejected.

I’ve heard a bunch of horror stories (no pun intended) about how these Saturday morning committees drained a lot of the excitement out of the show by listening to the wrong child psychologists who believed children need to be protected from everything. And yet somehow we became MORE violent and messed up, not less. Yes, these are shows for kids and you should keep the violence, the gore, and the sexual situations down…though I find it kind of funny that Barbera was told to watch out for racial stereotyping in 1985 while in 2025 all we get are racial stereotypes from the same mindset while all women must be girlbosses much better than the boys with no deviation to make them interesting characters…but I would watch syndicated reruns and new shows made for syndication that didn’t have the parent groups breathing down their necks and the violence was never too much, from Space Ghost to SilverHawks. Uncreative people who think they can change the world by ignoring it…except for the parts they want to shove down everyone’s throats.

If you couldn’t guess, this is the part where the Film Threat Versus podcast panel took offense.

I wonder if this is why first-run syndication looked so good to the various Saturday Morning giants. Filmation, Hanna-Barbera, Marvel Productions, DIC Entertainment, and Ruby-Spears Productions among others didn’t have the same restrictions. Compare the syndicated version of The Real Ghostbusters to the ABC shows with the same people until ABC forced changed by listening to an idiot consulting group who knew as much about kids as Sweet Baby Inc does about video gamers. Although oddly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might have been better on CBS because it got a bit more serious until the “red sky years” became a mess and killed the series trying to get the tone closer to the live-action movies.

Fox Kids actually held them off for awhile, and their afternoon lineup got away with stuff they couldn’t on Saturday mornings (like Batman: The Animated Series having actual bullet guns instead of lasers while the syndicated Gargoyles had both) but X-Men failed to kill off a character because someone had a longer memory than the audience and decided it was time to unkill Morph. Syndication had less restrictions but it also had less money, meaning the toy sales paid for the shows more than advertisers or anyone else, even if the show came first. Ultraforce which was not only produced by Saban Entertainment around the same time they were doing X-Men for Fox but practically ripped off the first episode of X-Men for the first episode of Ultraforce. Following the same story beats they killed off a character named Pixx and didn’t have to bring her back. Of course Ultraforce only lasted one season and her Ultraverse comic counterpart was also dead. Alan Burnett, who worked on both the DCAU and Super Friends, once complained about what they couldn’t get away with, though the last “Super Powers Team” season has one of my favorite Batman stories ever because that season took more risks with their upgraded animation.

All in all I consider myself lucky to have grown up with such variety as Sat AM and reruns of less restricted Saturday morning shows and first-run syndication. I had the best of all worlds, but you can see one of the reasons the networks and studios got tired of all this and eventually ended Saturday morning programming for children. Leave it to the “smarter than you” types to ruin everything.