“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.
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