The Saturday Morning Reclamation Part 2

 Saturday morning has been exciting for me for about a month or so now. Yes, I started watching cartoons before the original Saturday Morning Reclamation post went up. I already had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series on DVD. I ordered DVD copies of Voltron which is actually two complete series; Lion Force Voltron and Vehicle Team Voltron along with the movie Voltron Fleet of Doom. I could not resist grabbing a Blu Ray copy of the original Thundercats. To me it always felt like a nice transition between He-man and Voltron. 

I also picked up the complete Dungeons & Dragons animated series which is a whopping 27 episodes in total. Finally, I got my hands on a DVD copy of The Real Ghostbusters which was sold to me as the complete series. However, the DVD text describes it as 100 episodes from the series. A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that the series ran seven seasons and 140 episodes. Granted 33 of those were Slimer! segments. The completionist in me is upset.  Reality exerts some influence to point out that I am only watching an episode of these shows each week. 

The funny thing is I really didn't need to buy anything. Disney+ is a great source of shows that are pretty Teagan friendly. I knew that she wasn't necessarily going to want to watch Dungeons & Dragons or Voltron as a seven year old girl. Instead I have introduced her to episodes of Talespin, Ducktales, Gummi Bears, and Chip N Dales Rescue Rangers. Naturally I allowed a few mixed in episodes of Bluey.

In the weeks we have been doing this, Teagan has not quite settled into it as a routine. I am accustomed to waking up early. I am writing this on 14 January and I was awake at 10 minutes until 7 this morning. I managed to stay in bed reading until a little after 8 and am currently blogging rather than watching cartoons so that the kid gets the chance to sleep in a little. 

The first week she woke up just before noon and came running into the living room in tears thinking she had missed the chance to watch Saturday morning cartoons. Some hugs and reassurance ensued and we got directly into those Disney+ shows. She got through three episodes before she was ready to do something else. I was just happy she enjoyed Gummi Bears which is a personal favorite. 

The next week she really did miss Saturday Morning. She loves to spend time with my Dad on the weekends. Even though he is only on the other end of the house, Teagan treats it like she is going off to visit. She also famously uses those visits to break the rules including bedtime. She stayed up late and slept until nearly 1 pm. 

When she ventured in for cartoons I told her that she was more than welcome to sit down and watch TV. One of the fundamental parts of Saturday morning cartoons is that they should happen in the morning. Teagan totally understood and we moved on to typical Saturday activities. Truth is that in the 80s and 90s, long before streaming services or me owning collections of cartoons on DVD, you had to catch TV shows as they aired. Sounds barbaric, but it had some positives as well. I didn't sleep in on too many Saturday mornings as a kid and was well ready to get up and do stuff as soon as cartoons were done... unless I was excited about a Saturday afternoon movie or WWF wrestling. Could I have sat down, had Teagan eat cereal, and watched another episode of Gummi Bears? Of course, but that would not have been the same. 

One of the things that I am trying to change is Teagan's modern view of how TV works. If we use Bluey as our template, the only thing she has to wait on is a new season to drop. When one does she wants to binge it several episodes at a time. Once she has devoured the entire season, she then starts skipping and watching only her few favorite episodes over, and over, and over, and over until I have them more than memorized. Worse still, and I blame this on YouTube, Teagan wants to keep that TV remote in hand and only watch her favorite parts of her favorite episodes. I love Bluey, but if I have to watch Muffin run away from her parents too many more times I may be sick. 

Saturday morning cartoons when I was growing up aired new episodes in sequential order, but in the off season you might get a strange mismatch of reruns. Keeping up with the plot of these shows was something worth talking about with my friends in much the same way that we shared secrets of video games that we discovered. In those ways specifically, it was a much better time. 

Before I go any further I want to own something. Teagan's screentime habits are 100% my fault and under my control. A person I have great respect for has a little one that isn't allowed any screentime. He and his wife do not take the cop out of sticking the kid in front of a screen or handing her a tablet. I admire their commitment and had I thought about those things earlier in Teagan's life I might have done things differently. The catch to that is we handed Teagan a tablet early in her life because speech therapists and doctors encouraged her getting lots of exposure to sounds and conversation. Cool points to that advice because Teagan caught up with where she was supposed to be developmentally and is well ahead of the mark. 

TV really is a metaphorical opiate of the masses. Once a kid is really addicted to spending their time on YouTube or scrolling through a streaming service that is an interesting and difficult habit to break. A big part of this Saturday Morning routine I am scheming on is to give cartoons a relevant time and place to be viewed. 

 There were three places in my life that cartoons were important. Saturday morning was the most important. I had a series of different shows that I looked forward to. After school cartoons became important in my late elementary and middle school years. I loved that time and the shows hit different. Some of my favorite cartoons which have stuck with me longest were the ones that played in the morning before school. I typically watched a part of a show as I was eating breakfast and it made me less grumpy about being awake. I was incentivized to get up, get ready, and get food in front of me as quickly as possible so I could watch more of the cartoons. That occasionally got challenging during inclement weather during the winter as Mom constantly kept flipping over to check school closing, road conditions, and the weather report. I didn't object too much to this as there was a chance, however slim, that I might get an unexpected day off school. 

By creating some Saturday morning ritual I am hoping to create some memories of time together with the kid. Beyond that if she catches some fondness for classic cartoons I won't be too upset. Selfishly, I am also able to relieve the magic of my youth a little bit. I was surprised that it wasn't hard to stick to watching a single episode of each show. It also wasn't hard to watch a bit of everything I had access to. 

I started with Dungeons & Dragons and Voltron as "my" shows. Thus far they help me wait patiently for the kid to wake up and join me. Watching an episode weekly, I have a few years worth of material to work through before I will need to pick up something "new." That is a lot of bang for my buck. 

I have to admit it also gives HBOMax and Disney+ more value. I explained above how great Disney+ is for this plan. HBOMax gives me Scooby Doo and Batman the Animated Series. As epic as I believed all those 80s and 90s Disney cartoons were, most of them less than 100 episodes. Looking at that through an adult lens it makes sense why so many voice actors were on a variety of shows. It had to be tough to settle into a show for six months or a year only to have it cancel and move on to the next. It feels like that changed in the late 90s with all of the animated super shows like Spongebob Squarepants, Avatar:The Last Airbender, Family Guy, Futurama, and The Simpsons. More than a few people have made careers out of those shows. 

For now, I am going to go make a bowl of Cheerios and watch a couple of episodes of cartoons. Hopefully the kid will get up soon and join me. If not, this is some excellent relaxation before getting into the nuts and bolts of the weekend.