TVSquad

Like the year 1965 was before the Saturday morning cartoon explosion of 1966, the year 1971 was also the calm before another storm. After years of producing and airing show after show, the networks took a breather during the 1971-72 season to look around and see where their industry was at the time. Looking back at it from present day it wasn't looking too bright.

With pressure coming from inside the networks (thanks to the censors) and from outside activist organizations, Saturday morning television began to fracture. Out of the 14 shows to premiere in 1971 only 5 of them were brand new offerings. The rest were rehashes or revivals of older cartoons and live-action series. And out of those a majority featured an education bent...something that kids revved-up by chocolatey, sugar-coated cereal did not have the patience to watch.

The experiment would fail by 1972 as another surge of animated programs made their appearance. Until then, viewers had to deal with a lack of new programming and repeats of shows that had been repeated a few times already. So went the Saturday morning schedule in 1971-72. Let's journey back, shall we?

Aw, this is sad news: longtime Match Game panelist Charles Nelson Reilly has died at the age of 76.

Of course, he was known for a lot more than that. He won a Tony Award in 1962 for his work on Broadway in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. Reilly was also an acclaimed director, directing such plays as The Belle of Amherst and The Gin Game. He also directed several episodes of the TV show Evening Shade. He was a regular on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and appeared on many other shows, including Hollywood Squares, Love Boat, Nanny and the Professor, Lidsville, Here's Lucy, Love, American Style, Amazing Stories, Family Matters, The Drew Carey Show, SpongeBob SquarePants, and The X-Files.

He died of pneumonia in Los Angeles on Friday.

Sid and Marty Krofft created some of the oddest and most memorable characters for children's television and enhanced many acid trips for those same children's older siblings.

Of course, the brothers couldn't have been on drugs themselves considering all the work that went into productions like H.R. Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost (not to mention countless other productions like Lidsville, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, D.C. Follies and Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters). Marty Krofft spoke about that and a bunch of other things in a recent appearance on the Sound of Young America. You can listen to the interview here.

It's a great interview, especially if you grew up with these shows. Krofft also talks about the new Land of the Lost movie, which, as I mentioned before, does not yet have a director attached to it. Will Ferrell, however, has been cast in the lead role.