TVSquad

The operative word to describe the 1968-69 Saturday morning schedule was 'change'. After two years of superhero and action/adventure cartoons the networks and the animation studios decided to shake things up a bit. When you take a look at the world-altering events that occurred forty years ago, moving away from action and into some more amusing and less dangerous fare was not a surprising move.

That doesn't mean that Saturday mornings were totally void of any type of heroic action in 1968. In addition to shows like Spider-Man, The Herculoids, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, all entering their second seasons, three of the seven new series premiered that featured a hard-action bent. The rest focused more on humor and slapstick then on flying beings who could shoot beams out of their hands. And, out of the seven, five of the shows were the cornerstones of trends that would continue well into the 1970s.

So, if you have your Thing Maker in front of you, let's journey back in time to 1968.

Gallery: Saturday morning: 1968

A roundup of TV people from in front of the camera and behind the scenes who have passed away.

• Boyd Coddington: He was a custom car designer and star of TLC's American Hot Rod. A former machinist at Disneyland, he opened up Boyd's Wheels in 1988 and won several awards for his car designs. He died of complications from surgery at age 63 in Whittier, CA.

A roundup of TV people from in front of the camera and behind the scenes who have passed away.

• Robert DoQui: He was a veteran character actor who appeared in a ton of TV shows over the years, including ER, The Outer Limits, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Party of Five, The Practice, NYPD Blue, Picket Fences, Happy Days, I Dream of Jeannie, Gunsmoke, Cagney and Lacey, Hill Street Blues, Knot's Landing, and others. He was also in three of the Robocop movies and also the films Nashville, Short Cuts, and Cloak and Dagger. He died at age 74 in Los Angeles.

• At 8, ABC has a new Dancing With The Stars, followed by an hour long fall preview (comedy and reality the first half hour, dramas the second), then Jimmy Kimmel's All-Star Salute To Jimmy Kimmel Live!
• CBS has a new Rock Star Supernova at 8.
• There's a new Bones on FOX at 8, followed by a new Justice.
• NBC has two new hours of Dateline at 8, all about sex, sex, sex: teachers who have sex with students, predators, etc, etc. Ugh.
• At 9, Discovery has a new, two hour Mythbusters, focusing on scenes from Hollywood movies.
• Sci-Fi has the 1966 classic Fantastic Voyage at 9.
• At 10, Bravo has a new Project Runway.
• Also at 10: HBO has a new Inside the NFL.