Edition: U.S. / Global

Giving Saturday Morning Some Slack

By Charles McGrath
Published: November 9, 1997

Remember Saturday morning? The expectancy, the blissfulness, the sense of utter freedom? The most sublime moment was the first -- the instant when, unprodded by either alarm clock or parental summons, you emerged into consciousness and experienced an almost physical sense of release, a floating up from the mattress, as you realized that you didn't have to go to school. And the rest of the day -- of the whole weekend -- then seemed to spead out limitlessly from the edge of the bedcovers, a blank and beckoning horizon.

You could do absolutely anything you chose. You could turn over, tunnel under the pillow and go back to sleep. You could just lie there for a while, woolgathering and listening to Dad's snores rumble from down the hall. You could get up and play with your slot cars or your electric train. You could check on the gerbils, in hopes that they might be mating again. You could build a model plane, snuffling in deep, head-jolting whiffs of Testor's glue. You could even read -- that was not unheard of back then.

But what you chose to do, of course, was watch TV. You sprang up and, still in your pj's, went to the kitchen and fixed yourself a bowl of Froot Loops or Lucky Charms, which in violation of the first commandment of the household -- no food in the living room! -- you carried boldly over the forbidden threshold and set on top of the Magnavox. You turned on your favorite show and then curled up on the sofa or stretched out on the carpet in front, and with any luck you remained there, motionless, for hours. If, as the critics used to complain, TV is a drug, then no opium den was ever sweeter. On a good Saturday morning, one when Mom wasn't too cranky, you got to stay in your pajamas until noon.

In those days, of course, television was largely unregulated. No one, not even Mom, was paying much attention to what or how much we watched. In recent years, children's programming has been endlessly scrutinized, and thanks in large part to parental lobbying groups, it has come under more vigilant Federal controls. The newest set of regulations was supposed to go into effect this fall, requiring that stations devote at least three hours a week -- most of them on Saturday, presumably -- to educational programming for children under 16. So far, compliance has been spotty at best. Like those that preceded them, the new regulations are vague and unenforceable. No one can agree on what constitutes educational television, and the burden of policing falls not on the Government but on viewers, who are expected to keep tabs on their local stations. The stations claim, not unreasonably, that their hands are tied by the networks, which these days supply almost all the programming. The networks, meanwhile, have for the most part done little more than tinker with the existing shows and declare that they fit the bill. Disney's ''101 Dalmatians,'' for example, turns out to teach friendship and responsibility, and ''N.B.A. Inside Stuff,'' professional basketball's show for children, is said to impart ''life lessons.''

This is actually not as dumb as it sounds. All TV imparts life lessons of a sort -- if only lessons in how greedy or manipulative or boring television producers can be. And what we take away from the experience of watching television is more than what the programmers have put there. Watching television, even if you watch it alone, is also a social experience, and it's often a ritual. Part of the magic of the old Saturday-morning drill had almost nothing to do with content, or with anything that could be regulated. The magic was in the safeness and the sameness -- the reassuring security -- of the ritual itself.

What you watched, if you grew up in the 50's or early 60's, was not the parade of otherworldly characters that nowadays lurches forth -- robots and superheroes mostly, so poorly animated that their dialogue and their expressionless mouths are forever out of sync and that Captain America, for example, walks as stiffly as if he had just had a hip replacement. In those days, what you watched, most likely, was a Saturday-morning program that originated at your local station. It featured an adult figure, either clownish or avuncular, depending on local custom, and perhaps a puppet or two or a dimwitted visitor, whose job it was to fill with patter the intervals between the showing of vintage cartoons, doled out as sparingly as if they were some rare elixir -- which indeed they were.

In Boston, where I grew up, we had ''Boomtown,'' with Rex Trailer, a handsome singing cowboy, and his faithful, if none-too-bright, sidekick, the sombreroed and serape-clad Pablo. (I was astonished to discover once, when my father took me to one of Rex's ''personal appearances,'' that Pablo was not really Mexican and that he also had extremely bad breath.) The show began with a film clip of Rex galloping to the studio on his handsome palomino, Goldrush -- galloping from where was never entirely clear; New Hampshire, perhaps -- but the rest, except for the cartoons, was broadcast live. Rex did rope tricks and was occasionally persuaded to take out his guitar, or his ''git-fiddle,'' as he called it, and sing. (One of his tunes, I seem to recall, had a chorus that consisted of the word ''hoofbeats,'' repeated over and over.) Once in a while a vistor dropped by to talk about fire safety or disease prevention.